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By Sunday Ani
The Social Democratic Party (SDP) presidential candidate, Prince Adewole Adebayoin this interview speaks on the kind of leader that Nigeria needs and other national issues including why Nigeria is still in debt despite its wealth.
For many Nigerians, your name does not sound familiar. How did you get to this point and what have you done before now that made you think your first major job is to become the president of Nigeria?
This is not my first engagement with Nigerians. I have been in public for some time. I have been airing my views on many issues. I have been engaged with many presidents. I have been practising law, even up to the Supreme Court of Nigeria. I come from a professional background that forbids self advertisment. So, it’s just my first job in government and as I have always said, it is the practice of SDP that they tend to bring people from the professional side. In 1993, our candidate, MKO Abiola’s first job in public service was running for president and he was elected.
We need to run the government responsibly. We need to do what we are elected to do and we need to do what we say we are going to do. What we need in this country is someone who would assemble a presidency that doesn’t work against the president; a presidency that is efficient, not one fighting within itself and a presidency that attracts talents into the executive branch. This is so that the 5000 odd appointments that I need to make as president would be made from the best of Nigerians, not those who are advantaged in politics or those who have money to sponsor politicians. It is only after that, that I can address the armed forces and be a competent Commander in-Chief. I think I have understood the armed forces because I have done enough research to know that if you motivate the armed forces very well, within 18 months, banditry should come to an end. We should be able to deal with the issue of the terrorists in the North East, who have now migrated to the North West and are tipping to the North Central and towards the entire South. Now, if you lead the police very well and you have a competent police, all the prayers of the young people on ENDSARS should be able to reflect, and the new recruitment to the police from all walks of life in Nigeria and from getting the young people into the law enforcement, and many of the extra legal or paralegal security institutions being set up all across the country would be integrated into the security agencies, so that as a community, we can combat banditry once and for all. With respect to the economy, I will give you a state of the nation; I will address the National Assembly within 90 days of assuming office as president to give you an accurate state of the federation, so that we can understand what is going on in the country and remove speculations.
The country’s economy is at the lowest ebb, if you become president, what are your economic blueprints?
First, I know every local government in this country because I’ve been there and I have seen how poverty is ravaging Nigerians. So, what we need to do first is not to be intimidated by the fact that almost 100 percent of our income is for debt servicing. We need to check the books. The books are not accurate. We need to deal with leakage. If you bring all the leakages together, you will see that we have more on the side of leakage than on the books. You know that I’ve been talking about it for the past few months. How could the government be silent when 75 percent of the crude oil that we produce and sell in this country is done off balance sheet? These things are practically stolen, so they don’t enter into the books. So, the figure that we use to know our debt service relative to our population is based on what has been received by the Accountant General of the Federation. But when you practically go to the flow stations and steal all this crude, they don’t get recorded in the book, that’s number one.
Number two, you will discover that we don’t spend money on work. So, when you don’t spend money on work, you are not likely to get employment because people come with the mantra that it is not the job of the government to create jobs. But for those who tend to say it, it is the government that is creating their own jobs and they tend to hold these jobs for a very long time. Some have been in government for 40 years. So if the government can give you a job that lasts you a lifetime and double lifetime, how can you say it is not the responsibility of the government to create jobs for others? So when you deal with capturing the revenue properly to see that there are no leakages, there are a lot of the MDAs that are having a lot of their monies not getting to the federation account and these monies are given away one way or the other. And if you capture all of that, you can triple the revenue quickly. And if you look at our fiscal situation, our taxation, I think those who are collecting our taxes are collecting more for their pockets than they are reflecting in the book. So, if we just do honest book keeping, we will address that one immediately.
Again, if you look at chapter two of our constitution, it does not want the resources of the country to go into the hands of a few people, and if you do the analysis, you would see that in appropriation, we are not appropriating the poor or the less privileged. There is a fundamental objective and directive principle of state policy that says I must not concentrate the wealth of the country in the hands of a few. If I do that and create work, I would have been able to damage the unemployment figure, and bring it down to about a single digit with work. When you have work, then you are attacking poverty because people can now directly intervene in their own lives, and that of their families. So, our social structure in this country, analytically, says that if you employ and you give a living wage to one person, four people will be out of poverty, and we can do that without breaking the bank.
Did you say you will bring unemployment down from the double digit of about 33 percent to a single digit? How are you going to do that? And what are you going to do about the country’s debt servicing which gulps over 80 percent of the country’s budget?
If you look at the debt profile, debts in global sum tend to be intimidating but if you look at the tenor and it is a single digit, you don’t have to worry too much about that immediately. But if you stop the revenue from being stolen at the source – this is the problem we have in this administration now and we have had it for some time, even in the previous administration; you will achieve much. Let’s make it simple for our viewers – when a family head earns N100,000 and he tells his family that he earns N15,000, then the family members are artificially poor because they don’t know that he earns N100,000. What you need to do is to see that these revenues are not shared off the balance sheet. And as president of Nigeria, you need to know where your revenue is. I have had occasion to interact with people who are responsible for our revenue profile and they are in doubt. If you go to the appropriation committee of the Senate and the House of Representatives when they are doing their medium term expenditure framework, when you interview them, they don’t know; they are just speculating. And if you go round, you will discover that the government itself is running off balance sheet most of the time because a lot of the financing you see in politics is government money which has been secreted in many places, and I am not making wild allegations. It’s a fact.
The question is how will you bring down the inflation rate from the double digit of 33 percent to a single digit?
Okay, number one, the 33 percent is not accurate; it’s much more than that. It should be around 42 percent if you take the informal sector which is not captured. To bring it down, you make sure, like I said before, that 70 percent of your budget goes to social services because social services create employment. If you don’t spend on social services, you will not get employment. Who are the people who need employment? You need to hire more teachers, nurses and doctors, and also invest in agriculture where the majority has a natural basing for employment. Right now, there is virtually no investment in agriculture. And if you go to the Ministry of Agriculture today, they have a lot of money left in NIRSAL, one of the agencies there, which they are using for capital and money market investment; so there is no investment. If I do the investment, I think it will be able to bring every single budget that we do within 18 months to half unemployment because the unemployment we have is cyclical unemployment, it’s not structural.
In the choice of your running mate, what other parameters apart from religion and sex did you take into consideration in SDP, and what are your thoughts on this particular aspect of the nation’s politics?
Those are the problems the politicians have caused for themselves because of the way and manner they have played politics overtime. They have always been playing the politics of ‘It is my turn, it is my turn.’ And when you play the politics of ‘it is my turn,’ then you have problems. So, I want power to shift to the Nigerian people. I want a presidency that represents the Nigerian people; one that gives the underprivileged people an opportunity to have a say in government, to upset the professional class and the educated class who have not been allowed to exercise their functions in any principled capacity. I equally want to give Nigerians a presidency that takes into account the fact that the country is diverse and that no one should feel alienated. I believe that Nigeria has talents everywhere and primordial analyses don’t work in SDP. What matters is that those who have been shut out of government for a long time – patriots, professionals, and the underprivileged among others should be represented in government so that it is not a government of lobbyists, moneybags or cronies and all of that.
Talking about primordial sentiments, should we be looking at religion, sex and ethnicity or competence and efficiency?
As it is today, the SDP is the best party. We are not in the business of giving advice to other parties when it comes to the problems that they are facing. In fact, I have spent over 20 years of my life as an adviser and lawyer, giving advice to my clients, but now, I myself need advice because I am now the person who is on the seat making decisions. We will take our own action and announce our own team. And if they can learn from that, then they probably may find solutions to some of the quagmires that they have created for themselves in the manner in which they have done their politics. So, for me, I will not choose a person who cannot do the job just because I want to use the person to win an election. That’s already acting in my own self-interest which is not what the president should do. I will choose someone that I know would be the best for Nigeria as vice president, and if anything unexpected happens, such a person will be a good president for Nigeria. And if I am on holiday or vacation, such a person will be a good acting president. So, a vice president is not supposed to be a person who fixes ballots. It’s a person who can be a good adviser to the president, a person who can be a surrogate for you and a person who can discharge the duties of that office, and who will not embarrass you or privatize all the government’s property to himself. He is not going to be looking for a war chest to create a political campaign in the future; he is going to be someone who will be my number one critic such that when people are clapping for me, he will call me to the room and say, ‘you know you are not doing very well, you need to do better.’ That’s the person I need. I don’t need another big man or big woman. I need someone who will remind me of our oath to the people of Nigeria and who will look me in the face and say, ‘I disagree with you.’ That’s the kind of person I want, not another political bigwig somewhere. He is someone who can serve Nigerian people because the people have been underserved for too long.
Women have been complaining of being sidelined in politics. Is the SPD pro-women? What are your thoughts on this?
The SDP probably is the only hope in this election for women. The person who competed with me in the presidential primary was a lady, Kadija Okonu-Lamidi. So we have a good record with women. They know that we have their interests at heart. And women are not ruled out at all. Don’t be surprised if the VP is a woman, and don’t be surprised if the VP is a man. Women are in the basket and men are in the basket and we are consulting.
