Adebayo: Tinubu is Pretending He Doesn’t Know Nigerians Are Having A Hard Time
The leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and presidential candidate in the 2023 general election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, in this interview, says the Bola Tinubu government has a responsibility to deliver on its mandate, but has failed woefully to do so
Is the opposition losing the plot? Because the chaos apparently from the outside looking in is quite uninspiring according to most Nigerians. Do you agree with that?
Well, I don’t know where you got your statistics from. I think what is not inspiring is the governance record of the All Progressives Congress (APC). It left people with no choice than to find a way to hang on to any hope they can. And I think to the extent that Nigerians have hope, it is personally not hope in the government, but hope in God Almighty. That’s the only thing we haven’t lost. But we are trying to tell Nigerians that you should also have hope in the future and the authority that we are bringing. I don’t think that it’s much about the opposition. It is primarily that the government has a responsibility to make the democracy to be worthy. That the people who are shareholders in this democracy will feel that they are getting some dividends back. Now, even if the opposition were weak, which is not the case, the government cannot profit from the weakness of the oppositions to abandon the people. The government has a responsibility to deliver on its mandate. And this government has failed woefully to do so.
Now, for the opposition, we should not be accused of not matching the government billboard for billboard, poster for poster, campaign for campaign, because we are supposed to give them time to settle and show their true colours. We are not supposed to be a 24-hour, 12-month, round-the-clock election country. We are supposed to go to the farm, practise our profession, teach students, do something meaningful. So, after the last presidential election, I went back to my profession as a lawyer and spent some of my time consulting. It’s not supposed to be a full-time thing for everybody. But the government now is laying a foundation which I hope we don’t copy. A foundation where there’s zero governors. You start the next election while you finish the last one. And that’s what they are trying to recommend. And the public, the media, should not reward them. What they are doing is what they call false start in athletics. Before the whistle is blown, you’re very tired of running. So, everyone is trying to catch up with them.
But Prince, a lot of people will say that’s the pot calling the kettle black. It might be true. However, if you look into the mirror, you realize that that’s exactly what the opposition is doing. You started this whole conversation, at least not you personally, but members of the opposition, started this whole conversation about coalition. Is that true?
I started all this conversation about defeating the president when he was barely two years in office. I mean, you surely wouldn’t expect a ruling government to just sit and watch as the opposition galvanizes the country for a possible defeat in the next election. That is not how democracy is designed to work. Democracy is designed to work by those who are in government governing and those who are outside criticizing them and showing alternatives. Our job is to make the noise, to show to the people that we are here, and you can see how they are working, we can do better. It’s also to remind them that some of the things they are doing is not working and to profile alternatives. So, it’s our duty. Our duty in the opposition is to talk. It’s our duty in the opposition to talk, to organize, to plot, their own is to govern. If they can govern well, and still have time, because they have a political party and they have a government.
So, the political party can be responding to us while they are governing. But from what I see, and it’s not my business to cry for APC, the government itself has grounded the APC itself, and everybody is just sitting down, watching from the sideline. The government itself now is doing the role of their own party. They are not governing, they are not accountable to their own party; they are not accountable to the electorate; so, they are just in one permanent campaign mode. That is why it looks like we are doing catch-up. So, people will say, opposition, let them settle down. At the same time, people will also say, there is no credible opposition, they are not matching the government toe-to-toe. People have to make a choice. Which one do you want? What you want is a balance. Well, yes, we respect them, we let them run their show. When they are governing, when they are performing diplomacy or anything on behalf of the country, we give them an opportunity. But when it comes to domestic affairs, and they are mismanaging the budgets, they are writing to catastrophic budgets, they are unable to account for how items are inserted in the budget, they have misunderstood public procurement, they have misunderstood appropriation. And it is painful because the president himself was chairman of the Senate Committee on Appropriation before. So, it shows to you that what they are doing is deliberate mismanagement of public funds, privatization of what is public wealth, and misdirection of governmental priorities. This is what is happening, and it is happening both in the executive and in the legislature. We have a duty not to keep quiet.
Words like ‘lacklustre’, ‘uncoordinated’, ‘in disarray’ have been used to describe what we’re seeing in the opposition camp, whether it’s the PDP, the Labour Party, or the talks around a coalition ahead of 2027, which some have said is going to coalesce into the SDP or we now understand that the ADC is on the table, or even a new political party may be formed before 2027. What’s your take on that?
Nigerians are not worried about that. Nigerians are worried about food on their table. They’re worried about transportation. They’re worried about security. If you are in Hong Kong and you are seeing Boko Haram proudly around your area, are you thinking about the name of a political party?
They’re also worried, Prince, that if an alternative is not readily available, the Bola Tinubu administration could continue. Do you agree with that?
You see, there are sedentary analysts who don’t go around and who wait to feed off the Twitter. Twitter posts of politicians and TikTok and all of that. They don’t dig deep. Those are the ones who are doing surface analysis and they can be confused. The people on the streets are organizing on their yearning for us to put a name to the misery they’re going through. This is farming season. I’m a farmer. I’ve been busy with farming, monitoring all the places where I have farm plantations and all of that. All the input is terrible. I tried to buy a tractor a few days ago. I tried to buy three tractors. I was able to buy one tractor with the money that I’ve budgeted for three tractors. It’s raining in many places now. People don’t have money for seedlings. And I talked to a farmer, my neighbor who’s a farmer. He doesn’t even have money for medication for his cattle. What I’m letting you understand is that there’s deep conversation that shows that this government is failing. There’s no debate about that. Now, the mechanism of opposition, we need to understand. We signed up for a multi-party democracy. Opposition should come together. Opposition should coalesce. That’s just a tactical aspect. I don’t have a duty to coalesce with another party if their ideology doesn’t agree with mine. I am supposed to mobilize for my party. Grow my party. You grow your own. If at the point where we get to the election, which is like over one and a half years away, then we can have tactical organization we’re not supposed to become the same so if the only thing I have in common with you is that you want to unseat the government, that’s not enough for me to be in the same party with you. If we see that we have more in common that’s important strategically, we can have tactical alliance and all of that. If however, we are the philosophizing our politics generally, and now we are merging ideologies together, well we can start building. But to say in disarray, politics and democracy supposed to be open, it is supposed to be full of debates, disagreements. But the way we are here, our political culture or the narrative around our political culture is that if I disagree with somebody 1% of the way, then the media will say ‘oh rumpus in the opposition’. We are supposed to disagree. I can be doing alliance with you or cooperation with you and we argue over funding of education, I can disagree with you on that and I say I differ from you based on that, it doesn’t mean that I won’t work with you broadly but we need to emphasize areas where we differ, because in the length and breadth of where we get the power these things we don’t discuss will have implication. That is why even if you look at the APC, they are incongruous within themselves because the conversations they were supposed to have, they did not have this conversation. They were having conversation about how to grab, snatch and run away with something. They were not thinking, okay when you grab, you run, you snatch and run to where? And when you get your destiny what do you do? They were not trying to debate, they were just saying just buy the votes, who cares. Are they are all together.
To be honest, you’re talking about a party that has won a general election three times in a row that is not suggestive of a party that doesn’t have any strategy.
The electioneering strategy, which they have summarized by themselves as grabs, snatch and run away. That’s how they describe it. Their leader who is the leader of our country now by the Commander-in-Chief, president who is the head of APC says don’t disturb yourself, just grab, snatch and run away.
I don’t remember when he said it.
Well, I’m not in your research department, but you can always call somebody before we finish the show. Tell your producer to look for it. He will get it for you. Power is not ‘a la carte’. That’s how he puts it. You have to grab, snatch and run away. So that now you have grabbed, snatched, he is in serious trouble because governance cannot be snatched away, governance is about planning; it is about recruiting people you are going to use. When you are the president of Nigeria, you are the commander-in-chief, you are managing the human resources. First, because if you manage the human resources well, even material resources you don’t have, the human resources can get it for you. So, they are not managing human resources, the best people are not put in government and the people who are not led in the best of ways. This is what we should emphasize, opposition will have different challenges with respect to how our politics is done. And we are having a conversation with Nigerian people that your expectation of the political party must be an expectation of what they will do when they get to power, not an expectation what they will give you on their way to power. And if that conversation is understood, the way we even select our candidates will be different. We want to say go and check his account; does he have a lot of money? Does it look like he can fund our elections? You start to look at, can he perform when he’d put there? Can he mobilise people? Can they unite the country? And some of the differences we see, which is about ambition will be pushed down because people understand that if you have a winning team. President Tinubu’s problem is that he doesn’t want to be a winner in governance, he wants to be a winner in the election, and once he wins the election he says over let me plan for the next election and as a result of that his governance team can’t govern. Why? Because they are essentially a campaign team.
The APC held a national summit which is supposed to be a precursor for the 29th May anniversary of the Tinubu administration marking two years in office. Tinubu said if it’s a one-party state Nigerians want, there is nothing wrong in that. What do you make of his thoughts?
It’s unfortunate, because this president is approaching its midterm. He’s spending the money of all Nigerians, making decisions for all Nigerians. He’s supposed to be accountable to all Nigerians, but he’s talking like a chairman of a party, not like the commander-in-chief and head of state of Nigeria. He’s forgotten who he’s working for. He thinks he’s working for the fat cats in that hall who say they’ve never had it so good? He doesn’t understand that the Nigerian who is in Bama, the Nigerian who is in Chibok, the Nigerian who is anywhere in Kastina or Kogi or anywhere where there’s no peace now, wants to know from him. What plan he has for them, the women who carry their babies on their back and take them to the hospital, they cannot pay medical bill, they cannot feed them. People whose degrees, their certificates are under their pillow and they have no job, they want an answer. They don’t want you to be taunting opposition and joking and all of that. They want you to say this is how I’ve served you; these are the mistakes I have made; this is how I want to correct them. This is what I have for you in the future. He’s forgotten all of that. It shows to you that he’s not conscious of the requirements of that office. And I keep telling Nigerians be careful about people who just have a vision to be big men to occupy a big position and control large resources, without looking at the other side of the balance sheet, the responsibility that comes with it. That is the problem that it is in my own view with much respect to the president, that is an irresponsible way to give a midterm report.
I mean, he’s speaking to an APC congregation. Isn’t that a typical campaign vibe? You exaggerate; you use a lot of hyperbole. I mean, it’s more or less like a campaign theater there.
No, it is a mid-term. A mid-term, even when we used to be in school, they used to give a mid-term report. Mid-term is about how well you have done. I expect them to sit down there and have sober reflection and compare notes and understand the difficulty. Many of the representatives there are senators who are being asked to come and stand behind the Senate president so they can hardly go home without a heavy escort to their constituencies. They are getting richer from what I’m hearing. They are launching vehicles with public money and putting their names on them and all of that. They are inserting a lot of items unlawfully in my view into the budget. They are assuming that the money put in the budget, billions, is their own personal money. They don’t understand the law of appropriation. So, they’re there. In my mind, they should be reconsidered. This is because the president is our president. He’s just not as an APC president. So even me, I feel pain seeing the leader of the country making a joke like a stand-up comedian on a serious matter of accountability, of saying that you said if you don’t give us stable electricity, you are done. You are halfway there. The electricity is worse than before and we are paying higher for it. We can hardly do reasonable telephone calls. I’m sure it’s happening to you. Calls are dropping. Bandwidth is narrowing. No service is going on well. You are not able to fix the roads on time. Rainy season is coming now. You cannot give input to farmers. You cannot satisfy workers. You cannot employ more people. So, what are you doing? You are just having a joke.
I mean, it clearly looks like a victory lap for the APC and a lot of people including the chairman of the party who said the party is gaining grounds. But do you also think that the APC and the leadership of the party and the people in charge of the government are living in an alternate reality compared to what some Nigerians would consider a below-par performance?
No, I think that, first, they’re not even performing anymore. They have gone a whole. But what I see here, when you study it, it’s not that they are in living in a cocoon. They’re acting a script. They’ve confused themselves to the point where they want to please the emperor. They’re competing about who is going to be a jester for the man. And the man is a highly intelligent person. How he falls into this trap, I don’t understand. If you are an analyst of power all over the world, you know a system is crashing when you see them like this. When your advisor and supporters sit you on a throne like an emperor, and they are saying you are the tallest emperor in the world; you are the brightest; nobody can challenge you; you are next to God. When they start doing that to you, they are no longer working for you. They have lost hope in you that you cannot take criticism; they must praise you; they are insecure; they are all struggling. You can see they don’t believe in any of the things they are saying. If they were delusional, we can say let’s wake them up, but they are acting a play and that play is very costly play.
Sound bites of president on grab it, snatch it and run away with it. How does this play into what many Nigerians express in terms of concerns about what the election could look like because the 2027 election would be the first major election that will be conducted under the Tinubu administration? Are you worried about what kind of an election Nigerians are going to experience?
No. I am worried about how people are going to live safely, securely, and in some little comfort and prospect of survival and hope between now and that election time. I plead with the president, even though I’m in opposition, I plead with him. Have mercy on the people. Stop being funny in a situation of tragedy. Stop this…
Do you think he’s making light of serious issues?
Yes, because he’s now kind of. He feels entitled to unearned victory. He’s deliberately pretending that he doesn’t know that people are having a hard time. In a way, they are even looking like, okay, people are so poor, people are so broke, people are not doing well, they can’t even organize very well, so let’s just rule them, steamroll over them. But lives are at stake. Forget about me, being your opponent, I want to challenge you and remove you in the next election. Forget about all this opposition. Remember that God has given you an opportunity to be a servant and take care of his people. Show mercy, show kindness. Show reflection. Think about the mortality of human beings. Think about the lives that God has put under your custody. Forget about their party logo. Forget about everything. Remember that there’s a day of judgment and all of us will be accountable and that leadership is a burden. Be serious. Leave politics. Face the work. In fact, I can agree with the president that if he’s worried about us, we can suspend campaign for six months and let him govern properly.
