The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general elections, Adewole Adebayo, in this interview with AYODELE AFOLABI, spoke on issues that should define opposition in Nigeria and what some politicians that are planning to decamp to the party should know and ready to accept. He also disagrees with the role currently played by the judiciary in election matters.
Recently, there are notable politicians including former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and Mallam Nasir el-Rufai hobnobbing with your party, how do you feel about it?
They are welcome. We encourage every Nigerian to join SDP. Some of them had been in the SDP before when their politics were right. Maybe now, they believe that they want to get their politics right again. SDP is open, it’s a political party that has a dream that every Nigerian who is patriotic should join. You must have had our national chairman say the same thing about it and encourage them to properly join us.
Are you not worried that some of these individuals allegedly mismanaged the affairs of their parties and are now looking for a party with less baggage to hibernate?
I was not with them in their former parties. I’ve never joined any political party apart from SDP. So, I don’t know what role they played except what is in the public domain. But SDP, the way I see it, is a party that has internal discipline and some of us are already dying in the woods when it comes to the principles that underpin our party. We believe in the Constitution of Nigeria, we believe in the continuity of Nigeria, and we believe in democracy. We do not believe in any alternative form of government, whether military, dictatorship, and other forms of government.
We believe in the power of the people and rule of law. You can’t come and buy votes and induce delegates with money. You can’t have a dedicated ticket for yourself because you have to go through the primaries in line with the NEC regulations. You have to follow the manifesto of the party. You have to be a nationalist and you cannot be sectional or regional, you cannot have ethnic or religious bias.
No matter the position you hold, you have to maintain and respect the supremacy of the party. So, anyone who is coming, believes that no matter what he was before, he must have turned a new leaf because they have other options including forming their own party. Why would you want to come to a party that has this level of structure that is quite strict?
You could see how we conducted our primaries, nobody went to court. The person who came second in primary became my campaign director while the person who came third was also a director.
You can go ask APC, and President Tinubu if they have received any CV or application for a job from anybody in SDP. We are opposition that is loyal to the country, loyal to the constitution, and we are going to do our job.
Will you say the opposition parties are really doing enough now that the administration is almost two years in office?
Well, maybe we really need to do more because there’s always room for improvement. But in SDP, we are doing all that we can do by law. What we don’t do is to insult people. We don’t make allegations against people. That’s why when we were running the presidential campaign, we never called anybody names. We talked about the policy when we disagreed with you, we urged the public to find out more about you, and we focused on the policy.
When the election was about to be held, we attended the meeting of the peace committee, and signed the peace accord. When the result came out, we were not happy but we still complied with the peace accord because we signed it.
We are law abiding and anything the President is doing that is nationalistic, we will support the country. We don’t speak against Nigeria, we believe Nigeria is the greatest country on earth and I believe that the future of Nigeria is bright. I believe that there’s no other country like Nigeria.
So, we share that sentiment like Ebenezer Obey, who said there’s no place like my country. When we talk about Nigeria, we don’t talk about our grievances, we see the rainforest, we see the forest, we see the savanna, we see the swamp, and we see all the beautiful landscapes of Nigeria – the hills, the valleys, the rivers, and the sea of the lagoon.
We see all of those assets over, upon, or below the ground. We see the colorful people and the various ethnicities in Nigeria. We don’t have any problem with anybody, and the opposition’s work is for us to show Nigerians our alternative.
We contested every election including the last charade called the local government election in Ondo State. We knew that they were not going to be honest. We still came out, canvassed for votes, but they did not announce any of the results, they just proclaimed themselves as the winner.
We cautioned our members who are at the senate and House of Representatives to be disciplined because nobody is too big to be expelled. We are better off with no senator at all than to have an unserious one.
Do you share this sentiment that the opposition handed victory to APC in 2023 by not coming together to challenge the ruling party?
You have to define the opposition. Opposition doesn’t mean someone who is not in APC. Opposition is a body of ideas that is different from what the ruling elements are doing, canvassing it and making sure that they pursue democratic change of government to implement those ideas. So, in 2023, the way we looked at the opposition was that we looked at the manifesto. If you have the same manifesto as APC, we don’t see you as opposition because the real dividing line is between the self-centered elites and the forgotten people of Nigeria.
The fact that someone is ambitious to occupy an office that the incumbent is occupying doesn’t make that person an opposition. The way we look at opposition is that you must have another paradigm that is different. So, if Tinubu said he’s going to remove subsidies and he’s going to liberalise the currency and PDP said yes, they are going to do it harder and another party said they will do it on day one. So, where is the opposition there? What happened in 2023 from my own perspective is that the establishment split themselves into three. If not because of the internal ambitions inside PDP, there’ll be no Obi decamping to the Labour Party (LP). It’ll probably be number two to Alhaji Atiku or something else in that arrangement.
Rabiu Kwankwaso left APC because he said he wasn’t sufficiently respected there. He said that he had weight and they’re not recognising the weight. He defected to the PDP. He also didn’t agree with them and decamped to the NNPP. So, these are not opposition the way we see it.
The kind of opposition we want is opposition that subscribes to a set of beliefs so that when people, through sorrow, tears and blood, manage to push them into power, your policy will be different.
Nigerians are complaining about the government now not because they did not like Tinubu. They are complaining against hunger, high prices of simple commodities, prices of petroleum that are out of reach to most Nigerians. They are complaining against unemployment and the ostentatious lifestyle of their leaders.
They don’t like to see insecurity with billions of naira wasted and they are still insecure. If you are going to be an opposition, you have to be in opposition to those things so that when you come in, you change it. But if you just don’t like Tinubu because of the way he was educated, his family’s history, his attitude, the way he treated you, that’s not opposition. These are grievances and we don’t do politics of grievances.
In 2023, they were just having internal grievances among themselves without having any policy difference. We offer the policy difference, so how will you run on LP that is founded on the Labour movement and say you’re going to privatise institutions that are not going to employ people? You can see the contradiction there. You couldn’t run an SDP without this kind of attitude, we will kick you out because we want to generate employment.
Many have criticised the judiciary that they are taking too much role in the electioneering process, do you share this sentiment?
The Judiciary did not impose any judicial activism or intervention by themselves. The courts enforce the law passed by politicians who are in the National Assembly and the other legislative houses. So, if the National Assembly meets today, they can amend the Constitution, abolish the Supreme Court and abolish judiciary and say native doctors will be taking care of adjudication.
They can ask the Ifa oracle to be adjudicating cases. You can’t blame the judiciary when the power to interfere in elections was put there by politicians. That’s why I’ve been advocating that the judiciary should not be involved. Rarely do you have any developed democracy where the judiciary is involved in political disputes. Even in the case of Bush versus Gore that we were talking about, the U.S. Supreme Court did not say Bush is the winner, Gore is the loser. They only interpreted the law as to whether it allows you to count twice after having counted with a machine. Whatever the implication, go and sort it out. The judiciary here is too involved, the system should not give 3 or 7 people the power to remove some person and put a legacy over and above the electorates.
What we should do is to have a constitutional court, which should not make regular decisions. It should be made of judges who are retired or very senior lawyers of high standing and their job is to interpret the law for INEC and nobody should be asked to go and prove their petition.
It is a joke on jurisprudence and it’s unfair to say that somebody who did not conduct an election should go and fault it. What they should do is to say that no election is final until it has been challenged in the constitutional courts. All the challenger needs to do is to fill one form, indicating that he’s not satisfied with the election with reasons. Then they will call INEC to explain how they arrived at their result.
The thing they are doing now is a parody because you will say I should get a court order to go and inspect the document at INEC. Why can’t you just summon INEC to produce the document by itself and defend what it did by itself? So, this constitutional court will just be like an auditor. You’ll prepare the balance sheet, cash book by yourself, you are the one to explain to the auditor.
But the political elites don’t want to do it because they don’t think that democracy is good for them. They just want to do a civilian version of the military to cover and be there because the same people who are active in politics today have been there since 1999.
