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•You can’t be patriotic, care for rule of law and remain in APC
• New tax law bad, unjust, won’t achieve anything
By Sunday Ani
Presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general elections, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has described the year 2025 as one of the worst in the history of Nigeria.
He noted that it was a year of abuse, international embarrassment and a year with most brazing act of legislative treason, where the fiscal tax law passed by the National Assembly is being suspected by serious members of the National Assembly to have been tampered with.
In this interview, he talked about the new tax policy, which has since become operational, assessment of the President Bola Tinubu administration in the past year and the fear of Nigeria becoming a one-party state, among other issues.
What’s your assessment of the year 2025?
For the people in government, it’s a year of abuse, and for the media it’s a year of distraction. We have a list of all the problems of Nigerians. For the political class, it’s a year of removing credibility from politics. For the political class, it’s a year of denouncing oneself. For Nigeria, it’s a year of international embarrassment.
How would a foreign country be able to come to your country? Even to insult Nigeria or criticize Nigeria, it was a serious matter. Do you remember the postcard where the US government sent the so-called Peace Corps? And one of the Peace Corps members criticised Nigeria in the postcard that they sent home.
The entire postcard was proscribed because Nigerian youths came out to condemn it; how can you come to a country and insult it? The kind of messages we get from Mr Donald Trump and the US, and then the motion that we hope we can perform in social justice. When you look at all of that, it’s a year that we’ve got no way of exacting an opportunity to decide on peace or something.
Now, we’re going to present 2026 budgets, and they started with constitutional impossibility, of saying that they are repealing the 2025 Appropriation Act. Why do we want an Appropriation Act that has to be repealed?
The moneys spent, is it to be regarded as stolen money, lost money or lost opportunity? In all of the contracts awarded, what’s wrong with those subheads? Are you going to revoke all those numbers? Clearly, we don’t have a government. We only have people of power. We don’t have access to money to be able to engage them and tackle them. So, 2025 was a year where we beat the government without being able to tackle them and Tinubu was appointing everyone employed on the team as well. So, we want to analyse the year as the year where we introduced or expanded the most dangerous youth enslavement programme in the country.
Under the country’s constitution, tuition is supposed to be affordable. No one is expected, under our constitution, to take a loan to go to school. It’s one of the operations that arose in America. But in America, if you take a student loan, the professors will not be able to study. In the case of Nigeria, if you take a student loan, you’re paying interest to the government, or owing government interest.
At the state government level, almost every governor is to be found, on the average, in Abuja, lining up to wait for Tinubu on one of his numerous medical trips or unexplained journeys.
So, it’s the year of governors shutting down the radio stations, and bringing us to the secondary level, the sub-national level of states. About six or seven governments changed their parties to join the All Progressives Congress (APC) and many more are begging and spending money to join. There is no attempt to get the politicians to interpret the problems of the people and want to deal with it.
And it’s the year with the most military thing you can remember. A general was killed by the so-called terrorists. You really don’t see a general being killed like that. And the other military event is Tinubu’s minister and a Naval officer shouting at each other about a piece of land that belonged to neither of them. So, it’s the year we’ve come to the conclusion that it was a year God gave to us to try to make sense of our lives but we decided not to give it to Him in that year.
We ended the year with the threats that by this year, 2026, we are going to be officially living under the most brazing act of legislative treason, where the fiscal tax law passed by the National Assembly is being suspected by serious members of the National Assembly as having been tampered with, either by the president or part of the National Assembly or both of them.
So, there are so many things. It’s the year when Nigeria couldn’t meet even the most basic record.
In a few months’ time, the process for the 2027 election will commence and I know you are interested. Are you not worried that Nigeria is gradually moving to a one-party state?
I’m not worried at all because logic suggests to you that if you have one tendency elite, it’s a matter of time before they will stop pretending to be different and move into one political party. If you look at most of the political parties that have been in existence since 1998 when we started this current transition, they’re the same elites. Most of the political parties are the same. They are mostly neo-liberal. The elites are uniformly corrupt.
So, you can find someone who has been in government for eight years and you were asked to summarize their political philosophy. You don’t know it. But you can find out their political philosophy when they leave office and you charge them to court. So these elites don’t understand the essence of a republic.
They don’t take the job seriously. They don’t have a sense of leadership. And they’re not contributing to anyone. Their economic philosophy is contrary to what is in the constitution even though they swear by the same constitution when they are about to resume office.
That is not the language of someone who is collecting power from the people. This is for the benefit of the people.
And returning to the people and becoming an average citizen like the rest of us. So, all of them now have summarized their aspirations and realised that Tinubu group is the most successful in all of their career, all of the power structures and all of that. So they decided there’s no point competing with them. They just go and align with them. He is the Capon now and they just follow him.
That is what people call one-party state. But in reality, there cannot be a one-party state because the natural dialectics is that any union between hungry people and the overfed people cannot last. Any union between unemployed people and people who are considered employed cannot be together. A union of poor people and those who stole all their wealth cannot endure. So, we are reaching a point where the real opposition will not come from the political class.
The real opposition will come from the Nigerian people because what Nigerian people need is a political party in which the Nigerian people, the ordinary person, is invested in, part of and committed to and it’s a mass movement. That is the end of the so-called one party state. But the elite as decadent as they are, they are the leftover of the crops of military rule. If you look at the history of most of them, their career began with working for military governments during the dark days of military dictatorship, helping them to hide money and if you look at the Tinubu government, you can see how many of them are returning to their virtual homes especially in court; they are working for the government. And contractors who were virtuous partners are hiding money from them. So the summary of all of this is that the Nigerian people are having an opportunity to confront the elite with a political alternative. And now that they are enjoying the drama of problems in these elite classes, it is more important to pay attention to how responsive the Nigerian people are to these problems.
How the Nigerian people show character in realising that these problems won’t go away and you don’t have philosophical things like in the past is important. There’s no one who’s coming to rescue you. What you need to do is organise, mobilise and take collective action to save your democracy. This is the only thing you’ve got. Which is the right to vote, the right to have that vote reflect, the right to have people who think similarly with you, and to put them in a position of responsibility so that the wrong doings will come to an end. Then, we can begin to restore the republic to the original intent. I find it particularly unintelligent to fight and gain independence from white people and become slaves to black people. I don’t see any sense in that. And so, the Nigerian people now are going back to what Fanon called mass movement against second slavery, because if you look at the government of the day, they don’t regard you as equal or as a citizen. They regard you as someone who they can deny all your rights politically, economically, socially, and give the next generation a great future while they are smiling to the banks.
So, if you start from Lugard to the last colonial master, Robertson, I don’t think any of them was as anti-people as Tinubu has been. And the only thing that is motivating politicians, commonly, is to use politics and the offices they occupy to address their own personal poverty. So it is no longer a government that is meant to provide food for the public. It is a government that is providing an avenue for a few people to run to the kitchen and seek care for themselves.
That is the answer to the question of one party state. It can’t happen. The one-party elite has already happened but one-party state can’t happen. We will defeat them and we will send them out. The earlier he gets it easy for the common will of Nigerian people to be expressed through election, and he loses the election and goes away, the better for him and the country.
But in whichever way, it is not sustainable for Nigerians to continue with this trajectory. We will defeat him with a broken company. It doesn’t matter how many they are.
Are you re-contesting in 2027 or is your party forming a coalition?
I am running and I have already told my party. My party officially knows that I will contest in 2027. I am in the process of it. There is no major political party in Nigeria. Unless you are substituting it for the ruling party, which I can never join, and my deputy can never join it.
Why?
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Because I have met criminals and I have been dealing with criminals. First, you have to occupy an office. If you take an oath of office, you need to keep to it. If you were on your way to join a political party, would you join a political party where they are accusing each other of altering legislation? Would you do that?
It is obvious that you can’t claim to be patriotic and still be a member of the APC. It doesn’t work. You can’t say, I am democratic, but I also support apartheid.
There are certain things I don’t agree with. You could say, well, I like Tinubu, but I don’t care about Nigeria. So, it is not allowed because if you interact with politicians, they will say, oh, he is my mentor, he is my friend. You cannot be two things at the same time that are contradictory. You cannot say, I care for the rule of law, and join this government.
It doesn’t follow the rule of law. You cannot say, I care about accountability and they cannot account for money, they cannot account for budget, they cannot account for time. They can’t even account for the whereabouts of the president because of the time.
But some have also accused you of not seeing anything good in this government. Are they right in their judgement?
I don’t see it because it doesn’t exist. This has to exist. When I woke up this morning, I didn’t see you until you arrived. So, if something good happens, I will see it. But if nothing good happens, how do I see it? So, I cannot deceive myself. And Nigerian people are not even willing to see it. For example, they say they are reducing the inflation to 16 per cent, about the time when the price of everything has increased. So, why do you calculate your inflation?
How About the prices of foodstuff that are reportedly coming down?
First, put the foodstuff in the basket. They don’t know, the government, they don’t know how to lie. Number one, if you put the food in the basket, you take all the staples, rice, yam, beans. That’s all. Then, you take the processed foods.
Then, you take all the other condiments. If you take everything, the food is in the basket. Now, you have the price of rice at N120,000. It comes to N80,000. The minimum wage is out of it. You take the cost of transportation. There is no part of Nigeria where the cost of transportation has reduced. There is no part of Nigeria where the cost of housing has reduced. Anybody here who has a landlord, when you get a landlord saying, okay, I’m reducing your rent now, does it help? There is no part of the country where you would say that I set up a business and my new business that I’m setting up now is costing me less than before.
If you are in the construction industry, the cost of cement, cement-based materials, cement-block concrete and all of that, the cost of reinforcement, iron, rod, sand, water; none of the cost is coming down. If you compare the three-year budget of three roads, for the same project, their cost is rising.
So, you have a 90 kilometre road awarded in 2023 for X amount, because they didn’t fund the project, they have no discipline. Now, they carry the same project over to the following year, or some segment of it.
When they are re-pricing it, it’s higher than before. So, we call it variation, and you see David Umahi, coming on TV and talking about variation, variation, variation. So, it goes on like that.
If you travel by air, your airfare hasn’t reduced. Even if you adjust for seasonal volatility, it doesn’t reduce at all.
If you came by road, it did not reduce, it increased. If not that I shouted, and many people joined me to shout, people would have been surcharging you 15 per cent on top of the fuel you are buying now. So, when you look at all of these things, I have not heard of any school saying, oh, we are reducing our school fees, compared to last year.
And if you buy Christmas clothes for your children at once, there is no fabric that is less than before. So, if you are reducing inflation, at least, there is a basket of items that should be in your inflation calculation. Which of them has come down? The only one you mentioned is rice.
This is one out of, maybe, 1,000 staples. And rice was undergoing hyper-inflation. And what they did was to allow rice importation because when Buhari, in his wisdom, banned the importation of rice, and did not support rice farmers with it, how many rice farmers succeeded? I never saw them coming to do anything, because they don’t even know the agro-economics of farming. So, I am a farmer. I bought tractors at higher prices. I am maintaining and cultivating my land at higher prices. I go to the markets around to buy rice paddy, but the rice paddy nearby; they don’t have any support for that. There is no part of the rice production process that they were part of.
But they just assumed that if they ban the importation of rice, and we can charge more money from the customer, it would cover the already too high cost of producing rice. But in reality, what they should have done was to reduce our cost of producing the rice so that if you are bringing rice from abroad, with the shipment and all of that cost, it’s naturally going to be more difficult for you to beat our price since labour is very cheap, and land is almost free in Nigeria, but they don’t understand economics. So, to put it all together, what we need to understand is that criticism of Tinubu, not seeing anything good in them is because they are not good.
It’s for the good of the country because half of their lack of good policies is deliberate. There is a conflict between what they want to gain and what is good.
Speaking of policy, the tax reform law has just kicked off. As a lawyer, what is your take on that? Do you think it will help reduce the economy of the state, or do you think it will further add to the sufferings of Nigerians?
First, it’s a bad law. It’s an unjust law. It’s an impractical law. It is a distraction. What is the essence of taxation? Taxation has four critical ingredients in its philosophy. One, it must be a stimulant. It must stimulate the economy. It must be taxed. When you have a tax law, it must make people want to produce so that it helps you to stimulate the economy.
Two, it must be distributive, fairly distributive. That is to say, when you produce tax, it must help you to fund, to take resources from the area where it’s wasted to the area where it is useful. For example, if we had a case of homelessness, you can tax expensive homes, exorbitant homes like mine, and use the money to do affordable housing. If you have, like Ethiopia, a problem with public transportation, you can tax those who bring in luxury vehicles and use the money to buy buses. So, you could tax fabric, imported fabric. Those who are wearing expensive clothes; you can tax them and use the money to buy khaki and hats for the poor. So there must be an adjustment, tax is a modulator.
Three, you must generate more revenue in the long run. Lastly, it must be transparent and easy to follow. You cannot create a tax law that makes someone who is selling in the market to think of the need to hire a lawyer. If you have been following the last three months, everybody’s thinking, oh, are they going to seize my money in the bank?
Have you not been following? It’s either the president is not in the country mentally or he is not in the country physically because he used to be an accountant. At least, in the area of finance, you ought to have a bit of a clue. He used to be an auditor. I have a feeling that somehow he’s not interested.
When I went through that law, I could easily see the trick. He’s not interested in collecting more revenue. He’s not interested in stimulating the economy. He’s interested in the fiscal singularity because he has achieved political singularity in his mind, where almost all the governments are in his party. So, what he wants to do is achieve economic singularity, where all the businessmen are his business partners. And then achieve administrative singularity. He’s not the one who does all the businesses; the government collects all the taxes.
So this law is poorly written. And while you are distracted by this clause, the blue clause, the clause you forgot about. Why did you say that the Customs can’t collect some Customs duties anymore? It’s something that we’ve been doing from pre-colonial times.
If you look at our old arrangement, the Joint Tax Board even banned states from using consultancy. Nobody should use consultancy to collect revenue because revenue collection is a sovereign duty. It’s like using private people to do the job of the Navy, like they are doing some of the contract design, or using mercenaries essentially to do the work of the armed forces. And very soon, they will start using vigilante and private guards to do the work of the police. It’s unconstitutional in our own country.
So this is why they are distracting everybody. It’s a bad law. It’s not going to achieve anything.
Secondly, it is a violation of criminal law to have this law because members of the National Assembly are saying that the copy which they deliberated upon and they have in their votes and proceedings and gazette is not the one that has been circulated now; that they have gone to import into the law provisions that the National Assembly did not approve and did not deliberate upon at all. They’re determined to implement it. Why? Three reasons.
One, they have no respect for the country and the people in it. They believe that, oh, Nigerians, they will make noise, once we start, they will forget about it.
Secondly, they need money for election, because they want to buy everybody out. So they need that money. They’ve already internally and mentally spent that money. Three, they want you to perpetually be able to be part of those who are collecting your money, even after you have voted them out of government, like they have done that at the lower level before. So it doesn’t matter if they eventually vote them out of their 10-year espionage. They will still continue to cross their legs at their homes, and each time you go and pay tax or you are forced to pay tax, they are surcharging you. And they will use that money to finance more politics and eventually subjugate you. At the end of your lifetime, you, your children, everything around you has been appropriated to serve one empire.
