Tinubu playing politics not governance

By Chukwudi Nweje

Presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 presidential election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has said that eight months into his administration, President Bola Tinubu has continued to play politics while ignoring governance. He says the attitude of the administration is not what Nigeria needs, insisting that governance must be put over politics. He spoke on other national issues.

What is your impression of the President Bola Tinubu-led administration so far?

President Tinubu is in the office but he has not settled down to the job. No file is moving or treated. 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 the fact that they are 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 said the man will not succeed but he has succeeded; I will apologise. It is better than for people to say you were right, you warned us that the man will not succeed.

You recently posted on X that the administration has been doing more politicking than governance, how do you mean?

The skills you need to succeed in politicking are not the same skills you need to succeed in governance. In fact some times 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 because 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. Politic 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 and have political skills but he has to bifurcate and have two teams, those purely devoted to governance and those devoted to politics.

What is your take on the allegations of corrupt practices in the Ministry of Humanitarian affairs and Poverty Alleviation, the same ministry under the Buhari administration was accused of malfeasance?

The issue is this government, if you leave potholes on the public highway, statistically somebody is going to fall in there. If you leave a manhole uncovered somebody is going to fall into it; if you structure public institutions and publicly funded programmes in the manner that ministry is structured, it will only be a matter of time before somebody falls in. Whether it was National Supply during the Second Republic Alhaji Shehu Shagari’s administration somebody was bound to fall in. The way that ministry is formatted is like having potholes on the highway. So the president should look at it differently and deal with it. From the time that programme was under former Vice President Yemi Osinbajo in the Presidency, it had that problem. When the scandal happened, I was heartbroken for Dr Betta Edu and I was heartbroken for the President and heartbroken for Nigeria because there is a trauma that hungry people get from being hungry and being told that what could have come to you has suffered violence. As president there is no way I would have retained that ministry. The responsibility for the problem is with the President because if you look at photography, you will see that the minister he appointed was behaving exactly like the minister before her. The attitude of the President shows that he didn’t learn from his predecessor or learnt the wrong thing. That ministry is just about peddling cash around and we need to correct that.

Governorship election will hold in Ondo State in November this year, as a political leader in the state, what is your advice to the people in order to avert a repeat of the recent imbroglio in the state following the ill-health of now late Rotimi Akeredolu?

What I can say is that the situation of the people of Ondo State suggests that they have put in so much into APC but they have nothing to show for it. They elected Akeredolu twice despite not being happy with him and when the second term was affected by ill-health and lack of cohesion and the internal competition, the people suffered neglect because of the in-fighting and governance was without direction.

Unfortunately, because Akeredolu was having a running battle with his former deputy governor, he went to pick somebody he could dominate as deputy. But his ill-health required that he will have a firm deputy. What I will tell the people of Ondo is to first condole with the government and people on the death of the governor and to warn them not to behave as if they have no alternative because whether it is APC, PDP, SDP or any other party, the advantage of democracy is that it disciplines everybody because you have options because if you misbehave and don’t take your mandate seriously, they will vote another party. The people of Ondo State are not victims of APC as such, they are more like collaborators with the APC. There must be something in the party that they like because in every election, they vote for the APC even during the last presidential election despite the fact that I am from the state.

The elite of the state have a consensus that they will do national politics through APC. But the reality is that none of them is getting the best out of it; the state is not properly led; the developmental work that needs to be done is not paid attention to. The maturity of the people was what prevented the crisis in the State House from blowing into a crisis in the street; they knew that none of the parties was worth dying for; there was nobody in the street fighting for now late Akeredolu or the deputy governor as Lucky Orimisan Aiyedatiwa then was.

There was no faction in the street fighting for the First Lady in the street, all their fight was inside the State House. Now that another election is coming, the people have to understand that governance is important and in making decision, they have to organise a government for themselves that is going to address the problems of the state. Ondo is a maritime state, it is an oil producing state with high number of quality.

Despite the government failure, I think Ondo is the state with the least poverty in Nigeria according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) report but people are going through a lot. If you come to the major townships, the communities invest more on development than the government. The immediate past governor is from Owo but if you get there, it looks as if there is no government.

The entire Ondo South has been cut off from both state and federal support, imagine being cut off from the national grid for 10 years, that cannot continue. Ondo State cannot afford partisanship now, they have to put in place a long term development plan. The state that I’m impressed with is Akwa Ibom; there are corrupt politicians and people stealing money but their partisanship does not derail from the development plan. If Akwa Ibom State continues on the trajectory they are going now, they will make progress on the common ground. This kind of plan is what Ondo and many states need.

A state like Abia for example has been going in the opposite direction, as Akwa Ibom journeyed to the future, Abia was journeying to the abyss but it looks like Abia can reach a turning point; if you look at 1999, Abia was relatively more developed than Akwa Ibom, you cant say the same thing today. But it seems governor Alex Otti is trying to do something different, he is discussing about development.

Ondo State needs to start that kind of journey.