Prince Adewole Adebayo was the 2023 presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). In this interview, he speaks on the readiness of the opposition for the 2027 elections, performance of President Bola Tinubu and the controversy over the Electoral Act, among other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU reports
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has announced dates for the 2027 elections. Do you think the opposition is actually ready for the elections?
The opposition being ready is a given. What’s more important is whether the people are ready. Democracy is about the people. If you ask me if I am ready to take over from President Bola Tinubu and govern the country better, yes, I am ready, even today.
If you can drive me to the Aso Rock Villa now and ask me to take over, you will see a better result today, not tomorrow. I am better in every front. I am better prepared, better intentioned, better programmed surrounded by better people and with clearer vision, closer to what the constitution wants. It is the people who need to be ready to change their government. The idea that the duty of opposition is to hold the government to account is misplaced.
The primary duty to take the government to account is the different branches of government. The National Assembly has a duty to oversee what the executive is doing and the judiciary is to ensure that both the legislature and executive comply with the law of the land. It is now left for the people to hold their elected officials accountable.
My job in the opposition is to form the next government as I don’t want to choose opposition as a career. I don’t want after this election; you continue to call me opposition. I want to be called president and commander in chief. I want to be in government. I don’t want to be professional opposition.
Inter Party Advisory Council (IPAC) recently announced that it will boycott the election should amendment urgently not done on the Electoral Act. Is that a right decision?
The right decision is to have a good Electoral Act. You saw me at the National Assembly being teargased by government when they were in the process of passing the law. Mine is to ensure they pass a law which encourages the people to come and vote which deepens democracy and which makes credibility of the election a matter of law. That is what the government needs to do.
The political party should prepare for the election while still imploring the government to do the right thing. It is what the Nigerian people want. It is not an issue between the government and the opposition. The discussion that all Nigerians need to have is that the Electoral Act as currently passed and signed by President Tinubu, is it what Nigerians want?
Do you support IPAC position of threat?
I think IPAC is right to say that if you are not going to make the rules fair and clear from the beginning, then they have the right to say they are not going to participate under that rule. But I will encourage every political party to still continue to do its underground work and not be caught unawares
Boycotting an election is a very drastic democratic tactic. Isn’t that effectively surrendering to the ruling party?
No, the assumption is that if almost the political parties or majority of the political parties are not in government, or don’t participate, then you don’t have legitimacy because you cannot self coronate and it is a drastic reaction to a drastic legislative coup d’état which the people in power today made to ensure that the electoral system is put in controversy.
That is because the more we discuss this issue of electoral law and things like that, the less time we have to discuss the content of what we are bringing to government. The more people realise why am I participating in this thing, then, the voters tend to have some apathy towards the electoral process.
My approach to it is to say we keep agitating for the right thing to happen, we keep making sure we communicate to our law making bodies, the Senate and House of Representatives that what they have done, that is servicing themselves and President Tinubu, is not their constitutional duty. Their duty is to get feedback from their people and amend the clauses.
Are you saying the law as it stands today does not provide a level playing field?
Of course, there is no level playing field as there are a lot of booby-traps but we have a duty to still defeat the government. So, Nigerians should make sure that no member of the National Assembly returns because they are the ones who surrendered the sovereignty of Nigeria to the whims of one person, so vote all of them out. Once you vote them out, you can then put patriots there.
But the immediate reaction of IPAC is to say if you want to rig the rules, then carry the ball and play on your own. But we are also working to see that at the end of the day that final solution to bad law is to change the law makers.
Will you and the SDP join the boycott if IPAC goes ahead with the threat on the 2027 election?
That is for the SDP to take a decision when it meets at its National Executive Committee (NEC) but my position is that if we could hold elections under colonial government and under the military, even the military under a regime that didn’t want to go, we can hold the election no matter how bad the law might be and still defeat the government of the day.
You seem confident that you can defeat President Tinubu and the APC. What gives you that confidence?
My confidence is in the Nigerian people. What politicians don’t realise is that people want to focus on where the problems lie. So, if the opposition is saying the President and the government is not good, people will judge not only the government, they will also judge the opposition. If the people are saying the government is obviously not good but the opposition is not better either, the people will just abstain.
So, our uty as we are pointing out that President Tinubu’s government is a disaster, which is obvious by every metric, we also have to organise our front in the opposition and bring clear cogent and concrete plan to the people and project people who have credibility. It is not difficult beating President Tinubu blue black, so we will beat him.
Even in the last election where he supposedly won and we had to agree that he won because that is what the law says, you will see that the arithmetic shows that he lost because more people voted for other people than him. What we need to do now is bring more voters out to get them to understand that yes, there are many other problems, but our main problem is how to get the APC out of power and then focus on the SDP and listen to what we are doing and check the credibility of all our candidates.
If you are convinced that we can do better, you better come out and vote for us en masse. The problem of democracy is like the market place where you are coming to sell onions while others are coming to sell different wares and products, the noise if the market can sometimes drown what you are trying to sell. What we are trying to do now is to amplify that Tinubu is a historic disaster.
He is the worst of the lot that we may have. However, instead of lamenting continuously about Tinubu, God and time have brought an opportunity for us articulate an alternative. We don’t need to do anything extra ordinary, just go out of your house, push for the alternative and on election day, vote for the alternative.
There are people, who appear to be the new face of opposition some of whom are now in the African Democratic Congress (ADC), but the belief is that the opposition must be united to defeat that APC and you don’t seems to agree or align with them…
I don’t agree with that analysis because you can say that your aim is to defeat Tinubu and you don’t care about who is coming next.
Are you willing to work with other opposition leaders?
There is a reason why I am opposed irreconcilably with President Tinubu. It is not because of his name; t is because of his deeds and belief. These people whose names you have mentioned share exactly the same. They have been in government and acted like him or were in some situations. So my being opposed to Tinubu on certain basic principle automatically means that I am oppose to them too based on those principles.
It’s nothing personal. We are talking on behalf of the Nigerian people who have been marginalised for decades. In trying to come to power through people’s effort, we are not going to undercut ourselves by aligning with those that immediately they are in government, Tinubu will be laughing at them. What we are trying to do is to ignore all of them and focus on the Nigerian people.
So, If Nigerians are interested in forming a government in line with the constitution and making sure that decency is returned to government and that public service is clean, and that people who are going to be in charge of our affairs will be servants of the people, then they should go with people like us.
