Leader of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, and its presidential candidate in the 2023 presidential election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has berated the administration of President Bola Tinubu for concentrating more on politics at the expense of other critical aspects of the nation such as; economy, employment and security. Adebayo, in this interview, also spoke about the coalition of opposition parties ahead of the 2027 general election among other issues of national importance. Excerpts:
Politics should be about greater public interest, not for personal or group interest, but to uplift the well-being and welfare of the greatest number of people. Is that what we are seeing today in Nigeria against the backdrop of reports that we were better off in 1960 than we are today?
Well, you know democracy is a blank cheque and a unique kind of cheque because the beneficiaries are allowed to write their names or whatever names they write on it, the amount they want, the bank they want and sign it. Now, if the majority, instead of writing their own names, are writing the names of politicians, writing amounts the bank doesn’t have, and don’t remember their own signatures, it is the fault of the writers of the cheques.
Democracy wants you to be who you want to be. So, you will see that some of the governors were civil servants, some of them were hybrid businessmen, some of them were completely jobless, but they’ve used the opportunity of democracy to turn their own lives around. They are now former governors, former ministers, former vice president, former president, former this, former that. And some are still coming back for other things.
It is left for the Nigerian people to use these politics to turn their own lives around, by ensuring that they do not give their votes or support or sentiment in favour of those who are grabbing state power or who are capturing it. To capture the state is not a one-step episode.
It is that you go and grab the subset of the state. You grab political power, some grab money, then they start to grab state institutions one by one. Even right now, you will see that those who ruined the opportunities of the people, those who have not allowed the country to see one day of progress, are now the ones claiming to be the opposition.
Very soon, they will claim to be the media. And before long, they will completely grab the judiciary and law enforcement. So, this is the situation you find in a democracy where there’s an abdication on behalf of those who are responsible.
In a monarchy, the only time we talk about abdication is when the King or Queen abdicates or gives up power. But, in a democracy, you have abdication when the people either show apathy or show poor judgment or completely give up that there’s nothing they can do to correct the situation in the country. So, if anyone is going to wake up the country and make our democracy to work, we have to wake up the conscience and consciousness of the people.
And the issues at stake now are whether we want to be a lawful constitutional democracy in which we follow the rule book, which is the constitution of Nigeria.
Our own government since independence has done more harm to us in terms of offences, in terms of criminality, in terms of inhumanity than the British did. The reason our founding fathers asked the British to leave was because of the imagination they had of what the black man could achieve for himself in his own domain. And those dreams are there, they are alive.
So, with respect to the comments by the President of the African Development Bank, yes, he’s talking in terms of GDP. He’s talking of GDP divided by population. That’s essentially what he’s discussing and you know, as well as I do that that is just a fractional measurement. It is looking at the picture of you from an angle. So, if someone were to stay behind you now and take a picture, it is not what I’m seeing that person would be seeing, because I’m seeing you from your frontal perspective. And if somebody was to take a picture of you from the ceiling, we would see different things. So, the GDP is a measurement that if you take, the number is just a mathematical conclusion.
So, it appears we are losing ground with successive governments. How did we arrive at that?
Yeah, you are losing ground the more because if you take a bottle of any drink, and you keep diluting it with water. First, you take a bottle of any drink and you put a bottle of water, the first mix will give you half of the taste. Now, if you take that diluted one, and you put another bottle of water, and you further dilute it, as you are doing each dilution, you are getting farther and farther away from the original taste.
The appropriate government for us in this model we have chosen Is the government that resembled as much as what the British left; an independent civil service, a parliament where people discuss policies, a more diversified power base or power bases, that one has its own weaknesses, but it has more advantages and more growth at various levels.
So, the highest contribution to our GDP at that time was rural development; the ability of the various regional governments to transform rural communities into economic power businesses. So, the groundnut pyramids that you will see in Kaduna and Kano were not produced in those cities. They are a receipt, a resort, an evidence of productivity in the rural areas.