The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 elections, Prince Adewole Adebayo, spoke with select journalists on the sidelines of the second edition of the Prince Adewole Adebayo 2025 Christmas Marathon and Queen Lilian Adebayo Health Walk held in Ondo City recently, during which he critiqued the performance of both the federal and state governments last year and shared his thought on topical issues in the polity. The Guardian’s ADEWALE MOMOH was there.

What is your assessment of the year 2025 politically and its economic impact?
For the Nigerian people it’s a wasted year. For the people in government, it’s a year of loot. They can plan to loot you more next year. And for the media, it’s a year of destruction. Where you make a list of all the important problems of Nigerians and you decide to report on things that are not quite related. For the political class, it was a year of removing credibility from politics, a year of denouncing yourself. It’s just two silly things. Fighting, with no serious subject matters brought up. And for Nigeria, it’s a year of international embarrassment.
 
How would a foreign country be throwing bombs in your country? Even to insult Nigeria before or criticise Nigeria was a serious matter. Nigeria, historically, has not been a country that could look away from being insulted by anyone. You can remember the postcard fiasco where the U.S. government sent the so-called Peace Corps and one of the Peace Corps members criticised Nigeria in the postcard that they sent home. The entire programme was almost proscribed.
 
So fast forward to the kind of messages we get from not only Mr. Trump but also the U.S. and from other people, and then the notion that we are home here and that Trump was throwing bombs straight to the country.
 
So, when you look at all of that, it’s a year that we got what we always desired, given the amount of opportunity we decided to miss as a country and the general unseriousness. You have the government of Tinubu doing something that is not a little unserious; it sounds silly and, of course, unconstitutional.

But the economy seems to be picking up. Don’t you think so?
How can you run three fiscal budgets at the same time concurrently and violate three appropriation acts at the same time? That fellow should have been impeached a long time ago. How can you run three budgets? It doesn’t make sense. It’s like a tenant who rents three apartments and fails to pay the rent for any of them. Why won’t you streamline your budget into one? Now, they came to present the 2026 budget, and they started with the constitutional impossibility of saying that they are repealing the 2025 Appropriation Act.
 
How do you repeal an appropriation act that you partially implemented? The money spent, is it to be regarded as stolen money or lost money or lost opportunity? None of the contracts awarded subheads. Are you going to revoke all those monies? Clearly, we don’t have a government. We only have people in power who know what to do with it. We don’t have the presence of mind to be able to engage them and tackle them. 2025 was a year where we did the third year without having any ambassadors in any country. And Tinubu was appointing every unemployed politician as what is called a new hope ambassador. So, there is no ambassador for the country.
 
If you want to analyse the year, it’s the year when we introduced or expanded the most dangerous youth enslavement programme ever conceived – Student Loan – in a country where tuition is supposed to be affordable. No one is expected, under our constitution, to take a loan to go to school.
 
Germans don’t do it. Nobody does it in other countries. Nobody does it in Western Europe. It’s one of the aberrations that arose from America.
 
But in America, if you take a student loan, the professors will not be on strike. In the case of Nigeria, if you take a student loan, you are paying interest to the government or owing government interest. But the school is shut down.
 
So, the loan is going up, the education is coming in, and things like that. So what is it? It’s the year of zero compression of anything. None of the rules, none of the things that they say they are doing are completed. Basically, that’s at the Federal Government level.
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t the state government level, it’s the year of having governors who are totally unserious; where almost every governor is trying to compete for the most unserious lots. And about six or seven of them changed their parties to join the APC. And many more are begging and spending money to join. It’s the year where most political parties don’t show any soul, where there’s no attempt to play the politics which interprets the problems of the people and wants to deal with them. And it’s the year in which the most military thing we can remember is a general being killed by a so-called terrorist, which is almost literally impossible.

In a few months time, the process for the 2027 election will commence, and we know you are interested in that. Are you not worried that Nigeria is gradually turning into a one-party state?
I’m not worried at all, because logic suggests to you that if you have a one-tendency elite, it’s a matter of time before they will stop pretending to be different and morph into one politic party. If you look at most of the political parties that have been in existence since 1998, when we started this current transition, which is now 26 years of uninterrupted similar governments, the elites are the same.
 
Most of the political parties are the same. They are mostly neoliberal. The elites are uniformly corrupt, uniformly thoughtless. So, you can find someone who has been in government for eight years, and then when they are asked to summarise their political philosophy, they don’t know it. But you can find out their political philosophy when they leave office and the EFCC charges them to court on the fraud they committed.
 
So, these elites don’t understand the sense of a republic. They don’t take the job seriously. They don’t have a sense of leadership. They don’t need anyone. And they are not accountable to anyone. And their economic philosophy is contrary to what is in the Constitution even though they swear by the Constitution every time they assume office that they will abide by the Constitution, particularly Section 12 of the Constitution – Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy.
 
And they also swear a lot of loyalty to the country, allegiance to the country. As you know, from Tinubu to Shettima to the last of them, they are not loyal to the country. They are not making decisions in the interest of the country. And they don’t rely on services and institutions that are under their care for their own maintenance. So, the Minister of Health will not use your hospital for himself or for his children. The Minister of Education will not educate his children in schools that he runs. And so on and so forth.
 
So, this way, you summarise all of them, behaving similarly across over time and crisscrossing from one party to the other seamlessly without having to renounce anything.
 
So it’s a matter of time before they will find a common leader. And in this system of politics, the most successful lawbreaker is Tinubu. And since lawbreaking is what they are all about, they probably just go to him to perfect their skills; because Tinubu’s philosophy, as he says it, is that if the power is not served, you have to snatch it, grab it, and run along with it.
 
That is not the language of someone who is collecting power from the people, using it for the benefit of the people, and returning to the people, becoming an average citizen like the rest of us. So, all of them now have summarised their aspirations and realised that Tinubu is the most successful of all of their power snatchers and all of that. So they decided there’s no point competing with him. Just go and ally with him. He’s the Capone now and they’ll follow him. So, that is what you call a one-party state.
 
But in reality, there cannot be a one-party state, because the natural dialectic is that any union between hungry people and the overfed people cannot last. Any union between unemployed people and the people who are causing their unemployment cannot be together. A union of poor people and those who stole all their wealth cannot endure.
 
So, we are reaching a point where the real position is not for a one-party state. The elites, decadent as they are, are the leftovers of the crumbs of military rule. If you look at the history of most of them, their careers began with working for military governments during the dark days of military dictatorship, helping them to hide money. And if you look at Tinubu’s government, you can see how many of them are returning Abacha money officially in court.

Are you recontesting the presidential election in 2027 or is your party forming a coalition with one of the major political parties?
I am running. I’ve already told my party. My party officially knows that I am contesting in 2027, and I am in the process of it. And there is no major political party in Nigeria. Unless you are substituting it for the ruling party, which I can never join. My dead body can never join it!

Why didn’t your party perform better in 2023? How do you see its role in 2027?
Well, there are reasons we didn’t perform better than we did, both internal to us and external to us. The internal part had to do with the fact that we didn’t start on time. And prior to the 2023 election, we have not had a recent history of competitive elections. So, if you look at 2019, 2015, and prior to that, you will see that the party did not compete like we did in 2023. And we needed to work on our system.
 
So, that’s internal to us. That’s our fault, and we are addressing it. In fact, the entire leadership of the party – I’m sure you guys have seen them in some of the provinces – are going around the country trying to address that. But the rest has to do with the fact that it was not a proper election. It was just a criminal enterprise – stealing our votes, buying our votes and falsifying results.
 
So, since we don’t have that kind of talent, and we don’t want to have it, we can’t do well in that kind of election. And that’s why we are leading the electoral reform now. You can see that we’ve taken responsibility for our own contribution to our problem. But we are also ensuring that we embrace electoral reform in the country to see that at least we can eliminate the criminality of buying votes. You’ve seen all my campaigns against vote buying and selling of votes. We must have a more credible INEC. We must have technology and systems that work.

At the same time, we are collaborating with other political parties and civil society to ensure that at least you have an electoral empire, an electoral system that is trying to find out the most popular person, not already programmed to return or to favour a particular party or candidate, no matter who we vote for.

Why have you not joined opposition leaders, particularly the likes of Atiku and Obi, who have formed a coalition? 
We are talking with them, and we are trying to find a common purpose. And that common purpose has to have meaning in the life of God and everything else. The fact that I happen to not like Tinubu is a fact. And the fact that you don’t like Tinubu as well does not solve the problem of the people. The chances are very clear that Tinubu doesn’t like me either. But that’s not the level at which you play politics.
 
What we are trying to do is to make sure that people don’t capitalise on the obviously bad performance of Tinubu, which is obvious to come, and insinuate to us people who just ride on the wave of that anger and bring Tinubu 2.0 when they come. Because we saw it, and I was shouting in 2014, when they brought the academy of liars. Lai Mohammed, Tinubu and all of them said Jonathan was not performing. Go and review those interviews. I said, ‘Yes, I know Jonathan very well. It’s a total disaster as a president. But as for these people who are coming, they are going to be worse.’
 
When I saw their mascot, Buhari, I was convinced that we are going to be ‘dead’ because I knew Buhari very well. I knew him intimately and I knew Buhari does not have a calendar to know which century he belongs to, what date or anything.
 
So, they went and brought him, and people were just like, ‘Oh, Buhari Action.’ Which action? Because I was talking, Jonathan is bad, yes, but find somebody who is better.  And these people know what they were doing by bringing Buhari.

And to people, all of them, you could see that when they were doing their 2022 transition, Tinubu gave a live history as to why he brought all of them, because he wants to achieve his own aim; not because they are good, but because he wants to use them to rise.

So, if you haven’t learnt from that, when are you ever going to learn? Now that Tinubu is also not good, you want to make sure that someone worse than Tinubu is not being smuggled in, and then people will say, ‘Oh, even in Tinubu’s time, it was slightly better than this.’
 
I don’t want to experience that. And that’s why, for each of them that came, I interviewed them.  But many of them, when they came to us, I didn’t even let them open their mouths; I just told them to go away; because you can’t say that you wanted to do energy and you are a fraud. You went and brought one plane from Ethiopia and painted it with some fake auto paint that is used to paint cars. You brought the plane for one hour, flew it away, and all the money was gone. How can you come and sit next to me and ruin my life with that useless photograph of me sitting with you when you should be in jail?
 
The fact that I’m angry with Tinubu doesn’t mean I’m blind. How can I say Tinubu is not capable of governing? Due to advanced age, due to not having the agility, I brought somebody who is a senior brother who can hardly sit upright. You see, that’s the worst thing I can do.  What drives you to do something must not be hate or opportunism. It must be that you want to contribute better. And so, any coalition, which we are doing now, if you are in this place now, you’ll find five chairmen of five political parties.
 
It’s not as if we don’t like coalitions. We are working with people whom we disagree with in terms of certain ideologies and certain ideas. But we know that each of these persons is a patriot. You may have ideas we don’t quite appreciate. You may have certain styles we don’t quite understand. But you know that this person is a patriot. He loves the people. He loves the country. He’s loyal to the country. He’s accountable. He’s not trying to steal money. He’s not trying to use opportunism. He has no bad record. So, some expected them to go on an apology tour before you could even come to do a coalition with us. You must first confess your contribution to the country. 

So, is it true that you singlehandedly disallowed the coalition to be organised in SDP?
I’m not saying single-handedly. I convinced my party people that if we cannot help the Nigerian people, let’s not kill them. It’s better to not enter government than to enter government and become the enemy of the people. You can’t do it. It’s just not right. Nigeria has a lot of people who have never tasted government before.
 
All of the people who have been in government since independence today are not up to one per cent. Nigeria is not short of talent. So, if you want to stop what is going on, you need to bring fresh people or select among those who have served before who have relatively good records.
 
You have to see that the motivation is not about some people being incapable of being outside government for six hours. They will be disoriented because they are used to a free car, free housing, passing toll gates without paying, and free medical care. These are the things they defend in the name of fighting for you. They just can’t survive without government patronage. If they are ministers today, tomorrow you put them as the chairman of a nursery or primary school board. They go there. They just must drive a GLE car with the happening that is not important. And that is what is motivating their politics. So, it’s their style. I’m not saying they should not be in politics.
 
The main reason I entered politics and devoted my life to politics was because of that lie that Nigerians were telling themselves that they had no alternative. So, I will go on a TV show explaining the problem of the country and people will see me and say, ‘It’s people like you we want in government.’ I will tell them, ‘I’m facing my law practice. I’m doing my thing. Leave me alone.’
 
But they will say, ‘No, it’s people like you. Come out.’ So, I realised that if Gani came out, why didn’t he do something about that? So, we just have a way of not doing the right thing and claiming that we have no alternative. But in any case, let me put an end to the argument. I will come out now.

Some of the things you have said here are as worrisome as they are frank. First of all, you said that civil society is dead and that the media are distracted and conscious. If the civil society is dead and the media are conscious, it means we are in a deeper problem. So, going into 2027, with all these problems you have listed, what do you think Nigerians can do to change the situation from getting worse?
There are three things we can do. Very easy. We should stop lying to ourselves. When we see black, we don’t say ‘colourblind’. We used to be a society that would at least tell the truth. Someone is arguing with you on social media that Tinubu is performing. Our economy is doing better. Two minutes later he sends you a text message that he has not eaten today; send me money. That kind of level of sarcasm. An unemployed family head. He is still arguing with you as to whether the economy is bad. Someone who works and earns a salary that cannot pay his or her bills is still arguing with you that the economy has improved slightly. But you have to borrow money to pay your rent. You have to beg somebody to help you pay your child’s school fees. You have to buy clothes on credit.  That’s not a society.