Prince Adewole Ebenezer Adebayo is the presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, in the 2023 general elections. Adebayo says, in this interview, that the spate of killings going on, especially the killing of policemen in Benue State, show that there is really no government on ground. Adebayo also takes a swipe at the opposition members who have formed a coalition against President Bola Tinubu. “I cannot in good conscience oppose Tinubu and embrace the coalition” as there is really no difference between them, he declares.

Some people have castigated the president’s absence at the UN where Vice President Shettima represented him. The UN event is one of the most important events in the world where heads of state meet to discuss relations. What’s your take?

The president is in charge of foreign affairs. He is the chief diplomat of Nigeria. The president is in charge of his own priorities. So he is not missing in action as he is back home here in Nigeria, attending to state affairs, I suppose. So, he, as the commander-in-chief, knows his priorities. I don’t think that the delegation led by the vice president is too junior. The General Assembly is just a place where you go and recreate your commitment to the general principles of the United Nations Organisation and then have some bilateral and multilateral meetings. If the Minister of Foreign Affairs is there, and there is the Permanent Representative to the United Nations, I don’t think the president can be the only diplomat. All other people working with him are also diplomats. And where there serious meeting to be done, he could do it virtually. If there are meetings that require his personal attendance, he will be there. I will rather have my president at home than have him in the UN. What we need is to have the president at home, running good policies here and that is what we should be concerned about. You will recall that the president cut short his leave to return home and since he came back, he has been attending to one of two state matters. This is not one of the things that I will find questionable.

Talking about attending to state matters, are you aware that some policemen were killed and bodies recovered in Benue State which has witnessed and still witnessing insecurity presently.

That is the original sin of the Tinubu administration and it is the original sin of the APC as a party because they came to power being critical of the PDP and President Jonathan of handling the Boko Haram issue and they brought in their wake, a general, Buhari of blessed memory, and they said they were going to tackle security which they have not been able to do. It is a failure of government and the people are going to access whether President Tinubu deserves to continue or whether they look for alternative in SDP. I think security should be number one. Economy is number two. Those two primary basic indisputable failures of the government have nullified everything they are doing as they can’t keep safe and keep people engaged economically. I think there is no other excuse they can give. This is Nigeria. We know our geography. We know our community. It is just that the government is not on ground. This government is not on ground in terms of security. The manner of the killings and from what I know, read and seen, it is only a case of a government not on the ground that this can happen.

 There has been disaffection, reconciliation, alignment and realignment within your party, given the fact that the party chair was suspended some months back. What is the latest on the party?

The party is running well and it has no reconciliation to do. It has certain management process going on including disciplinary processes. If a political party cannot discipline its members, hold its officials to account, such party should not be trusted with power or access to power at all. The party is going through a disciplinary process. The persons the party is disciplining are the ones that would subject themselves to the process. As far as I know, those who are undergoing disciplinary processes in the party have been following the party rules and they have subjected themselves to the rules. While there have been suspension, they have been trying to pursue remedy within the party framework. So, there is nothing to reconcile. It’s just for the party to comply with its constitution and to follow due process, to be transparent in all investigations and all other management issues.

 SDP appears stand alone in the coalition of political parties which is gearing up to upstage the incumbent ruling party, APC. Can SDP upstage the ruling party without the support and collaboration of other parties in 2027?

What Nigerians want is good governance. They are not interested in removing one party and bringing in another. They just want you to know and understand the purpose of government, give them credible people to run for office, come with clear cut agenda, programmes and manifestos that they can believe in and that is why we are going with ‘farewell to poverty’ and insecurity.

But we are trying to tell them that it is not so. That is our focus. Once you buy into our ‘farewell to poverty’ and insecurity, social investment programmes, economic recovery programmes, and the leadership recruitment programme, then we can now say we have an alliance, we have a coalition. But it is not to call a meeting of people who are disappointed with Tinubu who have no other thing in common with us and say we should join them because they happen to be aggrieved. It is the grievances of the Nigerian people that we recognise, that is, hunger, unemployment, insecurity, inflation, general rejection of the population, abysmally low investment in education, housing, healthcare, infrastructure, lack of accountability, the way government manages the affairs and the general lack of direction that the government is supposed to be giving the country and the general decay in the leadership of the National Assembly and the governors who are just moving around town like spoilt kids asking for pocket money. Once we address those issues, anybody who joins us is a formidable force.

No, we are not carrying big names, former this, former that who don’t subscribe to these values. It will be a shame for us to come in now to form another government and behave exactly like one there now or worse. The natural gift of shamelessness which President Tinubu appears to be naturally gifted, I don’t have it. President Tinubu and many of his co-travellers are walking around as if there is nothing called shame anymore; when they came in 2014/15, what they said they would do, what they criticised about the PDP, they are presently doing and even worse. So, we want to make sure that any government that we are part of is actually going to be different. It is better to spend 20 years in the opposition and one day in with government that works than perpetually be in government for 26 years and there is no change in the life of the people. So, we are not trying to do it alone. We are doing it with the Nigerian people who are actually the real opposition and coalition, unlike the so called big men who are holding meetings in hotels trying to replace incompetence with incompetence, replace corruption with corruption, and replace failure with failure. We don’t want to do that. We want a clean break and that break is change the culture of politics and nurture a new generation that takes public service as a selfless idea of the Constitution. We don’t have anything in common with them. There is no way in good conscience I can oppose Tinubu and embrace any of them.

You cannot say you don’t like carnivorous animals, you oppose the lion and embrace the tiger, and you are caressing the hyena. If you look at nature, a carnivorous animal and another carnivorous animal cannot be friends. Any political party where you find the giraffe befriending a lion, know that such political party does not have ideas. These people want to eat the flesh of the Nigerian people, want to exhaust all the resources, good will and endowment God has given the country to use for their own enjoyment and aggrandizement. They want to hijack every institution of state meant to serve the people, they want to corrupt it, influence it and use for themselves and they want to perpetually be in government and anytime they are not in government, they are ready to bring down the house, set religion against religion, ethnicity against ethnicity, destroy the socio fabric of the country until they get into government and do exactly what they are criticising. We are in politics to change all that. I saw APC, I didn’t join. I saw PDP, I didn’t join.

So I cannot be in SDP and behaving as if I was in APC or PDP. It is not our business to make the alliance of past failure to work. We don’t owe them any obligation. Our obligation is to remind the Nigerian people that democracy gives you freedom to start afresh. You cannot be a marriage counselor and ask a woman to divorce a violent man and marry another violence man, or divorce an abusive husband and marry another abusive husband, that is torture. We cannot allow the same people to change their uniform, change the logo of their party and jump from party to party and the same people come back in one form and another. If you look at the APC, you will know that it is PDP in disguise. So, why should I join them? That is not why I join politics. I have paid too much a price in politics to end up as just one of those deceivers. It’s better to be home, planting trees in my community.