2027:  I Have No Confidence In INEC Conducting A Credible Election – Adebayo

Prince Adewole Adebayo is a former Presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party, SDP. In this interview with MBACHU GODWIN, he speaks of stifling opposition by the President Bola Tinubu-led government, INEC credibility and the party’s strategy of building a people-powered coalition, dismissing elite alliances as fundamentally flawed.

Why is the SDP not in the Coalition? Can SDP singlehandedly unseat this government?

Alliances and coalitions are with the strategic partners in an election. And strategic partners are not necessarily politicians. Strategic partners are the segments of the society. If you have the political class, within us we have certain disagreement,  because the ultimate aim of politics is to enter government and govern and if you are talking in terms of accountability, corruption, you will not have credibility if you are aligning yourself with people who don’t believe in that either by words of mouth or  by their actions or their questionable character. So, you will be inconsistent. Also if you look at the people who make elections happen, the majority of them have not been participating.  I ran for presidency last time and we had 93 million voters and we couldn’t get 80% to show up. If you want to have a coalition or alliance, you have to find out where the 80% that didn’t show up are, what are the issues that bothered them and why didn’t they show up? Those are the areas the SDP is working with, the strategic partners in an election. The other political parties we are having talks with from time to time, sometimes the talks are not that productive because you find out that somebody who made a serious mistake in government for the past 20 years hasn’t learnt anything new. They are looking for an opportunity to make another mistake for another 20 years and we are not going to enable that. Some in the coalition want to play roles which they are not suited for which are purely based on ambition. The real alliance is to make sure that the Nigerians who are going to bear the brunt of bad governance and beneficiaries of good governance are participating and what the SDP is doing is bringing more people into the fold.

Not much is heard about your party, SDP, what went wrong?

What we do is to try and increase our membership. If you go round the country, you will see physical signs of it. The under reporting of what we are doing is a mixed blessing.  Sometimes we get frustrated. We were in Kano where thousands of people joined the SDP. You didn’t report it, on the other hand, we think does it matter, on the election day you will see the difference. The person we are trying to remove has a security apparatus,  he knows what we are doing. If you are a Nigerian out there and you are expecting a coalition to come and save you, you are making a big mistake. What you need to do is talk to your neighbour who says let’s pray over this problem, yes you can pray but don’t stop there,  you need to listen to debate, join a political party that you think is speaking the truth to you and make sure you participate in the election,  don’t join anyone who says hope is lost. You need to come out. We have religious and civic organisations and professional organisations who think they can  profit from rendering services to a bad election system instead of coming to improve on it,  so that we can overall have a good country. We are also making sure the commitment to supporting us is not just verbal assurance but we have actually taken a step to come and join the party, participate in the membership. In the last few months data shows that in many remote parts of the country, there is no week now that we don’t have close to a hundred thousand people joining.  It used to be a hundred thousand per month and we are following up so that it’s not just numbers that we are going to post to INEC but quality participation. We are not closing our ears to those in the political class who wants to learn the lesson of the past and coming  to coalition but the real coalition discussion or corporation will start after the primaries because ,different political parties have different level of sanity in their party, if the people you are going to talk with like one of the talks we had recently, we found out that there was about seven antagonistic self possessed aspirants and we had to tell their representatives, don’t bring your virus to this discussion, go back to your party,  narrow down your own number of aspirants first, before you can come to talk to us, that is the kind of mechanism we need if it’s not going to be free for all.
We are still friends. Our own kind of coalition is when you begin to see civic coalition, other groupings in Nigeria who ordinarily would but show interest in it are showing interest, that is our idea of coalition.

Major defections happened in your party recently, are Nigerians not losing confidence in the SDP?

No, not really. What I see is that if there is a system where 5,000 left the SDP, chances are that we probably won’t notice at all because if you are bringing in 50,000, 100,000 every week and 5,000 decides to leave especially if it’s because he has  beholding to one particular aspirant who is not favoured by zoning and he knows that in the SDP , he might not get the ticket, he decides to go to another party, he takes 5000 people with him and he has a budget to advertise that, we cannot complain.

Are you not worried that the SDP has no member in the senate?

Not really, because one person died and we lost one now though he hasn’t officially resigned because we have to be careful according to the law, he hasn’t told us that he has left but we are hearing rumours that he is the favoured candidate of the ruling party. We cannot do anything about that. He is trying to be governor of a state. We already have quality people who will be governor. So, it’s natural that he knows that we will not take him to be the governorship candidate because of the way the formulas have worked out and he decides to go and seek his governorship elsewhere, I think we have to respect that. But the party is not about individual ambition like that because everyone of such that advertises departure, there are thousands coming in. What matters to us is that we would be congratulating ourselves half way if the Nigerian people understands why the SDP is in the race. That we are about the substance of chapter 2 of the constitution  and that we are trying to let you know that governance is not a contest of personality, it’s about a contest of principles. If they understand that we build that coalition across the country, others will join us even those who are all over the place now,  that is the coalition,  many will join us once they discover that Nigerian people are getting that message and that message is important,  if we don’t get it now, we get the transition wrong. I must say this clearly. The objective of the SDP is deeper than the objectives of some of the people you find in the so-called coalition.  

Do you have confidence in INEC conducting a credible election?

I don’t think they are aiming towards that because you have to be sure first if that is what they are aiming towards before you say whether they can do it. The person who is not willing to work, will not be productive. It is a question of what the rest of us have to do. Remember that the INEC chairman did not appoint himself. He was appointed by the president who I am not sure is a free fair and credible election is top on his priority. Not only that the president didn’t act alone, there was a council of state where all the former leaders and experienced people in the country, they all approved it without any question. And it went to the national assembly, representing all Nigerians,  and they approved the appointment without question. It looks to me therefore that there was not much uproar  even among some of the people who are now campaigning against  the INEC chairman,  if you go back months back you would have read the news where they were praising the appointment. Transitionally as they got along they discovered he was not getting on well and they realised they needed to criticise. We have blown the opportunity  to choose a free and fair INEC. If we wanted to do that we would have done the Uwais panel and the chairman of ADC for example,  he was the senate president as at the time justice Uwais submitted that report during president Yar’Adua,when David mark reviewed the report, he threw it away, and he spent 8 years exacting that law. A lot of opportunities for free, fair and credible elections had been lost.

There is a plot by the APC to shrink the opposition and present Tinubu as the sole candidate for the 2027 election. What’s your take?

When you look at several internal challenges, illegal battles, many of these parties are facing, where do you stand regarding this narrative? What you need to know is that we don’t need to make it sound that we are making something that is very creative.  President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is not a democrat. He hasn’t even said he is a democrat.  He doesn’t behave like a democrat. He didn’t come into office like the way a democrat will. He has even stopped pretending to be a democrat.

Cut in ….He is a former NADECO member that fought the Abacha dictatorship.

There are a lot of formers’. The issue is that what you do now is what matters. You could see that he is not a stakeholder in finding democracy for Nigeria. He is limited to the idea that i am there now, I know how i fought my way there, I wasn’t brought there by democracy. I was brought here by sheer effectiveness of my own ruthlessness. Now that I am there you have to be more ruthless than me to get me out of here. So he is not pretending.  We had interactions with him in the state house with all the political parties when he passed the electoral act, he told them, listen, I suffered, go and suffer your own.

President Tinubu  has always said that you can’t blame him for the  internal crises of your party?

I am saying what he spoke with his own mouth. You are talking about what his spokesperson is saying on his behalf. He said when I was in opposition I suffered it, the game is sweet when you are winning. So go and deal with it.

Is the Opposition ready to defeat President Tinubu?
What is opposition?

Opposition is what you do, not just merely what you say. Some of the people in opposition  are mercenaries and saboteurs.  Some of them are also causing problems for themselves.  But the key issue is that if we are to oppose President Tinubu,  there are three things we need to do. One, our action in the running of our political party is not lawlessness. Second, that we oppose in principle and mobilise Nigerians that these are the principles that are the implications of our opposition to this president to save the country and to ensure good governance because Nigerians are not going to be invested in your personal ambition to become something. Thirdly, we must create a contrast.
You shouldn’t look like Tinubu, if you want Nigerians to help you in defeating that government.  You have to bring a sharp contrast that will be like day and night, black and white. Nigerians must see that there is a clear alternative.