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The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party, Adewole Adebayo, shares his thoughts with CHUKWUDI AKASIKE on why he avoided joining the two major political parties in the country and other issues
W hat informed your joining the Social Democratic Party even when you have the option of realising your aspiration on the platform of either the Peoples Democratic Party or the All Progressives Congress?
I came into politics to correct the errors, ills and betrayal of the Nigerian people by those two political parties you mentioned. There is no way I can ever join them even if I am bound in my hands and feet and dragged to the place; it is impossible.
You are implying that the PDP and the APC have failed Nigerians. In what way have these political parties failed Nigerians?
In every way imaginable; they ruined the politics of Nigeria, they destroyed the rule of law; they’ve torn the moral fabric of the country. They have actually ruined the economy; they’ve fostered disunity in the country. They ruined institutions that society relies upon to be a bridge between the past and the modern world. So, there is no facet that you can point to; education, they made it worse than it was, and they are attacking the foundation of education with what they are doing with the Academic Staff Union of Universities. It is not a mere industrial dispute. They are trying to say that Nigeria is an anti-intellectual society.
But the APC and the PDP believe that they have done well for the people. How do we reconcile that with your position on the two political parties?
The issue is this; they started by doing what was wrong; but now, they don’t know what is right anymore.
Why do you say so?
I say so because everything is dead in them; conscience is dead, moral is dead, shame is dead, self-awareness is dead, hearing is dead, seeing is dead. So, when they see underdevelopment, they are not able to understand or recognise it. There is nothing around the APC or the PDP that can indicate to them that the country is dying within their grips. Even a blind person can know something dangerous by touching it; a deaf person can see a trailer truck speeding towards him and dodge it, but these two political parties are dead in every sense. They can’t see; they can’t touch; they can’t hear; they can’t feel.
Your political party, the SDP, became popular in the early 1990s when Chief MKO Abiola of blessed memory came with the slogan, ‘Hope 93’. But the situation has changed now. Do you think the SDP is strong enough to help you realise your aspiration?
The Nigerian people have a history of trusting the SDP. It is now time for the SDP to trust the Nigerian people. Nigerians had voted for the Social Democratic Party and took a leap of faith; they elected Moshood Abiola even though he never held any elective office before. Not only that, they elected the majority of members of the SDP into the National Assembly, state Houses of Assembly and as state governors. When the election was annulled, they stood by the SDP and many of them lost their lives, including Abiola. Many lost their liberty and the SDP was able to galvanise all the institutions in Nigeria, including elements within the military and the international community to get the military out of power. So, it is the SDP presidential election of June 12, 1993 that led to the end of military rule and brought this civilian government we have now.
What we are doing now is to come back and take it a notch higher by retiring these bad politicians, who are worse than the military in civilian dress. That is why when you listen to us, our language is different; it is a bit hotter. It is because of the tradition established by the SDP. If you want to suffer fools gladly, then you cannot get rid of the status quo. Any person who cannot pay the price that Abiola paid cannot change anything now, because the civilians there now are more vicious than the military people.
How will you describe the person of MKO Abiola, the winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election?
Abiola was a person without comparison. Abiola was a nationalist’s nationalist. He was a pan-Africanist, a man who Nelson Mandela acknowledged as one of the great contributors to the liberation of South Africa. He was a champion of the Black people all over the world. He was a friend to Fidel Castro. He was the President of presidents. So, God wanted to use him as a diamond in Nigeria. That generation, since Prof Wole Soyinka said they are a wasted generation, that is why we are trying now to rebuild so that we too will not inherit that curse of a wasted generation, because that generation, when they were getting wasted, they didn’t know. They thought they were having fun. So, this generation now cannot pretend that it does not know that there are problems in the land.
Nigerians are in serious need of a great leader who will change the narrative of underdevelopment, poverty and corruption. If you were not in the race, who among the presidential candidates do you think would be able to achieve these?
There are some who just came to rob, steal and destroy. So, anybody from the APC or the PDP, rule them out. Now, there are those who are coming to deceive and you can easily know them if they have recently been in the PDP. If you’ve run a national election on the platform of the PDP before and see nothing wrong with the PDP, you should know that you are part of them. I know that Omoyele Sowore has a lot to offer this country. He may have his own excesses; I don’t agree with him on many things. Hotheadedness is good for a follower, but a leader can’t be hot-headed. But his heart is 100 per cent with the people and his blood boils in the face of injustice. He is revolutionary, but he is playing revolutionary politics in a liberal civilian environment.
I also believe that Kola Abiola is okay because he is just coming to try and fulfil a legacy. Now, he knows that where we used to have lizards, we now have crocodiles there. Where we used to have cockroaches, we now have vicious snakes. But his heart is in the right place. Prof Peter Umeadi of the All Progressives Grand Alliance, his heart is in the right place. Dumebi Kachikwu of the African Democratic Congress wants change and he is already facing trial in his own party just for wanting that change of direction. He is unsettling with the status quo in trying to do what is right. At this point now, you judge every person based on what they want to do.
Why didn’t you mention the presidential candidate of the Labour Party?
It is because he is a PDP man. I like him, but I don’t like his politics.
Why do you dislike his politics?
It is because he doesn’t want change; he wants to take the message of populism, but I hope and pray that he should want change, but he does not. Look at the content of his programme. Don’t look at people and judge them by what they say, just look at the content of their programmes. Let’s look at facts; if you have served the country for eight years as the governor of a state, go to that state, look at every other state, don’t they look alike? So, if you are looking for underdevelopment, don’t you see it there in the state he governed? Secondly, look at the company you are keeping. You said four years ago that Atiku Abubakar, an itinerant office seeker and lover of privileges, was the person we needed to vote for, you didn’t see Fela Durotoye to partner; you said Atiku was the best man; you praised him to high heavens.
You will discover that the only disagreement he (Peter Obi) has with Atiku now, according to what I have gathered from him, is the question of zoning only. He (Obi) is still saying Atiku is his leader. So, how can I be against the leader and I will not be against the follower of that leader? It is nothing personal. The only difference is that one is Atiku of the North and the other is Atiku of the South.
How will you manage Nigeria’s debt, which is currently over N41.6tn if you become the President?
I am not intimidated by that. The size of our country does not justify these figures. If we manage our economy properly, the GDP of Kogi State should be able to handle that debt alone given the abundance of mineral resources there. If you gather all the money they have stolen since I started running for President, not the one before it, you will pay the debt in one hour. As I’m talking to you now, the price of oil is $130 per barrel, but who is collecting the money? They are government officials, who allow foreign companies to come to Nigerian waters and steal our crude and take it away. So, another thing is that the looting must stop to be able to pay the debt.
Have you looked at gas? We are on the eighth train of the NLNG and gas is the master now because of Russia putting pressure on the Europeans. We can even insist that we buy our gas and our crude in naira. The currency will rise immediately. There will be high demand for naira. I don’t want to go into revenues that they are collecting and they don’t want to talk. Again, some of the debt figures are of dubious claims. The major issue, however, is making sure that on the fiscal side, you collect the revenue that is supposed to come to the Federation Account, and on the expenditure side, you do appropriate pricing of projects and you eliminate wastage.
Aspiring for the presidency is not a mean feat. How do you intend to fund your campaign across the 36 states of the country?
Surviving in Nigeria even if you are not running for presidency is not a mean feat. I respect the enormity of the task. If I survive 50 years in Nigeria, I can survive now. When they say in the Bible that Jacob wrestled with an angel, to live in Nigeria is wrestling with the devil. All I need to do in the 36 states is to raise people like me who are following the train with a nationalistic approach and with the capability to change the mind of the people and motivate them. Look at what politicians spend money on. They spend money on the people; they want to buy the people. They pay men, who speak for them and speak on their behalf. They pay some people in the media to help them cover their errors; they pay some people to help them attack their enemies. They pay crowd pullers to hire crowds for them.
They pay party officials to say they have won when they have not won. So, if you have people who are working as volunteers, they can do a lot. I believe that since I spend less than one per cent of what they spend, even the person who came last in the APC or the PDP (presidential primaries) spent more than me so that he would become a candidate. Anybody who bought a form in those parties automatically spent more than I did to become a candidate. I don’t believe that I am the only person who loves Nigeria. I believe there are people like you, who also love the country. All I need to do is to convince them that I am not doing this for myself and I am not a mini-Atiku or mini-Tinubu or a proto-Obi. I am just an ordinary Nigerian, who is moved by the precipice that the country is at, and trying to get other ordinary Nigerians to work with me.
You will see a lot of my posters out there; some of them are upside-down, the billboards and stickers, but at the end of the day, the message will reach the people. Then they will know that a vote for the SDP will mean a fixed deposit in prosperity or you look at the other side and you choose if you want to go back to slavery. The Senate President of Nigeria, who has been in the Senate since 1999 and who has been the Senate President for about four years, said yesterday, and I quote, ‘Nigeria’s problem is lack of leadership’.
You boasted that you would employ 30 million Nigerians and tackle poverty within 18 months. How do you intend to achieve this in a country where industries and other investments are in short supply?
In economics, you start from the basics. You don’t start from industries of the highest level. You start from agriculture, road construction; you start from fixing potholes, installing solar panels to make electricity available. If you collect all the stolen money, you can rehabilitate all the roads in Nigeria. If you open the universities, do you know how many food sellers selling food around the campuses will be engaged? If you are building hostels all over, will you not employ people? They are assuming that when I say I will employ 30 million people, I will be giving them notes to government offices.
They have forgotten that I have used this same approach to employ people for the past 28 years. I started employing people when I was 22 years old, and people have been in my employ since that time till today. If you start an oil palm plantation in the South, if you start ginger farming, very soon, you will see ‘Wanted: Ginger farmers’. If it is an oil palm plantation, you will have planters and others who will be working. If you are training 10,000 youths as tractor operators and they are all making ridges in all the farms, when you travel, don’t you see empty parcels of land? You will pay the workers in naira. How hard is that?
You make these things look simple by the way you explain them. Are you saying the government has also failed in agriculture?
The government is not governing. It is like your security guard, who is asleep while you are coming back. He has failed in vigilance, he has failed in reporting, and he has failed in everything. You can have a government without experiencing governance.
Kidnapping and other forms of insecurity have been a challenge in the country, and the current regime has not been able to stop it over the past seven years. How can you put an end to terrorism and banditry?
It is a very simple matter. Let law enforcement be law enforcement. Let the defence people be defence people. Everybody is roped around in politics now. Even the security agencies, 50 per cent of their time is occupied by politicians. If the President is coming from a journey, they are more likely to deploy security operatives to go and occupy the highway. If there is an election in a state, the police are more likely to deploy all their men there. They will be telling you proudly, ‘We are deploying 11,000 policemen’.
You can see that there are many ungoverned spaces in the country. If you decide to disappear from your family now as a form of a joke, you can actually be missing in Nigeria without dying for six months. Even though you are a prominent journalist, you can decide to say, ‘I want to disappear’. There are people who escaped from Kuje Prison, who are having dinner in expensive and popular hotels. So, how do you want to fight insecurity where a government is oblivious to its duties? When you tell the truth, it is made to look like an abuse, like an insult.
If you stand next to your friend, who refused to brush his teeth, and you say his mouth smells, he will say, ‘Why are you insulting me?’ That is why I am reluctant to comment on them because I don’t want my campaign to be ‘Operation Yabis’. The situation in the country makes Nigerians start doubting if we can solve problems. When I was designing my 30 million jobs, I was very apprehensive that Nigerians would say it is a mission impossible. This government has killed our self-belief.
The Academic Staff Union of Universities has been on strike for several months over the disagreement between it and the Federal Government. Though the matter is in court, how do you think the feud can be resolved amicably?
There is no feud. It is a case of a bully and a victim. The Federal Government is the bully, while ASUU and Nigerian students are the victims. All of that is a stain on the conscience and the eyeballs of Nigerians. What the Buhari government is doing and the government before it that had a problem with ASUU; they are giving Nigeria’s future a black eye; they are molesting and beating up our prosperity. The ASUU strike is the symbol of Buhari’s government’s callousness. What he (President Buhari) is singing is Michael Jackson’s song, ‘They don’t really care about us’. But because he is a soldier, he doesn’t sing. So, he is using the ASUU strike to do that song.
You know that he went on air on Arise TV and later the NTA to say that as far as he was concerned, the government had no job for any youth; they should go and learn something. He said it by himself, and that he had spoken to the governors, and all of them said they had no job to give to anybody. But President Buhari himself has been in government jobs since he was born. He was taken to nursery/primary school paid for by the government. He went to boarding primary school and boarding secondary school. Even before he could get his school certificate, he was enrolled in the Army, and he was living in government quarters till he retired as Head of State. He is still living in government quarters as I speak to you now. He enjoys many things, including his medical bills being paid by the Nigerian government. But he is telling you that the same government cannot service you.
What is your view about same-faith ticket?
Before they (the APC) made that mistake of the same-faith ticket, I had already written them off. So, it is only someone who was trying to follow them before and got disappointed by it that will cry more. It is just like telling me that a notorious kidnapper slapped somebody. He had committed a bigger offence before getting to that stage of slapping someone. I am not going to join you in the commentary because I will look at it like okay, what do you expect? Is that the only thing wrong with that ticket? Look at them from leg to toe; is that the only thing wrong with that ticket? So, they were getting it right before the issue of that same-faith ticket came up; is that what they are saying?
Ordinarily, the APC should stay out of this election for good, and the PDP should retreat. So, people shouldn’t bother themselves by this point. Have you not heard the APC people saying they want to rescue Nigerians? From who? You are the ruling political party and you are campaigning on the basis that you are going to rescue us and change our direction. Again, anything you say about the APC affects the PDP, because they have joint membership. The followers of the PDP presidential candidate are spread in three political parties; the APC, the PDP and the LP. They are the two tyres of a bicycle. The APC and PDP are the two tyres of a bicycle and the Labour Party is the extra tyre. If the bicycle falls down, the two tyres will fall together with the extra tyre.
The number of out-of-school children has been on the increase and nothing tangible has been done about it. Do you think the situation can change?
It can change today. You alone can walk up to an orphanage and look around and pick up a child that is not in school and pick him or her up. I picked up one recently when I went to an Anglican Church programme. The government can do it; Lagos State can do it; any state and any government can do it; and in a few weeks, you won’t see any of the children on the street again. So, what is complicated there?
If it is that simply, why has the government not been able to at least reduce the number of out-of-school children in the country?
They can’t do it; these people (government officials) are money doublers. They come to the government to come and double and triple their money. They invest in politics the way people play the lottery. They put some money here, they put some money there. That is why if you go to anybody who plays lottery, they don’t follow one company; they play blue lotto, they play yellow lotto, they play green lotto, because they don’t know which one will bring money. So, these people look like they are in government, but they are not in government. It is just a licence to walk into the Central Bank of Nigeria, pick something and walk away. It is a licence to walk into the NNPC. Some people have realised that armed robbery is too difficult. You can do an experiment and gather armed robbers. Give them 100 days to loot the central bank and they won’t go far. Even if you don’t catch them, they won’t go far. They will just go inside, carry the money on their head, come out, go inside again, carry the money on their head and come out until they get tired. But the people in government can empty the CBN in one day.
The SDP governorship candidate in the June 2022 election in Ekiti State, Segun Oni, is challenging the election of Abiodun Oyebanji of the APC. Do you think this is necessary or is it an effort in futility?
It is necessary for justice and it is necessary for correcting the system. I believe that if we had fought very hard in 1999, and they had not made Olu Falae withdraw his petition, the 2003 election would not have been that bad. If we had done well with the 2003 election, the election of 2007, which the winner said was terrible, would have been better. After all, it was better than the 1983 election, which was marred by violence. So, when somebody goes to court, the truth will be told and justice should be done. If we cannot correct and stop our politicians from doing what they are doing, we should not accept it.
If every Nigerian can see a minister that has stolen and shout, ‘Thief, thief’, then we are doing a great service to Nigeria. If you see a governor who is a thief and say, ‘Thief, thief’, you are not doing badly. If you see President Buhari going anywhere and say, ‘Good morning sir, why are you incompetent?’ you are not doing badly. You know society keeps quiet. There is a Yoruba saying that if you are quiet, your problem will be quiet with you.
Nigerians believe an unsuccessful entrepreneur cannot reposition the country. How successful are you as an entrepreneur?
How do we measure success in an enterprise? You measure success by the fact that the person is able to run an organisation. At the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria, did you see my name there? Did you hear that I took a government contract and I didn’t execute it? Did you hear that I took a contract at an inflated price? So, success to me is adding value; if I see something that I want to set my mind on, and I set up a project and I meet the target. You can go round Nigeria and see what I have used my hands to develop. You can go round the world – Austria, the US, India, Europe and Asia – and see projects I have been involved in. As a lawyer, have you ever heard that a client wrote a petition against me anywhere that I mismanaged their case? Have I been reprimanded by a judge before? In all my years of practice, have my Bar association colleagues ever sanctioned me? When I appeared at the Nigerian Bar Association annual conference, did you hear when I told them that they were my character witnesses? Have you gone round the communities where I have been and they tell you that I have fallen short of any expectation? I believe that success is not about being the richest man in Africa or the whole world if all you do is to evade obligations and front for people and break the rules.
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