Prince Adewole Adebayo was the presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 elections. In this interview, he speaks on rising insecurity in Nigeria, President Donald Trump’s comment on the country and how the All Progressives Congress (APC) administration has failed the citizens, among other issues. ANAYO EZUGWU reports

Looking at Nigeria today, how would you describe the state of the country?

From the point of view of governance and primary duties of the different tiers of government, so many things still lie unattended to, and the dire situation that we all find ourselves remains unchanged. There are indications that the government has lost its map, and it’s just waking up every day to react to any new incident, whether local or international.

There is no rational observer who would say this is the trajectory of where the Bola Tinubu presidency was headed to. What is happening in November 2025 was what they planned in November 2024. President Tinubu has lost control of his own government, which he hasn’t had time to put together to start with.

And no matter how much you speak for the government, you cannot say that where they are now in 2025 was where they planned to be when they were planning a year ago or two years ago. They are definitely in the wilderness, and if the captain of the ship cannot determine the direction the ship is going, he has no control over the speed of the sail.

The passengers on that ship are entitled to a new captain, or they give up on that ship, and you cannot give up on Nigeria. So, it is easier to say that we have a bad government in a good country than to say we have a bad country, because I know that this country, if well managed, is second to none.

Some people accuse the opposition, including you, of exploiting the current misfortune under Tinubu’s administration just to score political points. Do you think your criticism is actually helping the country right now?

If the President wants to be helped, from what we say, he can pick up enough help. But if you say we are making capital of the misfortune, then they are producing too many misfortunes. Again, if you think that the opposition is taking advantage of your misfortune, then you should reduce the amount of misfortune you have.

You can’t fail in every aspect and expect that people are not going to remark on those failures. Are you saying that a community with people running helter-skelter, where even people in your administration don’t feel safe, where even the community you come from doesn’t feel safe, is okay?

The vast resources of Nigeria are located in the northern part of Nigeria. The entire North is closer to Somalia than it is to what Nigeria used to be. So, you cannot Afghanistanize your own country and expect people to sing your praises. You cannot take every index that you met and make it worse. Unemployment is worse, inflation is worse, insecurity is worse, international profile of the country is worse.

You either don’t have the competence to appoint ambassadors, or you can’t find competent ambassadors to appoint. Either side of the coin is a failure. So, you can’t police the state, you can’t secure the state. You don’t even have enough mental capacity to explain your failure.

President Donald Trump of the United States recently repeated his description of Nigeria as a disgraced country. Do you believe that is a fair description?

I don’t agree with President Trump that we’re a disgraced country. But, he’s speaking the language of international diplomacy. When you see the president of a country, you say Nigeria is here. So, what he meant is that the Tinubu administration is a disgraced government.

Is that not an oversimplification?

No, because Nigeria is not a disgrace, Nigeria is not a failure. But it’s like when 11 people are on the field playing for Nigeria, if they concede two goals, they will say 2-0 against Nigeria. It doesn’t mean that all of us are on the field playing, but they are representing Nigeria. President Tinubu on the international stage represents Nigeria and his scorecard is disgraceful.

Those who are outside don’t see you; they don’t see me, they only see the government of the day. And the government of the day is a failure in every aspect that is important. So, the counterpart overseas is entitled to say that this country has failed because the government has failed.

The government has lost its map and it is just waking up everyday to react to any new incident, whether local or international

They see the secret of the government. They see what the government ought to see that it cannot see, they see the yawning gap at the international space that the leadership of the country ought to fill, and when they don’t see them, they say they are a failure. But it doesn’t mean that all of us are a failure. He’s not evaluating all of us; he’s evaluating the government of the day.

The Secretary to the Government of the Federation suggested that recent surges in attacks may be linked to foreign interest, particularly from America. Does that explanation hold any water for you?

It is like a goalkeeper saying that the attacker or striker from the other side is shooting the ball too fast. That’s an admission of failure. Your job is to catch the ball.

So, whether the attack is coming from within or from without, your responsibility is to stop the attacks and every tool in the world that you need to stop the attack is given to you. But n every occasion, at every opportunity, you have failed to use these tools for what they are meant to be used for.

Nigeria has enough money, enough manpower, enough institutional experience in the military and enough association of friendship all over the world, enough technological and scientific and other skills within to defend this beautiful country.

You don’t believe there is any explanation that makes sense as to why Nigeria is struggling with the scale of insecurity that we are dealing with right now?

The explanation that makes sense is that we have a failed government; that’s it. There’s no other way because the kind of challenge or challenges that we are facing is onetenth or one per cent of what Ukraine is facing, or what other countries ar facing, including America itself is constantly facing.

Are you saying that Ukraine has the kind of support that Nigeria doesn’t have; I mean the support of Europe and the US?

Where Ukraine is today, where it will be tomorrow and where it was yesterday, is all a reflection of the kind of leadership it has at every point in time. If they had a leadership that is more serious than the one they have now, even the war would not happen. And if they have one that is not as strong as they have now, they would have fallen long ago.

Let us understand something clearly; the job of the government of a country is to secure that country, and you need resources to do so. And when those resources are available to you, you have no excuse to give. Why stay on the job when you can’t do it? Some of the reasons they are giving that the job is tough or that it’s unpredictable, are reasons you give when you’re resigning.

Those are not reasons you give when you’re on the job. If you bring a security guard to your house, and he says, the gate is too heavy, the intruders are too many, he will tell you that on his way out, why he can’t do the job. You cannot say that you do not know, or you did not know in 2023, when you were saying ‘it’s my turn, it’s my turn.’

You will not say that you did not know that it was your turn to fight Boko Haram, your turn to fix the economy, your turn to grow the potentials of the country, your turn to represent the country internationally and your turn to make Nigerians happy. If it’s just your turn to occupy the seat and nothing more, then you’re taking that turn to go away.

This is because the discussions we are having are not surrounding things that are optional. We’re not discussing subsidy, price increase, we’re discussing life or death. We’re discussing the continuity of the country or a fracture.

Do you see the current insecurity as an existential threat to Nigeria?

Of course, it is. We have two problems. Problem number one; non-state actors have infiltrated the government. The government is absent-minded, absent from duty. Now, it’s also deceiving itself, politically in a way to elongate its tenure even though it cannot do the basic function. Those are the problems.

The citizens have been coping. They should have been on the streets long ago, but I do not recommend that. I recommend that you should be patient, but our people have been overly patient.

The disturbance in the country is now causing international concern to a point where world powers are debating whether to take over the whole thing, as if we’re not a growing concern. The manner of their intervention, the angulation of the argumentation, is suggesting that they have a particular section of their population that they feel sympathetic towards, and that is going to create internal alienation in the country.

With your own international contacts, have you and other opposition figures been working behind the scenes to calm tension or have you simply been watching the Tinubu administration struggle?

We are not bystanders because it’s our country. It’s not Tinubu’s country. Tinubu is a mistake. The country is a reality. Number one, I’ve been to the House of Lords. I’ve been to London. I’ve talked to people there. You can’t say, nobody can say, they don’t have a Nigerian intelligence agency to give them reports. Nobody can say I spoke against the country. I’ve been speaking to the Americans for a long time. I’ve never spoken against the country.

So, we speak for the country but we cannot deny the fact that what is obvious to the people you are talking to, if you don’t want to lose credibility, is that they know you don’t have a proper government at home, a government that behaves like a government. They will ask you: What can you do to make things better because they too, in some areas, want a better partner to deal with. I was in London two weeks ago.

I was admitted to the House of Lords. I sat with them in their proceedings. We talked about Nigeria. After that, we had lunch, where they were raising people to talk about Nigeria. You’ve seen some of my intervention in the media, including the international media. I’ve always been supportive of my country. I’ve always said, do not invade Nigeria. Do not throw bombs into Nigeria. Try as much as possible to cooperate with the government that is in Nigeria.

They have shortcomings. They’re not a serious set of people but remember that there’s a longstanding relationship between Nigeria and your country, and you should expand your interaction with members of the civil society, with the opposition, and all of that, and to see that, overall, we’re not treated like a banana republic, even though we have an amateur government in power now. But, we are a regional power in our own right, and I reminded them of the role we played in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Lebanon and Congo, among other places.

So, we deserve respect, and they understand that. But they have during the George Bush administration, unless you abandon your work and start impersonating members of the government, which I’m not, you cannot lay their bed for them. They will scatter it by themselves. They’re not orderly. For example, they have a diplomatic problem. They are making it look like a public communication problem.

So, they are sending argumentative, loquacious people to go on foreign media and annoy everybody instead of going to Washington, London, Paris, Moscow, Delhi, Beijing, and start to talk softly to people. Forget about opposition, you can say maybe we’re going to sabotage you along the way. You have people who are neutral in the country. You have experts, you have retired ambassadors, you have a whole Institute of International Affairs, and I’ve spoken to people there.

Do you believe there is a link between the strong international rhetoric and what is actually happening here, especially when we see so much exaggeration of the casualty figures?

You cannot use embellishment when you are talking about human life. If 50 people were killed, and somebody goes to write 500 people were killed, it makes no difference about the fact that 50 people were killed but the scale and intensity says a different thing. A country that wants to succeed does not make that kind of argument.

It makes no sense. So, the numbers don’t matter. If your house caught fire, and somebody goes to report your house got burnt down, you cannot argue that only half of my house is burnt down.

That’s not the issue; seek help. Your house shouldn’t be burned down in the first place. The way Nigerians are being killed like chicken; if there’s another country where birds are dying like that, or dogs are dying like that, the international community would ask: Why are dogs dying like this in this country?

It is not a responsible argument from a government communication point of view to argue with people who are reporting real tragedies in your country. If people were killed in Cameroon, and they reported that people were killed in Nigeria, you can argue and say, no, those people were killed in Cameroon, not in Nigeria.

But if people are killed in Nigeria; ignore the exaggeration and deal with the killing because when the killing goes away, the exaggeration will go away. So, that is why nobody has ever exaggerated that Nigeria is frozen up with snow, because snow doesn’t fall here. So, anything that happens in any country will be exaggerated.

In America, there’s police killing of Black people. And when you talk to Americans about it, they don’t see it as often as when we see it from outside. So, anything that happens in your country that becomes a pattern is liable to occasionally or periodically suffer exaggeration. But, the root cause is, what you need to deal with, which the government is failing to deal with, and it’s getting worse by the day.

There have been some military deployments and rescues in recent weeks and the President has ordered the withdrawal of police personnel from VIP protection duties. What do you make of the government’s response so far?

I don’t have police guarding me. However, what I can let you know is, number one, nothing’s wrong with the armed forces. They have the wrong commander-in-chief; full stop. It was the elected commanderin-chief. You can elect the wrong person. You can buy the wrong shoe that doesn’t fit your feet. So the issue is, you can use someone to buy the wrong shoe and have foot poisoning. The problem facing Nigeria today is that the commander-in-chief is not a good commander-in-chief. He can make a good commanderin-chief out of himself if he wants, but he’s neglecting that mission.

I’m happy that he also knows that he doesn’t have to go all over the world on a fashion parade; that he can actually sit at home, go to the situation room and interact with his security chief. He didn’t go to South Africa; he shelved some of his international engagements to stay back home. We are talking of episodic, reactive actions. We are not talking of systematic work of a commander in chief. I saw a picture of the president talking with the chief of army staff.

As commander-in-chief, that’s not how I’m going to do it. So, he needs to take a cue from previous commanders-in-chief. Ibrahim Babangida, quite articulate, talk to him, no matter what your political disagreement with him, he’s got to know how to be a better commander-in-chief. I did all of those things, preparing myself to be a commander-in-chief. Tinubu is not commanding the armed forces properly; he’s not interacting with them.

When you say that this government has failed Nigerians, you make governance appear so simplistic, is it that simple and you’re saying that the government is intentionally looking away from the people?

The first enemy of the government is the government. The first enemy of the people is the government. You can not commit a crime and last one week, one month, if you don’t have government people cooperating with you. I cannot go now to the bank manager in my bank and say to them that I want to withdraw six million naira. They will not answer me. They will say scam, money laundry or whatever but people are paying millions of naira in ransom.

The people who collect the ransom are not worried where they are carrying the money to. If you want to try it out, just keep collecting your salary and taking it to cash. When it’s up to ten million, try to take it to the bank. The bank will tell you all kinds of stories. What I’m letting you know is that President Tinubu, in my own humble view, has lost control of his government.

He needs to organise his government, make sure that he understands that police covers this country effectively because every local government in Nigeria has a police division. There’s a Divisional Police Officer (DPO). In some large or massively populated local government, you have more than one division of police there.

Are you telling me that in Eruku, in Isapa, and all those places, there’s no division there? Are you saying that if there’s a youth corps member in Eruku criticizing the APC or criticizing the government, they will not go and arrest the person? This is a government that could capture somebody in Nairobi, Kenya, and bring here for trial and sentence the person.

But they cannot capture people who are going around. How do you go and carry hundreds of people? Have you been a nursery school teacher before? To get 35 children to cooperate with inside the class: is it easy? How are you going to carry 35 people and carry them somewhere?

Is it a failure of the government or a deathly action of saboteurs and fake communists?

The real saboteurs are inside that villa there. You see, when President Tinubu came, I said to Nigerians that this gentleman will undo his own government by the people he appoints in his own cabal because he was elected alone.

And look at all the choices he’s making. Now, he is the cause of his own problem, domestically and internationally. First, environmentally, he has heated up the whole country by poor economic policies that are making everybody desperate, making everybody to go wild. Leave that aside.

In terms of security of the country, he has not been paying attention to Nigerians who have been paying ransom everywhere from one chance. Do you know, if you do a public hearing of one chance victims, there will be over a million. He’s not paying attention to people being kidnapped in the communities everywhere. The only reason why he’s sensitive to it now is because Trump sent a tweet.

When last the National Assembly holding a hearing, and the president is going there, and they are doing a hearing on anything, but they are spending your money to fly to go and be partake in a hearing overseas. How can you say somebody is sabotaging you? Who sabotaged you to the point where you have no ambassador to the United States, no high commissioner to the United Kingdom, no ambassador to France, no ambassador to China, no High commission to the UK, the Security Council members.

Even if you are joking, you don’t want to have an ambassador to Burkina Faso, Estonia, and Australia. Why would you not have diplomatic representation in the membership of the Security Council? You are treating ambassador appointment like any other political appointment that you are going to use to force people to come and join you.