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Ahead of the 2027 presidential election, the candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Prince Adewole Adebayo has promised to end the country’s decades-long addiction to importation and turn it into a self-reliant production economy by 2031.
Speaking on his economic blueprint, titled, ‘Farewell to Poverty and Insecurity,’ he noted that the prosecution of the plan would be guided by five principles, comprising self-reliance and import substitution, full employment and poverty elimination, balanced regional development, speedy implementation and strategic state intervention wherever private investment falls short.
Adebayo bemoaned what he described as decades of governance built on managing poverty rather than eliminating it, arguing that Nigeria cannot permanently subsist on consumption and handouts but build productive capacity and generate real wealth and not simply cushion the pain of not having any.
He noted that the bedrock of his transformation plan would be anchored around agriculture, with manufacturing positioned as the industrial engine that converts raw output into value, higher-paying jobs and export earnings.
“The agricultural strategy calls for expanded irrigation, mechanisation, improved seeds, fertiliser access, credit and extension services, paired with agro-processing hubs planted across every geopolitical zone.
“Layered on top of that is a plan for regional industrial clusters, each built around a specific strength: agro-processing, textiles, pharmaceuticals, automotive assembly, electronics and building materials. Small and medium enterprises, the backbone of much of Nigeria’s real economy, would gain expanded access to affordable credit, guarantee schemes and technical support,” he stated.
He also promised to create a bank of electricity, a dedicated financing institution offering long-term, single-digit-interest loans to fund distributed power generation and crucially, the local manufacturing of transformers, meters, cables, solar panels, batteries and related equipment.
“It’s a proposal that pairs national-grid expansion with a parallel push for mini-grids and embedded power, aimed at attacking Nigeria’s electricity crisis from both ends at once,” he said.
On automobile manufacturing, he argued that Nigeria’s economic planners have long fixated on food imports while ignoring the country’s largest sources of foreign-exchange drain.
He emphasized that building a domestic auto industry would strike at the heart of Nigeria’s dollar demand in a way food policy alone never could.
Rather than treating employment as a hoped-for side effect of growth, he said he would elevate it to a primary national objective with dedicated programmes targeting small and medium enterprises (SMEs), young people and women, specifically.
He also promised to redirect Nigeria’s financial sector towards the real economy, guaranteeing cheaper credit, stronger development-finance institutions, credit guarantees and incentives designed to push banks towards lending in agriculture, manufacturing and infrastructure; sectors long starved of affordable capital.
Taken as a whole, the blueprint amounts to a wager that Nigeria’s next four years could either entrench its dependence on foreign goods or mark the start of a genuine industrial break from it and Adebayo is staking his 2027 candidacy on the latter.
