•Banditry, kidnapping fester because govt doesn’t care about ending insecurity
Presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 Presidential Election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has asserted that President Bola Tinubu has not played the three essential functions expected of him as Nigeria’s leader. These are the functions of Head of State, Chief Executive, and Commander-in-Chief. He noted that Tinubu has contempt for the job of President and continues to engage in politicking rather than concentrating on governance that is more enduring. Adebayo said criminality persists in Nigeria because those tasked to end it find it more rewarding to manage the crime rather than to eliminate it.
He spoke with CHUKWUDI NWEJE.
The Bola Tinubu administration has been in office for eight months now. What is your impression of the government so far?
My impression is that President Tinubu is in the office but he has not settled down to the job. It is like that typical civil service office where people just come and wait, asking ‘Oga don come?’And, when Oga comes, he just takes phone calls, no file is moving or treated. It is like when you board a plane, you are all boarded, the plane is waiting on the tarmac, the pilot is sitting in the cockpit shuffling paper around. So in a three-hour flight, the first 45 minutes is wasted sitting idly on the tarmac. That’s the way I see it. They are there but the vital work is not being done. The journey of Tinubu’s presidency has not begun. Everything you see happening to them and around them are things happening to them by virtue of their occupying the office but I won’t say that they are going anywhere. I’m very concerned because the success of Tinubu is my number one prayer. I don’t want to be right about Tinubu not succeeding; I want to be wrong; I want after four years for Nigerians to see me and say, you told us this man will not succeed but he has succeeded; I will apologise. It is better than for them to lament that I warned them.
What do you think is the problem with the government taking off?
I don’t know whether they just don’t want to settle down to the job or whether they don’t have enough people to do the job, or whether they are not focusing on doing the job, or if they think the job doesn’t matter. I have had occasion to review students’ attitude in some schools and I discovered that where students find the notion that studying will not reflect on how they are scored to be valid, they will not put in any effort in studying. I hope there are not people in the administration who believe that they can continue doing what they are doing and dictate the marking scheme in four years and impose on Nigerians a result that is not reflective of what’s on the ground because they have the propaganda and inducement to distort the reality and say that they have done very well. I hope that is not the case. Tinubu has capacity and talent but his altitude to government is a problem. That’s why I disagree with them, that’s why I don’t support them, and that why I ran against them. The attitude that they show is not what we need to deal with governance in Nigeria. That is where I think the challenge of the Tinubu administration lies, if they can change their attitude, take governance seriously and pay attention to things, maybe Nigeria will start making some progress. It looks to me that this attitude problem is an All Progressives Congress (APC) problem. If you read the new book written by Femi Adesina, there are several confessional statements there that explain why former President Muhammadu Buhari was all potential but no result and why he ended the way he did.
You also see the President’s comment when his Vice President was visiting some parts of the country. He told the Vice President he hoped he would not become the first Vice President to be kidnapped. Tinubu didn’t see any sense of responsibility in that comment. He could say it is a joke, but the joke is frugal. It shows their resignation about the situation. The lesson here is that the APC has a wrong attitude to governance. They don’t want to display even the basic capacity. Politics is dictating all their action.
Talking about politics dictating the actions of the administration, you posted on your X handle that the administration should differentiate between being good in politicking and being good in governance. Could you elaborate on that?
The skills you need to succeed in politicking are not the same skills you need to succeed in governance. In fact, sometimes they are contradictory. Politics has a lot predatory hunting skills like ability to dominate the opponent and force your will. Governance on the other hand is about situational awareness, co-ordination, recruitment, operations and keeping time, paying meticulous attention to critical success factors, not lying to yourself and following up on basic things. Most great things in governance require attention to ordinary things, to know generally about the security situation, to know that the brain of the president has to be co-ordinated with the muscle of the policeman in the street. Politics is jealous, it is there all the time because it is saga after saga and so-called triumph after triumph but you could have political triumph and governance failure. The President will always be a politician so he has to bifurcate and have two teams, those purely devoted to governance and those devoted to politics.
You contested to become Nigeria’s President. What are some of the things you would have had in place in eight months if you had won the election that are not yet in place under this administration?
There are things that should be in place in eight days and you are talking about eight months. First and foremost, you have to be a legitimate constitutional government, which means before you go into the debatable discretionary partisan achievements, you must do the basic constitutional duties to constitute a government for the peace, order and security of the republic. It is good if you want to construct roads but you must put in place a government that secures the continuity of the republic and guarantees security of lives and property.
There is nothing in the behaviour of the policeman in the street or any military formation, outpost or checkpoint that shows there is a new attitude regarding a new Commander-in-Chief taking the issue of security seriously. Tinubu is not doing the Head of State functions, he is doing the head of political party function. He is also not doing the chief executive function neither is he doing the Commander-in-Chief function.
I am not going to criticise Tinubu for our policy differences because he has won the election; that debate is over, I was one of the first to congratulate him. I am not going to say that as Social Democratic Party (SDP), I would have done this or that. I am saying we don’t have a government in place. He could have done a lot in five days, it is just a matter of attitude and saying I need to secure lives and property. It is about time management and focus. As chief executive, your job is to manage the human and material resources of the country efficiently. Ask yourself if there is any problem in the country that we don’t have the human and material resources to solve, it is not a partisan issue. You want to be chief executive in a country where people are discussing how to raise money to pay ransom to kidnappers as a quasi official policy? The President should be told that somebody was kidnapped, the President should be told that there would kidnapping in particular areas based on the intelligence reports by the security agencies and that these pre-emptive measures are being taken. If you have intelligence officers who cannot give you intelligence, what are you doing with them? Are we forgetting the minimum basic requirements to be a government? Being a government is not just about going to the Eagle Square to take the Oath of Office.
Their preparation for the office suggested to me that they would have contempt for the job, and when they won the election their attitude frightened me because there was no attempt to study the job description or available literature about the security situation of the country.
From March 1, 2023 when Tinubu knew he was President-Elect to May 29 when he was inaugurated and I suspect up till now, Tinubu has had less preparation for the office than it would require for one to be the traditional ruler of Ondo. You cannot inherit the requirements of being the Commander-in-Chief from being a governor. My appeal to the president is to take his job seriously. He should not have contempt for the Office of President and assume it is an upgrade from being governor. Equating your experience and success as governor to how you would perform as president is like saying I am going to be a good pilot because I am an experienced driver. It does not work that way. One operates on the ground; the other operates in the air. You may be okay when the plane is taxing off because it may look like a car but when it takes off, the laws of aerodynamics and physics of the air which are different from those on the ground will take over. It is better for you as president to know that anything can go wrong any time.
What do you expect Tinubu to do as President?
There are three critical functions of the Head of State. Some are ceremonial, but the Head of State is the reason why every Nigerian can say I have a leader, so the Head of State must pay attention to that. If there is any part or segment of Nigeria where the people think they don’t have a president, it is a failure of Head of State function because as we disagree among ourselves, the Constitution requires that we must have a residual interest in the presidency. That is missing in this administration and that is why you see every part of the country lashing out at everybody. Any segment in Nigeria lashing out against the other is a proxy lashing out at the president. It is a transferred misplaced aggression. When you see clashes, killings, when you see irrational sentiments, people are crying for the attention of the president. It is like a sibling who kicks the other sibling just to send a message to the parents that he is not happy.
The second job is to be the Chief Executive. There should be no problem Nigeria is facing which Nigerians are capable of tackling that the Chief Executive should not be able to pull Nigerians together to solve. It is not about capturing people, rewarding people or giving people appointment so that they will sing your praise and wearing that Swastika cap. It is about realising that as president, it is my duty to use all the resources of the entity called Nigeria to solve the country’s problems. Election is over and as Chief Executive, you need to communicate it that he needs the best people that would help him govern the country, that is what makes you a good Chief Executive. There is more reward in governance than in politicking. The only reward in politicking is electoral victory. The country does not move based on electoral victory, the country moves based on governance, especially sustainable governance.
Then the third function is that of the Commander-in-Chief. There is no partisanship in that. If there is no kidnappings, armed robbery or breakdown of law and order or insurgency, the Commander-in-Chief is okay. But if there are any of these things, he is not okay. We are not under open foreign invasion; we are under criminality within the country, maybe with marginal external collaboration and contribution. The Commander-in-Chief should be grand-star enough to get Nigerians to stop the criminality. The Commander-in-Chief is not supposed to be an easy person. He cannot have service chiefs visiting him like tourists; he is a service chief himself. He has a Situation Room in the Villa for that reason. The service chiefs should not be coming there to tell him tales, some of which they got because they were summoned to the Villa and they in turn summoned those under them and they will keep rehearsing the same story till it gets to you. The President should have a deal when appointing the service chiefs that if there are this numbers of breaches, you are gone. The President ought to know that personnel and financial issues occupy 90 per cent of the time of the service chiefs. He should know that part of the reasons why they don’t have a firm grip of the situation on the ground is that less than 10 per cent of the resources of the armed services and security agencies is devoted to operational issues. Ninety per cent of the time of the Inspector General of Police is spent on administrative, politics, personal and finance issues of how to resolve disagreement with the Minister, how to deal with the Police Service Commission over police promotions and things like that.
The operation in the street is left to the ragtag person who happens to be around and these people are battling for survival. They fend for themselves like pirates on the sea. So if solving your crime coincides with them trying to solve their problem, it is a good day but when there is a conflict between solving criminality and solving their problem of survival they will resolve on the side of their survival.
There is a total collapse of the intelligence network; either the president is not interested or it is too much hard work.
If you listen to Nuhu Ribadu, he is crying internally. If you have any interaction with intelligence agencies anywhere in the world and they want to talk to you about Nigeria, Nuhu Ribadu will be part of the discussion. There must be a policy way to articulate request for assistance. I’m very sensitive over the issue of Commander-in-Chief functions and that is why Nigerians have to be serious starting with the president. We are dealing with rookie problems. God forbid if big ones come. The problems we are dealing with are problems of water reaching our ankle. What happens when you have water reaching your knees? What happens when the water gets to your waist? There are countries in the Middle East that have water up to their chest and they are managing it well. Our problem in Nigeria currently is water that has not even passed our ankle. We are talking about ragtag bandits and kidnappers looking for opportunity to capture people and collect money. Every tool that we need to deal with these things is there, but they are not working because nobody cares. It seems to me that the President wants to enjoy the office of being president without doing the job of the president.
You have repeatedly said the President has contempt for the job, that he did not prepare well for the office and that he did not study the existing literature on the situation on the ground. What exactly was he supposed to do?
Government is run in writing. Anything you do in government that is not in writing does not exist. You could meet the President at the airport and he will say, promote this or that officer to the rank of Major General, deploy him to this place. He has said it, but you can’t effect it without having it in writing. It must be in writing before you start processing it. Everything that goes on in government is in writing so it needs study time. Chief Obafemi Awolowo made his now famous statement that the difference between him and others was in how he used his time. He said that while other people in public life were carousing around with women of easy virtue he was burning the midnight oil studying. Governance is about studying. There is a theoretical framework to explain what happens in government. There are also Executive Summaries on every issue sent to the President’s table and he must study them to get adequate knowledge on those issues. Before taking over government, the President has to take some study time to learn and consult people. When Tinubu was announced President, I watched him to see what he would do. There are people I would have consulted if I were the president-elect but Tinubu didn’t consult any of these people. The president expected many people he should have consulted to come and pay obeisance at the State House. He was looking at it from the point of politics. We won the election and we are now the centre of attraction. Everybody should come and worship us. It doesn’t work that way. Those whose survival depend on government will come looking for you but those on whose shoulders the survival of government depends, you have to go looking for them.
What is your take on the insecurity in the country? You posted on X that ‘We must bemoan and suspect our government more.’ Could you explain?
Government is constitutionally required to have legitimate monopoly of instruments of violence in the country but they license people to commit crime when it suits them by looking away. When the government looks away, the government is sanctioning it. And when every tool to stop crime is available to the government and they refuse to stop it, then they are responsible. There are no two ways about it. The modus operandi of kidnappers is known to the security agencies. There are crimes you commit and it will take time to detect, but within hours of a kidnap, somebody will know because you will carry the person alive to somewhere. The kidnapper is a criminal who reports himself because he will communicate to demand ransom. In law enforcement, conspiracy crimes are the easiest to detect.
Government is letting this be in three ways. Firstly by looking away. Secondly, people find opportunities in using money to manage the crime rather than to eliminate it. They find it is profitable to keep spending security votes in the name of settling kidnappers. Thirdly, the government is it because the lower rung or middle rung of the security agencies participate in it. Many kidnapping gangs are incomplete without law enforcement people and they continue to do it on the assumption that the government people are with us.
We were told to link our telephone lines with our National Identification Number (NIN). We were told that after linking the lines that you cannot make a call without your identity and location known. A major telecoms company even had to pay a heavy fine under the Buhari administration because they missed the deadline for linking the phone lines. It became an international issue but they paid the fine. But what we have today is that somebody would be kidnapped and the kidnapper would make a call in front of the State House and demand that ransom be dropped at Eagle Square. He would collect the ransom and get away with it because nobody cares.
What do you wish President Tinubu?
I want the President to succeed. I don’t want him to fail. When they were building the Titanic, there were critics that said that a ship of that size is not good for its speed but the builder said that even God cannot sink it. But when the Titanic hit an iceberg and water rushed into the Hall and it eventually began to sink, that would not be a good time for the critics to start saying ‘I warned you.’ I want Tinubu to succeed beyond expectation because we will all be in trouble if he fails. The people currently praising him will be in trouble. The President will be in even bigger trouble and the black race will be the worse for it. It is better for us to keep poking the President here and there as he is dozing away. Maybe it will steer him to the right direction. We owe it a duty to make sure he succeeds. It is obvious that so far Tinubu has not been a good Commander-in-Chief.