Follow Us on Google
By Sunday Ani
Amid swirling rumours of discord within the Social Democratic Party (SDP), its 2023 presidential candidate, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has denied the existence of factions. He spoke on this and other issues in this interview.
Excerpts:
There are reports that there are factions in the SDP. What actually is the state of your party concerning the story?
Well, there are no factions in the SDP, but there are tendencies. For a political party like us, we had one common tendency. Ideological convergence was already set up for us. We’re a different party. We’re lucky because, when the party originally came into existence in 1989, we already had a path to go even before members joined the party. Remember the National Republican Convention (NRC) and the SDP, whose ideologies were either to the left or to the right. The politicians who wanted to go to the left side of the ideological divide decided to go to the SDP. And that’s how we came up with Yar’Adua, the senior Yar’Adua, and so many other people like that. Eventually, we ended up with Chief MKO Abiola and the Farewell to Poverty and Insecurity.
So, when the party came back after the military interregnum, and we came back, we followed that ideology. But, you know, as you look for electoral success, new people join, and some of these people who joined are human beings, and they are coming with their own tendencies. That is playing politics the way they know it, so you expect to see some negotiations and some conflicts going on.
Secondly, you will see that the SDP is a party of law and order. It is a very carefully crafted party for law and order. Every organ of the party works.
In many political parties, these organs are decorative. So, if you say there’s a National Working Committee, it could be three governors sitting down on top of a money bag and telling you what to do. In the SDP, no matter who you are, if the NWC is calling you, you better go there quickly and listen to them.
If the State Working Committee is calling you, you better be careful. If the world is calling you, you better be careful. You could see that the National Chairman of the SDP, duly elected and substantive, is Shehu Musa Gabam. Nobody’s questioning that. The National Secretary is Olu Agunloye. But Gabam, due to the activity of the National Working Committee, over which he presides, suspended him.
And he has comported himself, even though he argues vehemently that there’s no basis to suspend him. He’s not guilty of anything, and he’s been following the party’s constitution, but he has kept to that.
So, for the past two months, he hasn’t come to the office. He’s obeying the order of the NWC. Occasionally, when the party needs him to do anything, like answer some questions or perform any activity, he still obeys. So, it’s a party of law and order. But there are people whom I have some sympathy for, who are new to the party and assume that if the national woman leader, national youth leader, or any other official of the party doesn’t look like they’re billionaires, then you think that maybe, if you promise to buy them a car or give them some money, they’re going to overlook their authority. They won’t do that.
So, that cultural shock is what you see. So many people, when they face discipline in the party, or they have a request and the request is not met, will resort to what they have been used to in their previous places. But a political party that wants to grow has to have room to know that people are learning.
Recently, former Governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, called for voters in Kaduna to vote for the SDP candidates, despite claims by the SDP that he has been expelled from the party for 30 years. How do you address the question of expelling or banning someone who is reportedly not a member of your party ab initio?
That question is for the National Working Committee of the party. Left to me, I don’t want to ban anyone. Left to me, anyone who is banned and is repentant and behaves well should be accommodated. But the organ of the party has the right to make a decision regarding membership; the Supreme Court of Nigeria has decided that. What I can say, generally speaking, is that as a member of the political party that obeys its own rules, if the party says this is how we go about it, I will follow the party.
So, where is El-Rufai now? Is he a member of your party or is he in ADC?
We know about him being in the coalition.
El-Rufai called the ruling APC a failed, clannish and visionless administration that has plunged Nigeria into deeper socio-economic misery. As a leader of one of the parties trying to unseat the ruling APC, do you agree with his description of APC? What do you think of that?
Other News
He’s not saying anything new. He’s saying in 2025 what I was saying in 2022/2023 after many waters have crossed his own bridge. So, it’s echoing me now. I can’t charge him for copyright, but I can say welcome to the club. But we’ve been saying this for some time, and we’re not saying it out of animosity or anything.
The results that we are getting from the performance of the APC in the last 10 years resemble the unsatisfactory result we got under the PDP for 16 years. And if this result must change, we must change the political tendencies that are in authority. Changing your political party without changing your tendency is just a mere nomenclature.
Senator Abba Moro recently suggested that the elite, including politicians, are the root cause of Nigeria’s problems. How can the mindset of politicians be shifted to prioritise the interest of the electorates who elected them into power?
First, you need new politicians because recycling the old politicians, not just a matter of age or other things, is like a leopard. If you don’t like spots, then you don’t need to bring leopards because leopards cannot change their spots. So, you need to listen to new ideas and new politicians. When new politicians come with new ideas, we should not be too conservative as a society because a conservative society is trying to consolidate its own progress, whether obtained lawfully, historically, or wrongly.
But when you see a conservative society, they have something they’ve achieved, something they’ve grabbed from the world which they want to preserve. But a country reeking with over 70 percent poverty rate, a country that has no infrastructure and has no institution working cannot be conservative. You have nothing to lose. You need new ideas and new leadership to renew yourself. And the ideologies we have, articulated or not articulated, are the ideologies that politics is for the people who are in politics, and governance is for those who are in government. That’s why everybody is trying to be in government. No matter the condition set for them to be in government, they want to be in government. And when they’re not in government, their position is to struggle willingly to be in government, not to change what is going on in the government. So, it’s left for the Nigerian people.
How many politicians do we have in this country? The politicians in this country are not up to two percent of the population. So, it’s not about what the two percent are doing or not doing. It is what the 98 percent want to do. Let character determine our choices. The answer is in the fingerprints of the voters. Let no one say that the good ones are not coming out or the beautiful ones are not yet born. Now is the time for a new direction. We must bid farewell to poverty and insecurity.
The WTO DG, Okonjo-Iweala, has commended President Bola Tinubu for stabilising the economy, but emphasised the need for safety nets to create more jobs and put more money in the people’s pocket to be able to address the hardship in the country. What do you make of her statement?
The statement is correct in the paradigm of neoliberal economics. So, it’s like saying a doctor who mistreated 1,000 patients and they are dropping dead by the dozens has now managed to reduce the number of those who are dropping dead to like one per week.
So, you can say you have stabilised the situation. It doesn’t mean that the situation is correct. It’s saying that the trauma that the APC and PDP policies threw the Nigerian people into, or even the tailspin that the economy was going into, has now been stabilised. It’s like a pilot who ran into terrible weather, flew above the level given to him, faced the wrong direction, and now is flailing in the storm, and now managed to balance the aircraft; he still has to find his bearing. He still has to find his altitude. He still has to travel towards the original destination.
So, what Tinubu has managed to do is that, instead of burning so much money to defend the Naira, instead of struggling with inflation numbers that don’t make sense for their own budgeting, he’s managed to cleverly cover how much money the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is using to defend the Naira to make it look like we can’t see it.
And because politicians are talking about factions, nobody’s paying attention that the CBN is burning our money, which would have been useful for employment, infrastructure, and all of that. It is burning that money to defend the Naira and keep it at a level. Secondly, what are they doing? They went and rebased the statistics so that inflation, which would ordinarily be getting to 38 percent, is somehow rigged into about 21–22 percent. So, these numbers now enable them to communicate to themselves regarding whether their policies make sense or not.
But the Nigerian people are not involved in all of these things. We use the feedback that we get from our stomach, the feedback with energy costs, the feedback from rent, the feedback from cost of education, and the feedback between the spending capacities of double-digit, triple-digit wages. So, if you are earning a million Naira and you can only buy two tickets for you and your wife to go and see your aging mother in the village and come back and your salary is gone, you know that whatever WTO is saying doesn’t make sense.
Last thing I want to say is that WTO is not where you get your figure for your economics. WTO is where you get your figures for trade relations, and if you look at the tariff being bandied all over the world, everybody is giving tariff against the other. WTO is not a place where you go now for wise people.
The INEC recently asked political parties to desist from any sort of campaigns until 150 days to the elections, in line with the electoral law. An APC member, Farouk Aliyu, has tackled INEC for failing to wield the big stick against defaulting parties. What’s your stance on what the political parties are doing and INEC’s role so far?
Two things are involved here: one, the guilty party is President Tinubu and the APC. Everywhere you go, it’s only APC and Tinubu.
The INEC says most of the parties. When you are the leader, when you are the party in government, you set the tone. The key issue is that if we want to go back to regular order, the president and the APC have to go back to regular order. Once they go back to regular order and remove all those obnoxious billboards all over the place, we will listen to them. They’ll be briefing us about how the budget is performing and how education is performing.
