2027: ADC coalition leaders could not answer 99 percent of our questions – SDP’s Adebayo

Ahead of the 2027 race for the nation’s top seat, the presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, in the 2023 elections, Adewole Adebayo has warned Nigerians against politicians that change parties without changing their political tendencies, insisting that only new politicians with fresh ideas would bring about the change they have been yearning for.

In this interview with journalists, he spoke on a wide range of issues, including what Nigerians must do to get it right in 2027. He also ex-rays why the opposition coalition could not adopt the SDP as their political platform. Ihechukwu Sunday was there for DAILY POST. Excerpts!

Recently, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, asked political parties to desist from any sort of campaigns until 150 days to the elections, in line with the electoral law. But, a member of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, Farouk Aliyu, has tackled INEC for failing to wield the big stick against defaulting parties. What’s your stance on what the political parties are doing and INEC’s role so far?

Two things are involved here: one, the guilty party is President Tinubu and the APC. Everywhere you go, it’s only APC and Tinubu.

The INEC said most of the parties. When you are the leader, when you are the party in government, you set the tone. When you are the leader of the country, when it comes to obeying the law, you set the tone.

There’s nowhere you go, you don’t see the picture of President Tinubu and some members of his family are already dancing and waltzing ahead of 2027. So, if you are not to be caught panting as an opposition, you would give an answer. If the government was governing, our policies would not be in opposition against their governing methods.

But since they are campaigning, the opposition has to be in a campaign format. Then, there are so many displaced politicians who were left. Politicians were used by President Tinubu and dumped on the highway and are now walking all over the place looking for political accommodation. So, in the process of changing parties, looking for a party to join, dissolving, ending up using some party, joining their crisis, politics becomes something that is now current.

The key issue is that if we want to go back to regular order, the president and the APC have to go back to regular order. Once they go back to regular order and remove all those obnoxious billboards all over the place, we will listen to them. They’ll be briefing us about how the budget is performing and how education is performing.

You talked about the opposition- what’s your take on the implications of the internal squabbles within the opposition parties? And what do you make of the opposition coalition, ADC, and the caliber of politicians there?

Let me start with the ADC. I have stopped thinking about them because we have had an engagement with them. They came to us before they went to ADC; they were to use the SDP. We had a robust conversation with them. They had no answer to 99 percent of our questions. And we said, thank you very much; carry whatever you’re carrying to the next bus stop. Here, you have not answered our questions correctly. We’re not dealing with you. It doesn’t mean that we don’t share the same objective with you that President Tinubu is not supposed to be there. And it would be a mistake for the country, even for him personally, and for any other person, to keep him beyond 2027. We agree with that. But, you haven’t answered our questions. So, go on and do your own business as well. So, having left us in peace and carried their activity to their own place, courtesy demands that I should leave them alone.

Maybe, in the course of lecturing in the future, we may see some of them that are willing to answer the question of what is wrong with Nigerian politics. What is wrong with Nigerian politics is the ideology for getting to power. What is wrong with Nigerian politics is not the APC, as an alphabet or acronym; what is wrong is the philosophy of politics, ranging from the way you fund it to the way you arrange it, what you do when you get in there and the lack of ethics, which is the idea that no minimum ethics is required to be in politics.

Secondly, every party is not the same. We are not the same as them. SDP and ADC, we are poles apart. We are not the same as them. And I’m not saying this because there’s a person I don’t like there. We have tried to engage them intellectually and ideologically and they gave up. They couldn’t answer the questions. So leave them alone.

There are rumours that the SDP is currently factionalised, what actually is the state of your party?

Well, there are no factions in the SDP, but there are tendencies and for a political party like us, we had one common tendency. Ideological convergence was already set up for us. We’re a different party. We’re lucky, because when the party originally came into existence in 1989, we already had a path to go even before members came into the party.

Remember the National Republican Convention, NRC, and the SDP, whose ideologies were either to the left or to the right. The politicians who wanted to go to the left side of the ideological divide decided to go to the SDP. And that’s how we came up with Yar’ Adua, the senior Yar’ Adua, and so many other people like that. Eventually, we ended up with Chief MKO Abiola and the Farewell to Poverty and Insecurity.

So, when the party came back after the military interregnum, and we came back, we followed that ideology. But, you know, as you look for electoral success, new people join and some of these people who joined are human beings and they are coming with their own tendencies. That is playing politics, the way they know it, so you expect to see some negotiations and some conflicts going on.

Secondly, you will see that the SDP is a party of law and order. It is a very carefully crafted party for law and order. Every organ of the party works.

In many political parties, these organs are decorative. So, if you say there’s a National Working Committee, NWC, it could be three governors sitting down on top of a money bag and telling you what to do. In the SDP, no matter who you are, if the NWC is calling you, you better go there quickly and listen to them.

If the State Working Committee is calling you, you better be careful. If the ward is calling you, you better be careful. You could see that the National Chairman of the SDP, duly elected and substantive is Shehu Musa Gabam. Nobody’s questioning that. The National Secretary is Olu Agunloye. But Gabam, due to the activity of the National Working Committee, over which he presides, suspended him.

And he has comported himself, even though he argues vehemently that there’s no basis to suspend him. He’s not guilty of anything, and he’s been following the party’s constitution, but he has kept to that.

So, for the past two months, he hasn’t come to the office. He’s obeying the order of the NWC. Occasionally, when the party needs him to do anything, like answer some questions or to perform any activity, he still obeys. So, it’s a party of law and order. But there are people whom I have some sympathy for, who are new to the party and assume that if the national woman leader, national youth leader, or any other official of the party doesn’t look like they’re billionaires, then you think that, maybe, if you promise to buy them a car or give them some money, they’re going to overlook their authority. They won’t do that.

So, that cultural shock is what you see. So many people, when they face discipline in the party, or they have a request and the request is not met, they will resort to what they have been used to in their previous places. But a political party that wants to grow has to have a room to know that people are learning.

So, we just watch them do all the drama they need to do, but the SDP is not about drama at all. There’s no faction, the organs are there, and everything’s intact, and if anybody’s in doubt, you can go to INEC and verify. So the party is in order.

Recently, former Governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai called for voters in Kaduna to vote for the SDP candidates, despite claims by the SDP that he has been expelled from the party. How do you address the question of expelling or banning someone who is reportedly not a member of your party?

That question is for the National Working Committee of the party. Left to me, I don’t want to ban anyone. Left to me, anyone who is banned, and is repentant and behaves well, should be accommodated. But the organ of the party has the right to make a decision regarding membership; the Supreme Court of Nigeria has decided that.

What I can say, generally speaking, is that as a member of the political party that obeys its own rules, if the party says this is how we go about it, I will follow the party. However, the party has sufficient organs within it for anybody, including someone who was banned or suspended, to approach that organ of the party, to make his/her case.

So, for me who is a member of the party and who wants the party to grow, anyone who says vote for the SDP is my friend, whether he was in my party or not in my party, whether he was suspended or not suspended. I go around telling people to vote for SDP, not because of me, but because the country needs alternative politics.

So where is El Rufai now? Is he a member of your party or is he in ADC?

We know about him being in the coalition.

But is he a member of your party?

Well, what I can say, and that is secondhand information, is that from party records, from what party officials are saying, he’s not a member of the party. But if he wants to be a member of the party, I’m not against him being a member of the party.

I just have to follow what the party says clearly. But the party officials will explain how the processes work. What I can say is that this is how you know a member of a party. You will see their name in the ward register, where they come from. And at the national level, the national secretary will have overall numbers of members and their particulars. But one way or the other, it’s left for the member and the party to try to work it out. And we who are inside the party have been advising one way or the other to see how that can happen.

El Rufai called the ruling APC a failed, clannish and visionless administration that has plunged Nigeria into deeper socio-economic misery. Of course, as a leader of one of the parties trying to unseat the ruling APC, do you agree with his description of APC? What do you think of that?

He’s not saying anything new. He’s saying in 2025 what I was saying in 2022/2023 after many waters have crossed his own bridge. So he’s echoing me now. I can’t charge him for copyright, but I can say welcome to the club. But we’ve been saying this for some time and we’re not saying it out of animosity or anything.

The results that we are getting from the performance of the APC in the last 10 years resemble the unsatisfactory result we got under the PDP for 16 years. And if this result must change, we must change the political tendencies that are in authority. Changing your political party without changing your tendency is just a mere nomenclature.

Break it down, what do you mean by changing political tendencies?

There is a governing principle, which is feudalistic, that is responsible for why our democracy is not in congruence with the result. Now, that mentality where you don’t respect that the power comes from the people, you don’t respect the rule of law, you don’t want to show accountability and you don’t want to separate money from politics; that tendency where the bigger your money, the bigger the results you get in politics and then when you go into politics, the bigger money you need to roll over your political investment; if you have that kind of mentality, you can jump from the APC to the SDP to the ADC to the ADA or even to the YYY. If you carry that mentality, wherever you go, it will pollute that place.

So, if you are in the APC, you don’t even need to leave APC but you decide to change your mind. For example, President Tinubu doesn’t have to leave the APC to change his mind. He’s in government; if he decides to take something out of a playbook of the SDP, and govern properly for the Nigerian people, follow the chapter four of the Constitution, and chapter two of the Constitution combined, and decides to be accountable and to be a constitutional democrat, he doesn’t have to leave his party.

Results will change but because you have squabbles in your party, you now leave and join another party. If you don’t want to drop the tendency that caused the tension where you’re coming from, you will now pollute the new place with that same tendency because you just changed alphabets.

In fact, now they are running out of alphabets to use. But what you need to do, what is going to change the life of Nigerians is a different politics.

Senator Aba Moro recently suggested that the elite, including politicians, are the root cause of Nigeria’s problems. How can the mindset of politicians be shifted to prioritize the interest of the electorates who elected them into power?

First, you need new politicians because recycling the old politicians, not just a matter of age or other things, is like a leopard. If you don’t like spots, then you don’t need to bring leopards because leopards cannot change their spots.

So you need to listen to new ideas and new politicians. When new politicians come with new ideas, we should not be too conservative as a society because a conservative society is trying to consolidate on its own progress, whether obtained lawfully, historically or wrongly.

But when you see a conservative society, they have something they’ve achieved, something they’ve grabbed from the world which they want to preserve. But a country reeking with over 70 percent poverty rate, a country that has no infrastructure and has no institution working cannot be conservative. You have nothing to lose. You need new ideas and new leadership to renew yourself. And the ideologies we have, articulated or not articulated, are the ideologies that politics is for the people who are in politics and governors is for those who are in government. That’s why everybody is trying to be in government.

No matter the condition set for them to be in government, they want to be in government. And when they’re not in government, their position is to struggle willingly to be in government, not to change what is going on in the government. So it’s left for the Nigerian people.

How many politicians do we have in this country? The politicians in this country are not up to two percent of the population. So it’s not about what the two percent are doing or not doing. It is what the 98 percent want to do.

Let character determine our choices. The answer is on the fingerprints of the voters. Let no one say that the good ones are not coming out or the beautiful ones are not yet born. Now is the time for a new direction. We must bid farewell to poverty and insecurity.

The WTO DG, Okonjo-Iweala has commended President Bola Tinubu for stabilizing the economy, but emphasized the need for safety nets to create more jobs and put more money in the people’s pocket to be able to address the hardship in the country. What do you make of her statement?

The statement is correct in the paradigm of neoliberal economics. So, it’s like saying a doctor who mistreated 1,000 patients and they are dropping dead by the dozens, has now managed to reduce the number of those who are dropping dead to like one per week.

So, you can say you have stabilized the situation. It doesn’t mean that the situation is correct. It’s saying that the trauma that the APC and the PDP policies threw the Nigerian people into, or even the tailspin that the economy was going into, has now been stabilized. It’s like a pilot who ran into terrible weather, flew above the level given to him, faced the wrong direction, and now is flailing in the storm and now managed to balance the aircraft; he still has to find his bearing. He still has to find his altitude. He still has to travel towards the original destination.

So what Tinubu has managed to do, is that instead of burning so much money to defend the Naira, instead of struggling with inflation number that doesn’t make their own budgeting to make any sense to themselves, he’s managed to cleverly cover how much money the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, is using to defend the Naira, to make it look like we can’t see it.

And because politicians are talking about faction, nobody’s paying attention that the CBN is burning our money, which would have been useful for employment, infrastructure and all of that. It is burning that money to defend the Naira and keep it at a level. Secondly, what are they doing? They went and rebased the statistics so that inflation, which would ordinarily be getting to 38 percent, is somehow rigged into about 21/ 22 percent. So, these numbers now enable them to communicate to themselves regarding whether their policies make sense or not.

But, the Nigerian people are not involved in all of these things. We use the feedback that we get from our stomach, the feedback with energy costs, the feedback from rent, the feedback from cost of education and the feedback between the spending capacities of double-digit, triple-digit wages. So, if you are earning a million Naira and you can only buy two tickets for you and your wife to go and see your aging mom in the village and come back and your salary is gone, you know that whatever WTO is saying doesn’t make sense.

Last thing I want to say is that WTO is not where you get your figure for your economics. WTO is where you get your figures for trade relations and if you look at the tariff being bandied all over the world, everybody’s giving tariff against the other. WTO is not a place where you go now for wise people.