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By Chukwudi Nweje
A presidential aspirant on the platform of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Adewole Adebayo, in this interview among others, discusses the problems inherent in the country’s governance system and what he will do differently to restore Nigeria to greatness if given the chance to lead in 2023.
You are one of the many Nigerians that have indicated interest to serve the country in 2023; specifically, your interest is in the Office of the President. Why the highest office in the land?
My approach to the problems of Nigeria is not about the privilege or height of the office or my career ladder, which office I want to be in, or which will be easier. It is basically about service to the country. The time we are in now is not a time of luxury where you can choose the form of service you want to render; we are in a period of extreme emergency and the ship of state is imminently going to capsize. This is not a time to start asking whether you are the admiral, a new ship-man, carpenter or a passenger. Nigeria today is a rudderless ship and the Captain and his top officers at the bridge are crying for help, the mother ship is heading for the abyss. The onus is on us to go to the bridge, take over the rudder and steer the ship away from catastrophe. The executive powers of the Nigerian Federation are vested in one man, the president. The country will look like whoever is in the office of the president, the person’s virtues will be used to service that office, his vices will loom large over the office, his fears will be the fears of the country, his hope will be the fume for other people in the country having hope. There is nothing I can do for Nigeria and her future if I don’t go for that office where the executive powers lie, that is why I’m going for the Office of the President.
You talk about Nigeria in extreme emergency and the ship of state on the verge of capsizing, what are the major problems you see?
You don’t need to think too much to know the problems of the country, they are out there and they are shouting. This is not the era of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe or Chief Obafemi Awolowo who foresaw the problems we might have in the future and tried to warn us about them; these are problems that even a child knows, that this country is insecure and getting worse by the day and that the governmental system we run and our state actors have become part of the insecurity of the Nigerian state and that there is looming poverty not just among the unemployed but also among employed professionals, that even the character of those in power is reflecting intellectual poverty; they are stealing the country blindly because they are afraid that the widespread poverty will catch-up with them. Insecurity, poverty, lack of unity, and injustice have become common currency in Nigeria. We no longer have the assurance that the President and Commander-in-Chief is the father of the nation. As divided as we were politically in the Second republic, and despite that many people did not agree with the politics of Alhaji Shehu Shagari, remember we had to go to the Supreme Court to resolve the issue of what 12 two-thirds of the 19 states is; despite these, nobody in the country doubted the fact that Shagari was head of state and that you could go to him and complain about issues and get a quick answer; no part of the country was alienated then, it is not the case today.
I don’t want to focus on these problems because they are well articulated, I’m focusing on the solutions. My coming out to run for the presidency is to show the people that the problems may loom large, but the solutions are obvious. It is the lack of discipline that makes the problems seem large. It is like the case of a child who has malaria, he knows that his mother keeps the malaria medicine in the cabinet, but because the medicine is bitter, the child does not have the moral courage to take it. The Nigerian elite know the problems of the country, they also know the solutions to the problems – insecurity, poverty, disunity, injustice and others but they have refused to apply the medicine because it is bitter. Insecurity will not end until all those sharing dollars on top of it realise that it has to end because lives are being lost. Every incident of insecurity that occurs produces an excuse for someone to siphon money; they will not apply the medicine to solve insecurity in say three months when the cash out is in six months, that is why insecurity persists.
What specifically will you do in the area of insecurity for example?
All you need is to have a compact with those in charge and they will do their job. The compact we have now is a compact between those who have political power and authority, those who have the professional skill, those who have commercial interests, and those who have administrative responsibility. All these people are united in a compact to make money out of the insecure situation of the country. This compact is seen in the relationship between those who appoint professionals into service positions and those they appoint; they have to be greased; that is why the selection of who will head any of the services or how long he will stay is not done professionally; it is seen as a lucrative ground, so only people who are in a compact with them are appointed and how long you will stay is not a measure of your performance but how much returns you make to those who put you there.
What I will do differently is to engage my Service chiefs and the bureaucrats and ward off those who have commercial interests. My measure of performance will not be about how much money I can make. This problem is not peculiar to this administration, it started with the previous administration whereby the security situation was not taken seriously. The insecurity has now got worse and becomes an excuse to spend money recklessly. Look at the structure of this spending and compare it with spending during the ECOMOG and civil war, you will find that the spending now is not going into fighting insecurity because it is not producing results. If you look at our military and paramilitary, you will discover their problem is not that of capacity or training; it is a problem of leadership and that is why I’m coming out.
The general impression is that Nigeria has not been as disunited and divided as it is today, what do you think is the reason for that?
Some of those who say Nigeria has not been this divided are using it as a weapon to keep us disunited and to challenge the government of the day. I can tell you that Nigerians themselves have not been this united in a very long time. Nigerians are united about the problems the country is facing. The problem is that the elite have not been this desperate at any time in Nigeria’s history to use disunity to keep us divided as they are doing now. Since 1999 when terms and tenure of political offices were defined, the political elite have discovered that no matter how powerful or mischievous a politician is, after four years, he must have to take another mandate to continue in office during which his renewal of mandate could be denied and even if it was renewed after eight years, he cannot renew it again. So, what the political elite in Nigeria have done now is to form a conclave and put their names in a basket. A governor today will after eight years put a lackey to succeed him and move to the Senate and after some years in the Senate, he will take a shot at the presidency and if he doesn’t get it, he will become a minister. They keep the people disunited to succeed in doing this. Sometimes they use ethnic strife and other times they use religious tension but the bottom line is that this does not have any effect on the real life dynamics of the Nigerian people. The common Nigerians are united by the misery the political elite foist on them. The political elites’ own interpretation of unity is whether they are all represented in government. We must contrast the cry of the elite over the sharing of the loot and our common patrimony and what the Nigerian people are going through because the common people of Nigeria are not disunited among themselves. I don’t join the elite in their ethno-religious classification and interpretation of what a disunited Nigeria is based on how much access they have to the villa. The Nigerian elite are the ones stubbornly trying to promote disunity.
You are aspiring to contest for presidency on the platform of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), do you think the platform can compete with political parties like the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)?
The SDP is the second oldest party in Nigeria after the Peoples Redemption Party (PRP), which is our friend, and hopefully, we will finalise our union together. It is not hard at all to compete against the APC and the PDP because both are part and parcel of the fabric of the crisis that Nigeria has. Both are now problems Nigerians have to solve. The SDP has more committed members than the APC or PDP has. What is happening is that the APC and PDP are using the apparatuses of the state to promote and project themselves but they don’t have depth. We have taken our party to the people and we believe we stand a chance to defeat them in a free and fair election, more so, now that the Electoral Act, though not perfect has become more transparent and pro-voter. Three things are in our favour, first, the SPD is committed to delivering good governance unlike the APC or the PDP which are a place for people who want to share the resources of the country. Second, we have a track record of having produced MKO Abiola in 1993; he won an election that is up to date the freest ad fairest election held in Nigeria. Thirdly, the election is going to the people and the chances of rigging are reduced; I don’t see any reason to join the APC or PDP when I know they are the problems of the country.
The SPD like you rightly said has been around since MKO Abiola won the 1993 presidential election on its platform, but is the manifesto and ideology still the same?
Yes, the manifesto and ideology of the party are still the same, that is why I’m running on a mantra of ‘Hope Again’, and our slogan is farewell to poverty and insecurity. MKO Abiola ran on farewell to poverty; at that time, it was inconceivable that Nigeria which was running ECOMOG and securing West Africa, Central Africa, and the Gulf of Guinea will become a theatre of war. Although, the insecurity we face today was gradually coming up then, which was why Abiola was speaking against poverty. We are running on the mantra of farewell to poverty and insecurity because every injustice, poverty and injustice MKO Abiola spoke about and wanted to address has got worse now. Also, the fruit of poverty and injustice which is insecurity has started to germinate so, we have to go beyond what MKO Abiola did, we are dealing with poverty and insecurity. We are determined to realise Chapter 2 of the 1999 constitution – Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy- it is written in the constitution for a reason so that we won’t have a wayward, un-anchored government that will take power, privileges, and perquisites of office and resources of the state for themselves alone. Nigeria is supposed to follow social and economic justice and every other aspects of justice. However, they put a clause there that the provisions of chapter 2 are non-justiciable and have prevented ordinary people who are victims of the violation from going to court to enforce it. It doesn’t, however, mean that a politician who has taken the oath of office, a component of which is that you will abide by the constitution, of which the fundamental objectives and directive principles of state policy are part, does not have to abide by those provisions, that is what we are coming to do. Look at the economy of Nigeria today, the Central Bank which is supposed to defend the currency has joined the Federal Government to debase the economy and inflation is all over the place and workers’ salaries can no longer take them anywhere; they are now saying they are giving interventions, they go into the markets sharing N5,000 in the name of Trader-Moni and N-Power. Nigerians don’t want such interventions, they want the Central Bank to stabilse the economy so that their salaries can take care of their needs.
You are a confessed follower of late MKO Abiola, you believe in the ideals he lived and died for, and you are running a campaign along the same ideas he professed. How do you see the comparison one of his daughters, Hafsat made between late MKO and Gov Yahaya Bello of Kogi state who is also a presidential aspirant of the APC?
I will try to say it very responsibly, trauma has a way of manifesting itself. I knew Hafsat when she was young, I’ve not seen her for a long time, I knew the mother, late Kudirat Abiola and I knew the father. I also know the family paid the ultimate price. There are three things that happen to someone that goes through that kind of trauma: one is that there is trauma across board; two is that you cannot be rational, if somebody gives you any kind of recognition you may throw your dignity away; third is that young people hardly know their parents well, your father is just a father to you; it is people that know your father at the intellectual, philological and ideological level that know he represents a lot to society. For these reasons, my sympathy goes to Hafsat. MKO Abiola was a very busy man so I doubt if Hafsat really had time to stay with him and study him very well. Since the tragic death of her father and the assassination of the mother, Hafsat has also not had time to reflect on the legacies of her father. She does not live in Nigeria and I doubt if she has ever been to Kogi State. If she has, she will not make that kind of comparison. If you look at that clip where Hafsat made that comparison, to her left and right you will see she was in bad company. No politician of his era could be compared to MKO Abiola.
Still on your aspiration on the SPD platform, what happened to your association with the National Consultative Front (NCFront)?
The NCFront of which I am part of is not a political party, it was not designed as a political party and will never be a political party. There are elements in the NCFront who were advocating that the NCFront needed to be a political party, many of them are top officials of existing parties, some of us had the idea that NCFront should merge or form an alliance with existing political party while some others wanted us to register as a political party. The aim is to give Nigerians a viable force that will help them escape from the forced dilemma of APC and PDP because both have basically become one party; you can see that from the new chairman to the APC to the last man in the National Working committee (NWC) are heart and soul PDP members and if you go to the PDP, it is the same; both have become the same. The NCFront was trying to give Nigerians a clearing house where we will debate ideas, but we found out that our ideas were common and not only were they common among us, the ideas were common with the common people. The 2023 electioneering has already started, a political party can hold their convention now and nominate their candidates, so how can we go to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and say we want to register a new party.
What stands you out from all the other aspirants across the political parties, why should Nigerians put their trust in you?
For me, it is the freshness and singularity of my commitment to the purpose of the republic and total lack of any distraction, the mastery of the situation of our people and ability to see solutions quickly. You will see that majority of my solutions don’t require money, they require character, competence and commitment which cannot be purchased in the market. They are not things we need to borrow money from the IMF to do, if I become president, most of our problems will go away just by the application of common sense and these virtues. People without these virtues are compromised because they are playing politics of compensation and don’t understand that we are all at risk of oblivion if we allow politics to be done like a business where you invest and reap bountifully for yourself. I’m bringing originality of purpose. If government fights corruption inside government, the corruption in the street will disappear. Until we have a president that has knowledge of how to harness the resources at our disposal, we will be going around in circles. Nigeria has every human, material, ecological, natural and artificial resources to solve the problems of Nigeria. God gave us everything like character, truth and justice but we have refused to use it and thereby turned our paradise into hell. The government has unleashed socio-economic terrorists on the people. If a businessman in Onitsha imports goods, he must come to Lagos, I don’t know how we think geography. Inside the port in Lagos, government has officially sent terrorists, up to 21 different agencies to fleece importers after the goods have come out of the port; with all the bad roads, there are over 300 stop and search points between Apapa and Onitsha bridge head where the importer has to pay. Until we stop governmental terrorism, we cannot solve the problem of the country. For now, no one is running on this platform with me so that is why I feel God has given me an insight because I listen to other people and when they talk, they may make sense but they don’t know where the key is; so I don’t feel threatened in anyway, all I need and the SDP needs to do is to tell the people to stop raising their hands in prayer because what they are asking God for is already before them.
