The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 elections, Prince Adewole Adebayo, spoke with journalists on the performance of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the readiness of the opposition for the 2027 general election as well as the controversy trailing the Electoral Act. He maintained that the Tinubu administration has failed the masses, stressing that Nigeria needs a new breed of politicians to take over from Tinubu, not people from the establishment. The Guardian’s ONYEDIKA AGBEDO was there.

INEC has announced dates for the 2027 general election. Do you think the opposition is actually ready for the election?
The opposition being ready is a given. What’s more important is whether the people are ready. Democracy is about the people. If you ask me if I am ready to take over from President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and govern the country better, yes, I am ready, even today. You can drive me to Aso Rock villa now and ask me to take over; you will see a better result today, not tomorrow. I am better in every front. I am better prepared, better intentioned, better programmed, surrounded by better people and with clearer vision, closer to what the constitution wants. It is the people who need to be ready to change their government.

The idea that the duty of opposition is to hold the government to account is misplaced. It is the primary duty of the different branches of government to hold the government to account. The National Assembly has a duty to oversee what the executive is doing and the judiciary has a duty to ensure that both the legislature and executive comply with the law of the land. It is now left for the people to hold their elected officials accountable. My job in the opposition is to form the next government, as I don’t want to choose opposition as a career. I don’t want you to continue to call me opposition after this election. I want to be called president, commander-in-chief. I want to be in government. I don’t want to be a professional opposition.

Inter Party Advisory Council (IPAC) recently announced that it may boycott the election should the Electoral Act not be amended urgently. Is that the right decision?
The right decision is to have a good Electoral Act. You saw me at the National Assembly being tear-gassed by government when they were in the process of passing the law. Mine is to ensure they pass a law that encourages the people to come and vote, deepens democracy and makes credibility of the election a matter of law. That is what the government needs to do. It is not an issue between the government and the opposition. It is a discussion that all Nigerians need to have – the Electoral Act as currently passed and signed by President Tinubu, is it what Nigerians want? I don’t think so. I think it is more about saving the regime and saving their own skin, not losing control of the electoral process to the people.

Do you support IPAC’s threat to boycott the 2027 polls? 
If you are not going to make the rules fair and clear from the beginning, then they have the right to say they are not going to participate under that rule. But I will encourage every political party to still continue to do its underground work and not be caught unawares.

Boycotting an election is a very drastic democratic tactic. Isn’t that effectively surrendering to the ruling party?
No! The assumption is that if almost all the political parties or majority of the political parties are not in government, or don’t participate, then you don’t have legitimacy because you cannot self-coronate. And so it is a drastic reaction to a drastic legislative coup d’etat, which the people in power today made to ensure that the electoral system is put in controversy because the more we discuss this issue of electoral law and things like that, the less time we have to discuss the content of what we are bringing to government. The more people realise why am I participating in this thing, the voters tend to have some apathy towards the electoral process.

My approach to it is to say we keep agitating for the right thing to happen; we keep making sure we communicate to our law-making bodies, the Senate and House of Representatives, that what they have done, that is servicing themselves and President Tinubu, is not their constitutional duty. Their duty is to get feedback from their people and amend the clauses.

Are you saying the law as it stands today does not provide a level playing field?
Of course, there is no level playing field as there are a lot of booby-traps; but we have a duty to still defeat the government. The duty Nigerians have is to make sure that no member of the National Assembly returns because they are the ones that surrendered the sovereignty of Nigeria to the whims of one person; so vote all of them out. And once you vote them out, you can then put patriots there. But the immediate reaction of IPAC is to say if you want to rig the rules, then carry the ball and play on your own. But we are also working to see that at the end of the day, the final solution to bad law is to change the lawmakers.

Will SDP join the boycott if IPAC goes ahead with the threat?
That is for the SDP to make a decision when it meets at its NEC next week Monday. But what I have encouraged our people is that if we could hold elections under colonial government, if we could hold elections under the military (June 12 election was held under an administration that didn’t want to go), I think we would still have to hold the election as bad as the law might be to defeat the government of the day. That is what we need to do.

You seem confident in your ability and capability to defeat President Tinubu and the APC. What gives you that confidence?
My confidence is in the Nigerian people. The Nigerian people are patient. The communication is confused coming from all sides and people are not able to focus on where the problem lies. What politicians don’t realise is that people want to focus on where the problems lie. So, if the opposition is saying the president and the government are not good, people will judge not only the government; they will also judge the opposition. If the people are saying the government is obviously not good but the opposition is not better either, the people will just abstain. So, as we are pointing out that President Tinubu’s government is a disaster, which is obvious by every metric, we also have to organise our front in the opposition and bring a clear, cogent and concrete plan to the people and project people who have credibility. That is the challenge.

It is not difficult beating President Bola Ahmed Tinubu at the poll; we will beat him. Even in the last election where he supposedly won and we had to agree that he won because that is what the law says, you will see that the arithmetic shows that he lost because more people voted for other people than him. What we need to do now is bring more voters out to get them to understand that yes, there are many other problems but your chief problem is to get the APC out of power and your immediate solution is to remove Tinubu and then you can focus on the SDP and listen to what we are doing and check the credibility of all our candidates. If you are convinced that we can do better, you better come out and vote for us en masse.

The problem of democracy is like the market place where you are coming to sell onions while others are coming to sell different wares and products. The noise of the market can sometimes drown what you are trying to sell. What we are trying to do now is to amplify that President Tinubu’s government is a colossal historic disaster. However, you have alternatives; instead of lamenting continuously about Tinubu, God and time have brought you an opportunity to now articulate an alternative. You don’t need to do anything extraordinary; just go out of your house, push for the alternative, on the election day, vote for the alternative.

Luckily for us, President Tinubu has helped us by making an identification parade of all the problems of Nigeria and the people causing them and making sure all of them move to his own side. Now, you don’t have any confusion. Once you see that terrible broom on election day and you don’t vote, you have already killed half of the problem. The other half is to make sure that you don’t fall for those who are part of the ruin of the last 26 years, but who are pretending that they are now in opposition, because if you are opposed to poor and rigged elections and you were in the Senate for 20 years, you didn’t bring a single bill to improve the election, the fact that you are in opposition now, we are not going to listen to you. If you were attorney general for eight years and you were in government when electoral bills were presented and you asked the president not to sign it; if you were Senate President when the Uwais panel was submitted and you spent 20 years in the Senate and eight years as Senate President and you didn’t sign the electoral bill into law, the problems you are complaining about now, you had plenty of opportunity to solve them but you didn’t. We, the Nigerian people, will also pack you with the establishment to make sure that Tinubu and his band of current problems don’t come to power next time and that those who have historical records of being part of them also don’t come in. Then, we can have a clean break from the past if we are truly mature enough to solve our problems.

There are some faces in the ADC who appear to be the new face of opposition and people have said the opposition must be united if they have to defeat Tinubu and APC, but it seems you don’t agree or align with them…
(Cuts in) I don’t agree with that analysis. If your aim is to defeat Tinubu per say as one person and you don’t care about who is coming next, what that means is that you want to remove Darius the Great and bring in Darius the next. Nigerians are tired of bad government.

Are you willing to work with opposition figures because you actually talked about people like Abubakar Malami, Nasir El-Rufai, David Mark etc, who are all in ADC?
How can you say you are against the infestation of insects but you are killing mosquitoes and cockroaches? You cannot be that hypocritical. There is a reason I am opposed irreconcilably with President Tinubu. It is not because of his name; it is because of his deeds and belief system. These people whose names you have mentioned share exactly the same. They have been in government, acted like him or were in some situations. So my being opposed to Tinubu on certain basic principles automatically means that I am opposed to them too based on those principles. It’s nothing personal. If you say you don’t want carnivorous animals because they can eat the flesh, you cannot say you don’t like lions but tigers are welcome. You need to be consistent. The establishment, some of their wings are in government; some of the wings are left outside of the government and effort to enter the government has failed and some of them are now forced to be in opposition. But they are not opposed to the ideas of President Tinubu; they are opposed to the fact that they are not in his government.

We are talking on behalf of the Nigerian people who have been marginalised for decades now. In trying to come to power through people’s effort, we are not going to undercut ourselves by aligning with those immediately they are in government, Tinubu will be laughing at them. What we are trying to do is to make you ignore all of them, focus on the Nigerian people. If the Nigerian people are interested in forming a government in line with the constitution of Nigeria and making sure that decency is returned to government, that public service is clean, transparent and corruption free and the people who are going to be in charge of our affairs will be servants of the people, then they Will go to people like us; they will boycott all of them.

So you are not willing to work with the ADC?
As presently constituted, if I work with them, then I am a hypocrite. It means that what is driving me is personal hatred for Tinubu.

Our political parties are not a garden of saints. Are you looking for an association of saints?
No. I am looking for decent people who, first, are honest.

Is there such a political party in Nigeria?
Yes, the SDP. Come to the SDP; you will see it because we take that pledge to Nigeria, my country; to be faithful, loyal and honest.

So, SDP is a party of saints?
No, it is a party of citizens who know that truth matters and if you had misbehaved in the past, that is not a complete bad but you just admit that you have misbehaved in the past and this is what you stole from the government and you are returning it and you are saying today there shall be no more corruption. We are not saying you must be a saint; you must be decent and honest. In the SDP, the party has taken a decision that we want to start on a clean slate.

You are invariably saying you are ready for 2027 polls?
Yes, I have told my party that and I am working with my party on that. I am making sure I am going round the country to prepare the people. My presidency is in the hands of God and when Nigerians are ready. There is no other magic. If the people are ready, we will come. If they are not ready, we will continue until they are ready.

You clinched the party’s presidential ticket in 2023; what’s the assurance that luck will smile on you this time around?
That is why you don’t see me lying down waiting for luck to fall on my lap. I know that other people are working hard as well while I continue to do my duty to my country and my party.
I started this duty to the party when I was 19 years old; when I joined it 1991. There is no level in the party that I have been given an assignment or service that I have not done.

Realistically, the fear is that the party may not have the national political machinery required to compete with the APC entrenched structure in 2027…
(Cuts in) Let the political scientists have that fear. What I can let you know is the amount of hard work that we have to do to make the party a party of the people. Remember this party, even under the harsh conditions of the military era, won the June 12 election that brought democracy to Nigeria and brought the first political martyr in MKO Abiola and brought June 12, which we all now observe as Democracy Day. It is not about competing with the APC; what we need to do is to sell the party to the people. Once the people embrace the party once again, all these speculations will go by the wayside. Our mind is focused on the people. When the people are ready, we will defeat any force.