Adebayo: Nigerians Need Available, Stable and Affordable Power Not Rhetoric

The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, in a recent interview with select journalists, said what Nigerians need right now is available, stable and affordable electricity and not tariff hike or rhetoric as many administrations in the past and the present one have made empty promises that electricity would be readily available to Nigerians…

What is your impression about the planned increase in electricity tariff?

What they are doing essentially is to try to dwell more on creating an electricity market and they are trying to follow the example in Chile and other places where electricity is not seen just from the strategic national development point of view; the way it was reflected in our first national development plan. They are not looking at it from the social service point of view; they are looking at it like creating a market for product. The only problem they have is that the product they are creating about a perfect market does not exist. So, it will be good for the government to forget the idea of creating a perfect market. They should try as much as possible to make supply available and it is an engineering question. There is no amount of change of language that can run away from the fact that people will know when there is electricity. Remember how we used to talk about generating 5,000 megawatts, now they have changed it. So, it is just a mathematical language. At the end of the day, people will know whether electricity is available, stable and affordable, and it requires a lot of investments and some of the investments have lead time.

The problem with politics is that the president has only four years and if you have an engineering project that requires 16 years of continuous investment, there is no need lying to the people that you are going to fix it in four years. You will see that many people have fallen by the wayside. Bola Ige came and said that in six months, there will be electricity. If you listened to Babatunde Fashola, by now we should be swimming in electrical current. I believe that in his house now, he is probably running on a generator. So, what we need to understand is the advice I gave in 2001. I remember in September 2001, I attended the National Council on Power and I advised them to de-politicise power and make it an investment, just like you need to de-politicise health care delivery and things like that, because these things require time and major investment.

I think the government should do more in terms of investing public money in core areas and the way we have relied too much on the national grid; the engineering requirements of the national grid are too technical for the people in the ministry to manage. So, we should do it the other way round. The grid is cheaper if it works but I think that micro grates and captain systems are more manageable and more reliable. And they need to also work on the excessive bureaucracy that they operate. I made a huge investment in electricity in my community in Ondo State and I did it through solar. The second phase I tried to engage the government and I made a heavy investment in electrification, using their grid. One and a half years later, they are still doing inspections. I have done all the engineering and bought all the equipment. And when you buy all this equipment, everything is donated to the government automatically. So, they need to die down on bureaucracy, and work on the affordability. The National Council of State and National Economic Council should deal with it; all of them should come together and make the right investment in the right mix of energy sources and we should dwell very delicately when it comes to wheeling power over thousands of kilometres. We don’t have that executive and managerial capacity for someone who is in Ibadan to be relying on power coming from Kainji, or someone who is in Yola expecting power to come all the way from maybe Afam. So, you need to localize it and some of the monkey businesses they are doing with new hydro-powers like some of the ones that are now in controversy in various courts internationally, if the investments had been made in some of these power stations, by now capacity would have gone up and we won’t be having litigations.

You talked about decentralizing it and that’s what the president did with the signing of the Act but it appears only about 27 states out of 36 have taken it up, meaning the government has something about that; don’t you think so?

They are decentralizing the market but what I am saying generally is for them to make the power available. Even if there are statistics of capturing power, they are not capturing the investments that private people are making. They went to Tanzania looking for $35 billion, but do you know how much money Nigerians spend on their own? So, we can actually plan the market better.

You talked about not politicizing it; do you fear that Nigeria might become a one-party state or is it already becoming a one-party state?

I don’t think so. The problem with politics is that the elite are the same. They feed off one another.

(Cuts in)…Does that include you?

Yes, mostly, the elite are the same; we just have to make a difference. The elite have the same political belief. They disagree as to sharing positions and all of that, but we are trying to bring core ideological differences. It is difficult to pretend to be different when you are not different and that is why it looks like there is no opposition because when you believe in the same thing and rotate position in government, you behave the same way. You will see that President Bola Tinubu is behaving like former President Goodluck Jonathan whom he liked to really oppose and sponsor protests against but he is Jonathan times 10. So, you will see that they behave in the same way. What he was protesting for against Jonathan, he is doing even far more than Jonathan did.

What do you mean?

Removal of subsidy for example and so many other things like the issue of accountability. What I am bringing out is the fact that the Nigerian political elite are not different. There is one single tendency and because there is one single tendency, even when they are in different political parties, it is easy for them to cross over from one party to the other or remain in their own party and sabotage it to work for another party because there is no real difference between them and until we have real difference, we won’t see that distinction.

Nigerians are lamenting the lack of virile opposition parties in the country and here you are talking about sabotage; what do you make of the popular view that there is no virile opposition party in Nigeria?

What I can say is that all parties that are not in government are regarded as opposition but the dynamics of Nigerian politics is not that way. Many of these parties are supposed to be in coalition. In fact, technically speaking, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and All Progressives Congress (APC) are in coalition.

Technically in coalition; can you break it down?

This is simple. A foremost leader of the PDP is a strong minister in the administration of the APC and not only did he go there in his private capacity, he got the clearance of his party, the PDP, to go and be a minister under the APC government. You can’t get that kind of clearance from the SDP’s NWC; they can’t give you that. Secondly, we are not angry or displeased with the PDP but the fact remains that if you look at the PDP’s policies, they resemble that of the APC. So, it is good for them to try to work together. What will happen is that in the near future, ideology will be the acid test to know which party is in opposition because Nigerians don’t like to be duped. Imagine how much opposition that has been mounted against Tinubu since he became president. People will be duped if I come to power and I start doing exactly what he is doing. And that is why I am saying that we should apply the acid test of ideology to say the fact that your party is not in government now doesn’t mean you are actually doing opposition politics. It could be that you are doing coalition politics and you are now having issues among yourselves as to how to share the spoils of office.

APC is still an amalgamation of political parties. Peter Obi said he is not opposed to a coalition. Are you seeing the parties coming together and working together to take power from the APC? Is there a possibility of a coalition of the opposition parties?

Yes, there should be a coalition but that coalition should lead to collision. Any coalition that does not lead to collision is not a coalition, because what you want to do is to coalesce all the opposition parties so that they can oppose or collide with the ruling party. But if you look more like the ruling party, why will I be in coalition with you? So, there must be an ideological convergence. What we in SDP are trying to do with some other partners is that we are trying to have a consensus regarding how governance should be done. We are not interested in ganging up to remove one person. They did that against Jonathan in 2015. They tried it against Buhari in 2019 but it didn’t work. But, to be against an individual is not an ideological framework. You must agree on what to do with power; what you will do with the constitution, rule of law, public expenditure and revenues, what are the priorities in government and all those things. If you don’t agree with them; I have attended some meetings where people discuss how terrible Tinubu is, I have no doubt about that for sure, but is that what I am going to base my politics on? So, what I want to get clear is where do we agree? What’s your view on power generation, on education? Why should I join you to remove Tinubu if that is the only thing you want to do and you are going to continue with his policies, like not funding education and asking kids to go and take loans with no guarantee of jobs after graduation? Why will I join you to oppose one person, who in my own view, is too old for the job and I am going to bring another person who is even older than the person who is too old for the job. 

Donald Trump is 78…

Yes, Trump is 78, congratulations to the Americans.

Joe Biden was even older…

And they made a strong point out of that. They have a system that can take a mannequin. You can elect a mannequin as US president. They have a system, though Trump is working very hard to make sure that that system is challenged, but hitherto, there is a system in America that does not depend too much on what an individual is. We don’t have such a strong system in Nigeria.

It is said that opposition is not just reeling out statements, which is what the opposition parties seem to be doing now. What real opposition is offering better policies. You said you are not against Tinubu but against wrong policies that characterize his government. Now, are you offering alternatives? What should the government be doing now?

We did all that in the last election. We offered policies on everything in the last election. We gave alternatives to subsidy removal, floating of currency, management of the economy, revenue generation, education, healthcare and all of that. So, we have the alternative. The issue we need to understand is that we are not in a parliamentary system of government, where everybody who has a voice is a member of the parliament already. So, we have to do our own discussion on the street.  Secondly, we oppose some of their measures, including where we need to protest, we do that; where we need to offer alternatives, we do that and we go round the country to hear people, interact with them and sell our alternative view point to them. I think that there is no single window that is available for opposition to channel our points that we have not been doing, at least in the SDP. There may be other political parties that just focus on personalities, regionalism or other things like that. We cannot comment on them but we always come out with alternative policies for the consideration of the electorate.

Prof Jubril Ibrahim, democracy advocate, is against the idea of a few individuals owning and funding a political party. He pointed that as one of the dangers of democracy in our system; what do you think about that?

Well, I don’t think that an individual owning a party is a good thing or a real thing. PDP for example was set up in 1998; it wasn’t by one person.

(Cuts in)..Funding; what about when you have rich individuals seemingly taking over the party because they have the funds?

Well, that’s bad. I am not a member of their party but in SDP it is almost impossible. The SDP was set up in 1989 during the military transition and when we were revived by Chief Olu Falae and others and we came back in this current dispensation, no individual owns that political party. The person who is now the chairman is a joiner; I am a joiner; most people there are joiners and we are funded from the grassroots. We also emphasise to the people that money politics is not the best. I think the problem of the other political parties is that when they are in government, they try to use government resources to fund their activities and that is why their governors and former governors become powerful because when politics is based on money those who have money will dominate. But, in a party like the SDP where the party’s politics is based on ideology, those who are deep thinkers; those who can explain the ideology of the party, tend to be the candidates of the party.

Where does all this leave the electorate? Do you subscribe to the fact that the electorate is getting the short end of the stick when it comes to choosing their leaders? Atiku Abubakar said the biggest problem of democracy is the judiciary; how do you explain all these narratives?

Well, I wouldn’t say the judiciary is the biggest problem of democracy. The biggest problem of democracy is the politicians because they are the ones that rig elections. They are the ones that file petitions. The judiciary is just intervening. Of course, it is unfortunate for the judiciary that on many occasions, they have not been able to do their own part but they are not the main cause. The main cause is that the political class is full of desperate people who don’t want to win fair and square, and who do not want to accept even when they lose fair and square, and they use all kinds of methods. So, the judge that is a good judge is the one that gives judgment in their favour. The one that doesn’t give judgment in their favour is a bad judge. But, the issue we need to deal with is the fact that the Nigerian electorate need to understand that they are the makers of people in power and that however boring it may seem, they need to listen more to what politicians are saying and what they want to do and they should resist the temptation of selling their votes; I know it is very difficult because of the economic situation, but if they don’t sell their votes and vote in an enlightened way, they will be able to have a government that will work for them. It is a work in progress. Democracy takes time but you must do the work which is that as a good citizen, you must understand the power of votes; you must listen and we that are in politics must go around. I have done 4,000 kilometres going from Katsina to Jigawa and other places trying to talk to people and I think we might be able to show to the world and the Nigerian people that we still have patriots in this country. And President Tinubu will be highly surprised by the time 2027 comes and he will be grateful that he served, but I think he should be preparing a handover note.