The candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 presidential election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has declared that the politicians who are defecting from the opposition parties to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) are government tools to dampen the spirit of the opposition parties ahead of the 2027 elections.

He noted that many of them did not join the opposition by choice, stressing that those who joined by choice can never defect to the ruling party without tangible progress on ground.

He said: “The so-called defections are sometimes coming out of the closet of people claiming to be in opposition because they have been compulsorily retired into opposition, not by choice. When you choose to be in opposition by choice, you have access to the ruling party but you just don’t agree with them, and the reasons for that are well articulated, which has to do with the interest of the Nigerian people. There is zero risk of you defecting unless those fundamental disagreements or problems have now been eliminated.

“Everybody in Nigeria will know that poverty is no longer there, that insecurity is no longer there and corruption and poor ethics that have dominated our politics have now changed. Anything other than that, you will find out that people who miss the bus of the ruling party tend to wait at the bus stop of opposition until the next bus comes and then they hop along. There is nothing new.

“Many of the defectors are being primed and kept in waiting for the dramatisation of resurgence by the ruling party. They just keep them somewhere so that when the time comes, they will use them to demoralise the opposition.”

Adebayo said since 1991 when he first joined the SDP, he has not seen any reason to join any other party because the SDP is well positioned to solve Nigeria’s problems.