Adewole Adebayo is the Leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and its presidential candidate in the 2023 election. In a recent interview with Arise TV, Adebayo discussed the current state of Nigerian politics, the wave of defections to the ruling party, and the challenges facing the country. With unflinching honesty, Adebayo shares his thoughts on the opposition’s role, good governance, and the path forward for Nigeria.

Let me register my condolences to the people of Benue state. It is sad to say it again, because I have had to say it on too many occasions. This is a very sad one in particular. It is a clarion call to say that this show we call politics has practical consequences and that people who in leadership must be up and doing. I hope that we don’t just mourn and wait and the next one is worse than this. I think this should be a turning point for the country because human lives need not to be wasted that way. The causes are well known, they are preventable and the solution is good governance.

The so called defections are sometimes coming out of the closet for people claiming to be 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 disagreement or problems have now been eliminated. Everybody in Nigeria will know that poverty is no longer there, that insecurity is no longer there, corruption and poor ethics that have dominated our politics are now have changed, anything other than that, you will find out that people will miss the bus of the ruling party tend to wait at the bus stop if opposition until the next bus comes and then they hop along. There is nothing new. Many of them are being prime and kept in waiting for the dramatization of resurgence by the ruling party. They just keep them somewhere so that when the time comes they will use them to demoralize the opposition. That is why we are careful about people who come to us to say they in opposition.

They don’t have any burden because they don’t have to believe in what they are saying. They just say for the moment. I joined SDP when I was 19 years old in 1991 in the days leading to the late Abiola. At that time, it was even the late Yar’Adua, the late Adamu Ciroma who was in NRC, Abiola came, Atiku Abubakar, Kingibe to run with him after he was chairman of the party. I joined because of the late Lateef Jakande in Lagos. I haven’t joined any other political party since that time. I don’t see any reason why I will join any other one because the party is well positioned to solve the problems of Nigeria. When the late Abiola came with his farewell to poverty, that was 1992 leading to 1993.

It is still valid for today, farewell to poverty. If you pick Abiola’s programme and you want to implement them, it is just unfortunate that none of the problems have been fixed, rather, more problems have been added. That was why in 2023 when I came, 30 years later, we did farewell to poverty and insecurity. The guidelines are there. There is no change of government that is going to solve the problems without change of ideas, methodologies and culture.

The idea that someone can get a call from someone from the state house or anywhere and get enraptured with photography with the president and come and say there is a new epiphany, it is their own politics. If the president drops out tomorrow, they will also change their mind and go somewhere.

For those, they have their own role in politics and that’s not the kind of role we want to play.

What is clear is one wants to be clear, you have to give President Tinubu A1 in politics. The only problem he has with the A1 is that he tends to have F9 in governance, so how is he going to graduate into any substantive legacy?

That is a problem because the A1 politics is that he knows the political class very well, he knows what moves and motivated them, he knows how to recruit them, sometimes retrench them,retire them and reengage them because he knows what they want. But I wish he knows what Nigerian people want which s basic services, stability, security. He doesn’t need to have many people defected to your party. If he cannot saves lives in Benue, Plateau and many parts of the country, then you have failed. The problem with that speech is forgetting the fact he was at the national Assembly in front of politicians, he was actually on be half of the politicians supposed to give accountability to Nigerians. Therefore, I am not sure that Nigerians are as enormed with the defections as the president appears to be in that speech. The politicians who are now waxing albums for the president featuring the Senate president as the solo singer and they are singing the choruses, that music is only for their ears because the rumbling in the stomach of Nigerians will not let them hear the music of national Assembly. So that podium belongs to the Nigerian people and it is their issues that ought to be reported there. The idea that we will assume that the political fortune of the president and his political party and his co-travelers will be the whole essence of the four year term is most unfortunate.

What you do with politics is that you compete well and I respect the president has the ability to compete well but if you manage to get the power somehow, controversially, that moment, politics ends. Then, you want o to give service to the Nigerian people. You want to manage the diversity of the country very well. You want to obey the constitution and execute the enforcement of other arms of government obeying the constitution. You want to manage the economy. The only skill you have in the management of the economy is the economisation of truth which basically what they do,rather than manage the economy.

What we want to do differently is focus the entire politics to the welfare of the people. There will be less controversy if we address the issue of our people hungry or not, how many of them have good housing, are we investing in education as we should? re we investing in healthcare as we should? Do we have the basic infrastructure for modern business, modern governance. Are we able to make a complete telephone call without dropping?

These principles that we have in the SDP, they do not only belongs to me, they belongs to the SDP. These are manifestoes written when I was a teenager and they belong to the Nigerian people because they are found in the chapter 2 of the Nigerian constitution, so it’s not something I am inventing, I might have been a good advocate of it and sincerely believe in it but it belongs to the party.

Now the leadership of the party have a dual roles to play. They want those of us in the party to promote this ideology of the party, they also want to have an open door policy to allow to allow people to come to the party. Among those who are coming now, some might have intentions other than ideological and people oriented, they will discover that because the sdp bus well rooted. If you are looking for a get away car, your quick dash to whatever you want to do, you discover that you are detained in sdp as you are thoroughly weighed down by the need to understand how the party works, the organs actually work and that many of them who have come have managed to be impressed and they are staying. Some who came for transactional purposes, trying to hijack a vehicle, they discovered that this this party actually exists in reality. We believe that many people you find in politics are are following the bandwagon as they are doing what they think works.

So this lone voice, if he keeps resonating, people will discover that ths is the right way, more so that the house is already crowded on the government side as they don’t have the window to look at the other people anymore because all the problems of Nigeria are assembled inside their political party. Unless politics start to work for the ordinary person, there is a limit to how many people want to turn to billionaires overnight. So what we are doing on our side is that we do not want to say everybody outside the party now is not automatically not ideological not principles. No we are saying when you come in and how you interact with us will let us know whether you have come for principles or you have come to destabilize the party, we have supreme confidence in the membership of our party that they are ideologically rooted. I have supreme confidence in the leadership of the party that the leadership of the party believe in the party, for that reason, if anyone comes to the party, he will have to blend or have to move on.

The assumption that president Tinubu has is that the people are marginal to politics., that if you capture institutions and politicians, then there is no opposition but the real opposition is coming from the people. There are problems with those who want to turn career politicians to opposition, you are going to have a problem because it s only when they are dropped off from the list of ministers, board appointment, that is the only time they remember that they need to make this noise so that they can be brought back.

No, no. It’s a general culture which has been there for ages and that is why you see many of them say I will never do this, the next page, they are doing it. The reason is that the real opposition is from the Nigerian people.

The many problems the sdp has has to do with our inabilities to this far to tap into the real opposition in the masses of the people. I will let you know that the country needs serious surgery, neurosurgery in particular to be able to solve the problems we have now.

To do that, the first thing a surgeon does is to sanitize himself because if you don’t do it, you will effect the patient. If we don’t sanitize the opposition first to know who is actually in the opposition or who is in opposition by conveniences. So it is not everyone is calling himself opposition today that prays in the morning and say I want to be in opposition. If we do that and then allow the party belong to the Nigerian people as you are not searching for big men with money to come and dominate the party but you are letting the people contribute to the party. That is what we are doing, May be a lot of it outside the view of the press. What we are trying to do is quite fundamental such that when president Tinubu and all these paper castle he is buildings are blown away by the tide of time and he will realize that even in his old age, he need a government that works. When he is out of power , he needs a deepened democracy and rule of law. What we are building required time and that’s why we tend to attract young people who are not desperate that wants to be in power within two weeks, who are ready to do the work, who are ready to grind and build a structure.

It’s a bit of tragic comedy of some sort in the sense that the comedy part is the some people believe they can pray instead of to go and farm. I am a farmer. I pray after I have done all the necessary planting. It is a common thing in Nigeria that there is consultancy that we give to God to do what we have refuse to do for ourselves and because we are a religious society, what we are told is that if you want your horse to be safe, you tie it to a tree, you pray and God will answer your prayer. These are all part of doctrinal confusion that you find in Nigerian government. Everything that they do, even in the way the president selected his prayer warrior to be in charge of agriculture, you will realize that he has given little thoughts and I can say it with all without being prejudice against him. I am convinced scientifically that president Tinubu’s mind was not on good governance when he was setting up his cabinet. He was on politics. It happens that one or two of his cabinet members have been a lucky hit but for the most part, you have a comedy show all through. He has a chance even now to meet his own party. He should not look towards SDP, we are never going to be useful to him when it comes to working with him. He should lean towards his party and many of the newly found friends, find some of them that can completely hold down a task like Wike, you will know that he can actually get the job done, whether he sleeps at all but he can still get the job done still go and make trouble tomorrow. Look at the gentleman in the interior, he appears to be working. You can look around because Nigeria is not short of talent. But you must know that what matters is that you are a public servant and you are using public resources and public time and time is the most precious resource we cannot replace and renew. So you must do what is right, that is why the office is for four years. He is the mid term and he is having midterm crisis and he is not willing, he is not showing, he is allowing hubris and some of this comedic adulation that he gets allows it to get in his way. Using his own metric, if I am not able to give you constant electricity in four years, then don’t vote for me next time, now he s half way there, he is yet to have 10 percent of the job done.