Prince Adewole Adebayo was the presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general elections. In this interview, he dismisses elite-driven alliances as fundamentally flawed, questions the credibility and readiness of the electoral system, and outlines the SDP’s strategy of building people-powered coalition, among other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU reports
Politics is a game of strategic alliance and numbers. It is said that anyone that is not in the coalition is inadvertently supporting the ruling party as it will be difficult to singlehandedly defeat the ruling party without a coalition. Why is the SDP running a lone man show?
Alliances and coalition are with the strategic partners in an election. And strategic partners are not necessarily politicians. Strategic partners are the segments of the society.
If you have the political class, within us we have certain disagreement, because the ultimate aim of politics is to enter government and govern and if you are talking in terms of accountability, corruption, you will not have credibility if you are aligning yourself with people who don’t believe in that either by words of mouth or by their actions or their questionable character. So, you will be inconsistent. Also, if you look at the people who make elections happen, the majority of them have not been participating.
I ran for president last time and we had 93 million voters but we couldn’t get 80 per cent to show up. If you want to have coalition or alliance, you have to find out where the 80 per cent that didn’t show up are, what the issues that bothered them and why they didn’t show up, those are the areas the SDP is working with the strategic partners in an election.
The other political parties we are having talks with from time to time, sometimes the talks are not that productive because you find out that like somebody who made serious mistake in government for the past 20 years hasn’t learnt anything new.
They are looking for an opportunity to make another mistake for another 20 years and we are not going to enable that. Some in the coalition want to play roles which they are not suited for and which purely based on ambitions. The real alliance is to make sure that Nigerians who are going to bear the brunt of bad governance and beneficiaries of good governance are participating and what the SDP is doing is bringing more people into the fold.
Your party’s activities appeared not really in the media. Can you fill us in on what your party is doing?
What we do is to try and increase our membership. If you go round the country, you will see physical signs of it. The under reporting of what we are doing is a mixed blessing. In some siting we get frustrated.
We were in Kano where thousands of people joined the SDP but you didn’t report it. On the other hand, we think it doesn’t matter, once the election day you will see the difference. The person we are trying to remove has security apparatus and he knows what we are doing. If you are a Nigerian out there and you are expecting a coalition to come and save you, you are making a big mistake.
What you need to do is talk to your neighbour who says let’s pray over this problem, yes you can pray but don’t stop there, you need to listen to debate, join a political party that you think is speaking the truth to you and make sure you participate in the election, don’t join anyone who says hope is lost. You need to come out. We have religious and civic organisations and professional organization that think they can profit from rendering services to a bad election system instead of coming to improve on it, so that we can over all have a good country.
We are also making sure the commitment to supporting us is not just verbal assurance but we have actually taken a step to come and join the party, participate in the membership. In the last few months, data shows that in many remote parts of the country, there is no week now that we don’t have close to hundred thousand people joining.
It used to be hundred thousand a month and we are following up, so that it’s not just number that we are going to post to INEC but quality participation. We are not closing our ears to those in the political class who wants to learn the lesson of the past and coming to coalition but the real coalition discussion will start after the primaries because different political parties have different level of sanity in their party.
Our own kind of coalition is when you begin to see civic coalition, other groupings in Nigeria who ordinarily would but show interest in it are showing interest. That is our idea of coalition.
Some major defections happened in your party recently, is this a sign of people losing confidence and faith in your party capacity to drive the 2027 agenda?
No, not really. What I see is that if there is a system where 5,000 left the SDP, chances that we probably won’t notice at all because if you are bringing in 50,000, 100,000 every week and 5,000 decide to leave especially if it’s because he has beholding to one particular aspirant who is not favoured by zoning and he knows that in the SDP , he might not get the ticket, he decides to go to another party, he takes 5,000 people with him and he has a budget to advertise that, we cannot complain.
Are you not concerned that the party is left with one member in the Senate?
Not really because one person died and we lost one now though he hasn’t officially resigned because we have to be careful according to the law. He hasn’t told us that he has left but we are hearing rumour that he is the favoured candidate of the ring party. We cannot do anything about that. He is trying to be governor of a state. We already have quality people who will be governor.
So, it’s natural that he knows that we will not take him to be the governorship candidate because of the way the formulas has worked out and he decides to go and seek his governorship elsewhere, I think we have to respect that. But the party is not about individual ambition like that because every one of such that advertises departure, there are thousands coming in.
What matters to us is that we would be congratulating ourselves half way if the Nigerian people understand why the SDP is in the race. That we are about substance of the Chapter 2 of the Constitution and that we are trying to let you know that governance is not contest of personality, it’s about contest of principles.
If they understand that we build that coalition across the country, others will join us even those who are all over the place now that is the coalition, many will join us once they discover that Nigerian people are getting that message and that message is important. If we don’t get it now, we get the transition wrong.
I must say this clearly. The objective of the SDP is deeper than the objectives of some of the people you find in the so called coalition. They are satisfied 100 per cent if the president is removed. But for us, that is just the beginning. Our objective is achieved only when we remove the president and replace him with government that will not look like his own.
President Tinubu is not a democrat. He doesn’t behave like a democrat. He didn’t come to office the way a democrat will and he has even stopped pretending to be a democrat
What matters to us is that we would be congratulating ourselves half way if the Nigerian people understand why the SDP is in the race. That we are about substance of the Chapter 2 of the Constitution and that we are trying to let you know that governance is not contest of personality, it’s about contest of principles.
If they understand that we build that coalition across the country, others will join us even those who are all over the place now that is the coalition, many will join us once they discover that Nigerian people are getting that message and that message is important. If we don’t get it now, we get the transition wrong. I must say this clearly.
The objective of the SDP is deeper than the objectives of some of the people you find in the so called coalition. They are satisfied 100 per cent if the president is removed.
But for us, that is just the beginning. Our objective is achieved only when we remove the president and replace him with government that will not look like his own.he decides to go to another party, he takes 5,000 people with him and he has a budget to advertise that, we cannot complain.
Do you think the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is ready to conduct credible elections come 2027?
I don’t think they are aiming towards that because you have to be sure first if that is what they are aiming towards before you say whether they can do it. The person who is not willing to work will not be productive.
It is a question of what the rest of us have to do. Remember that the INEC chairman did not appoint himself. He was appointed by the president who I am not sure that free fair and credible election is top on his priority. Not only that the president didn’t act alone, there is Council of State where all the former leaders and experienced people in the country are and they approved it without any question.
And it went to the National Assembly, representing all Nigerians, and they approved the appointment without question. It looks to me therefore that there was no so much uproar. Even some of the people who are now campaigning against the INEC chairman, if you go back months back, you would have read where they were praising the appointment. So, we have blown the opportunity to choose a free and fair INEC.
If we wanted to do that, we would have implemented the Uwais panel recommendation. And the chairman if ADC, David Mark, for example, he was the Senate president as at the time justice Uwais submitted that report during President Umaru Yar’Adua. He threw it away, so lot of opportunities for free fair and credible elections have been lost.
There is the perception that there is a subtle underground attempt to shrink the democratic space there by presenting President Tinubu as the sole candidate for 2027 election. Where do you stand in this narrative?
What you need to know is that we don’t need to make it sound that we are making something that is very creative. President Tinubu is not a democrat. He doesn’t behave like a democrat. He didn’t come to office the way a democrat will and he has even stopped pretending to be a democrat.
Are you saying that a former member of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), who fought military dictatorship, is not a democrat?
Your operating word is former. A thief is a former honest man. Conflict is a former innocent person. There are a lot of formers. The issue is that what you do now is what matters.
You could see that he is limited to the idea that ‘I am there now, I know how I fought my way, I wasn’t brought there by democracy. I was brought there by the effectiveness of my own ruthlessness. Now that I am there, I have to be more ruthless.’
Do you think that the opposition is ready to pay for the sacrifice? What is opposition?
Opposition is what you do, not just merely what you say. Some of the people in opposition are mercenaries and saboteurs. Some of them are also causing problems for themselves.
But the key issue is that if we are to oppose President Tinubu, there are three things we need to do. One, our action in the running of our political party is not lawlessness. Second, we oppose in principle and mobilise Nigerians to ensure good governance because Nigerians are not going to be interested in your personal ambition.
Thirdly, you must create a contrast. You shouldn’t look like Tinubu, if you want Nigerians to help you in defeating his government. You have to bring a sharp contrast that will be like day and night, black and white.
Nigerians must see that there is a clear alternative. I know that if President Tinubu remembers the SDP, his wish would be to destroy it or destabilise it. It’s not new to me. The question is: Are we going to enable him?
