Adewole Adebayo was the Presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 General elections. In this interview, he tells LEO SOBECHI that Nigerians should seek consensus on the qualities of a good president instead talking about political alliances to grab power.
Some tendencies, especially in the North Western part of this country, are clamouring for an alliance with the South as a basis to stabilise the country politically. Do you buy into that kind of thinking?
Well, for me, Nigeria is just one constituency. For someone who is running to be president, there’s only one constituency, Nigeria. So, for a presidential election, there’s only one constituency. So the idea of alliance is, for me, a surplus, because we are supposed to be one constituency.
We are only choosing one man to lead us. So, we are one people, as far as the presidency is concerned, all Nigerians are one. So, it is necessary for us to agree as to the qualities of the leader that we want. As far as a good president is concerned, when we manage to have a good president, we hope that there can be a good president for Nigeria. What you will have is a consensus as to the qualities that the leader must have.
It must be a good head of state, good chief executive, and a good commander in chief. So, we must have a way of reconciling the issues for the person, so that he will know that my people are one. So, that’s the way I’m looking at it.
I don’t know those who are using that language, alliance. I don’t know what they have in mind. But, what I know is that it is a compulsory state of affairs, that is one nation under God: One nation, one destiny, one nation, one people! These are more than slogans; they have been written into the law.
The urge for alliance per se stems from the allegation by some people that they were deceived into supporting a candidate from the South, President Bola Tinubu, in 2022, hoping that they will fully align with that tendency, but that suddenly the reverse played out when the man went to North East to pick a running mate instead of the North West. Now they argue that the only way to undo that mistake is to support a rival candidate from the same South.
You see, before any politician would think of reaching up to the North or to the South, hunger has reached up to the North and South. Inflation has already formed alliances with North and South in addition to joblessness, insecurity.
So, you see, politicians only think of how to win elections. All these permutations on how to win elections is what they are thinking in their head.
But, we are looking at it from the point of view that you must have a government that works. And your selection process, not by taking geography into consideration, because geography will not be the only factor.
The problem they are probing, they have been misdiagnosing it. The problem we have with Tinubu is not because his vice-president is from the North East. It is that East, West, North, South, Tinubu only thinks of himself.
Even between Tinubu and the vice-president, I don’t think that there is equilibrium anymore. The elites need to understand something that when you have elite conspiracies, to rotate power, to share power, to rotate money or share money, to rotate opportunity and share opportunity, and all of that to the exclusion of the common people, if you agree in the morning, you will not agree in the evening. It has been ordained by God like that.
The only government that can last in Nigeria is a government that is serving the people with the fear of God. Any other conspiracy you form, even if Tinubu has chosen his vice from the North West, the thing will still not be even for them, because the only way you can use power and you will have no long-term regret is to use power with honesty. To serve the country with honesty, not to think about yourself.
What is disturbing them now is the failure of the agreement of sharing formula. The conspiracy of the night is now being exposed in the day. But, when you go round the country and see how our people are living, anybody still telling you about East, West, North, South, you know that person has a serious problem of abstraction from reality.
If you are connected to the fact that there are people in the forest now, whether in Ndigbo, or in Yoruba lands, or in the North East, or North West, or North Central, who are in the bushes now in the hand of kidnappers and being asked to come and pay ransom.
There are people in the hospital now, there are no medicine to use to cure them. Doctors, nurses are in serious dire straits. Universities don’t have funding. Nobody has employment. Inflation has eaten into everything and somebody is still telling you this story of North East, North West. They are not realistic.
Our people want good government, period. And to have that, you need leaders who understand the issue, appreciate the situation, and have been thinking of solutions and have the discipline and rigor to deliver on these difficult tasks. If you are talking like that, then the geography of the person will be merely accidental and incidental. So that is where I want us to focus.
I have been listening to them. They have discussions with me. I attend meetings and when they raise all these issues, I cannot but discover that my neck is shaking my head automatically. That these people don’t understand that they are selling fuel above N1,000 getting close to N2,000. People’s salary cannot buy a bag of rice, the entire salary of a hard-working person. They don’t understand that there are no roads for us to travel.
All these people who are formulating all of these ideas, they need to come down and talk to the Nigerian people. The Nigerian people’s request is very simple.
They want a government of honest people, who are competent, who are focused, who understand the issues and who will start solving the problems from day one.
The people of Maiduguri, the people of Ondo State, they don’t care about Shettima, they don’t want Shettima. If you remove him and put another person, they don’t care. They want you to remove poverty and insecurity from their lives.
People of Lagos State don’t care about Tinubu. You throw him out, you vote him out, you throw him into the Lagoon, they don’t care. They care about the cost of living, cost of transportation, cost of housing. They care about their businesses that are in the doldrums. Nobody cares. People of Zaria don’t care about Mr. Speaker (Tajudeen Abbas). They don’t know him, they don’t care.
People of Akwa Ibom don’t care about (Senator Godswill) Akpabio or anything. They want oil pollution to go away.
They want to be able to live as if they are Qatar or Dubai, because they have the same amount of oil per capita as those people. So, nobody cares about all these people.
But, this is the elite conspiracy for them to distract you or send you here and there. The Nigerian problem is simply that the land is full of milk and honey. Government is making billions and trillions every day and nobody is serving the public. And, they are bankrupting the economy.
They are borrowing money every day and they are not doing the people’s work. If you find anything that we are trying to build in FCT, that can convince the people that we are aware of this situation and we want to solve this problem, they will not ask us East, West, North, South, and all of those questions. They won’t.
Are you saying that maybe the perceived failure of governance now has thrown up the criticality of issue-based politics?
Yes. The issue-based politics has been with the people. What is happening is that the elite, the political class, the business class, the media, INEC (Independent National Electoral Commission) and all those people, have conspired to distract the people from being able to fully do their issues.
Because, when you go on campaign and you listen to Nigerian people, I have never been accosted at the campaign before and asked, are you going to pick a minister from my own town? Nigerians don’t ask that kind of question.
They will tell you, look at this bridge, it has been like this from the time of (Lrd Frederick) Luggard. Can you give us a new bridge?
They will tell you that they are hungry. Can you make food affordable? They will show you their roads that are not good. They will ask you if you want to fix the road? They will show you their children that are out of school. They will say, what do you want to do about that? They will show the graduates that have no employment or underemployed or undercompensated in their employment.
The women will tell you about their market and how they don’t have capital to run their businesses. Farmers will tell you how insecure the farms are and how they don’t have fertilizer, how they don’t have crops, how they don’t have machinery.
And, they will tell you how, where is the money to harvest. They don’t have good prices for their harvest, because there’s no storage and there’s no means of transportation to take their goods to the market. Doctors will tell you how they are not well paid or how the hospitals have no medical equipment and no medication.
All these are the questions people will be telling you, so Nigerian people are issue-based. It is the media.
When you give an interview for one hour and you will spend 50 minutes raising issues and maybe you spend one minute to insult somebody or to… that’s the one they are going to amplify because the media is partly a subset of the elite and the business people don’t care about issues.
They care about who’s going to award them contracts, who’s going to make them borrow money from banks and not pay back, who’s going to remove their name from AMCON list, who’s going to help them checkmate EFCC (Economic and Financial Crimes Commission) when they’re investigating them.
So it is the elite that know that when you do issue-based politics, then they will not have the ability to run away with the goods. That is where we are trying to bridge the gap.
Can you say that, of a truth, that indeed geography of the leader is equidistant to the needs of the grassroots?
What I can tell you is this, that it is part of a basket of factors. For example, it would not make sense for the president to come from Ondo State and the vice president comes from Oyo State, so those are just common sense issues.
But they are not the main issues because you first have to find a quality person, you have to find the right person who can do the job.
So, if you run a transport company and you are looking for drivers, you want to make sure your drivers are competent, that they have licenses, they can drive well and they value human life and they value the equipment that you give to them.
But, if you find out that you have 100 vehicles and 50 of the drivers are from the same hometown, you can call the HR manager and say, no, no, no, there must be other good drivers from elsewhere. You cannot give all the jobs to one community.
But you want to make sure that each of the drivers is competent. So that is what we are saying. We are saying that right now, Nigerians are aware of our diversity, Nigerians are aware that we are a large population, they are aware of our history, that we need to be united, so they know that already.
