By Chukwudi Nweje
Prince Adewole Adebayo, the 2023 Presidential Candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in this interview bares his mind on the recent increase in the electricity tariff, the talks about a new alliance of opposition parties and other issues.
What is your take on the increase of electricity tariff by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC); this is at a time when Nigerians are contending with an increase in the price of petroleum products and the high cost of food.
Well, it looks like Nigerians did not listen during the campaigns. If a political party calls itself the rain-maker, and it goes about campaigning, that during our time, it will rain every day and every hour, throughout their tenure, and you vote them in, and it rains on your wedding day, you don’t need to complain. This party promised you that it would be tough, what do you expect? This political party that is in power, and this president that is in office, has been consistent with his policies. He believes that these policies are necessary for the vision of Nigeria that he has. And he sold that vision to the Nigerian public during the campaign, and there were alternative views and alternative visions, and people voted for this one.
So this is just a natural development arising from giving them that mandate to exercise their power and carry out their plans. The summary of it is that there is no recognition of any social market. Every market is commercial, so this is another version of withdrawing subsidies. They have made up their mind that they will not subsidise, they have made up their mind that there is no social market, everything is commercial, and any sector of the economy that the government is spending money to subsidise any service, product, or amenities, that they are going to examine and immediately block.
This government in power are not social democrats, they are neoliberal economists. If you look at their economic team, they are the kind of people that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will hire, so there is nothing strange there. Look at the Minister in charge of Power or Energy, you can see his philosophy regarding access to energy and the vision for the energy market.
Energy just like any other product as far as he is concerned is an option. The last time I heard of something like this was when David Mark, as minister of communication, said that the telephone was not for the poor. You can imagine what telephony has done for the poor since then, all over the world, including in Nigeria that without telephony, many of our communities would not be reachable.
This gentleman who is now in charge of energy believes that energy is an option, no energy is not an option. So God forbid, if the government were in charge of the supply of oxygen, they would ask Nigerians to start breathing slowly so they would consume less oxygen.
So, the long and short of this is that it’s difficult for me to intervene because I can put myself in the mind of President Bola Tinubu. He has a Nigeria in his mind where he’s going, it is just that the Nigeria in his mind is not the kind of Nigeria that I have in my mind. That’s why we all campaigned and the story he told appeared to appeal to the people more than the vision that I presented. So as he is implementing his vision, he is validating our position that there’s a place for socio-economic justice, that there’s a place for you to understand that not everything can be commoditised, and that there’s a place for you to think of alternatives if you are going to have economic revolution, and that there’s a place for a country where people don’t live in panic of daily assistance. But President Tinubu believes that the path he is taking is going to lead to a path where the market will correct many of these social ills that we have. Tinubu believes that through the market, he will solve economic problems, he will solve political, and social problems, and even the market, he will educate students.
You saw what he did when he was schooling in Chicago, that you can create a market where you can go and borrow money to pay for your education and work to pay it back, that’s the vision he has.
So, it’s not a case of they don’t care for the masses or they are bad people. He is a successor to President Ibrahim Babangida, and his ministers; Wale Edu is a successor to Kalu Idika Kalu and Olu Falae in the days of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). I don’t know what he wants to do but we are watching. My concern is, why do you worry when a government that you put in place said that it will implement what it told you it was going to implement when you were putting the government in place?
There is nothing I can do other than keep telling you that there are alternatives. This government is bound to be here for four years, so you haven’t seen them all. You will start to see them manifest in other places.
The increase comes at a time when there is no improvement in power supply, so why increase?
They didn’t tell you when they were campaigning to improve anything. They said that what they would do is to remove the subsidies first so that they can have money for other things. They said that even with the one you are getting, you are not paying the right price for them. So whether it’s petrol, whether it’s diesel, whether it’s electricity, they are saying let’s just collect more money from you for the little we are giving you before we know whether to add more. That’s a summary of what they are saying. So it’s like you go to a hospital and you see there are not enough doctors there and that your medication is not complete and the beds are not good but when you complain they tell you that even the rickety bed you get and the one doctor to 3000 of you, you are not paying enough. So, if you pay enough, we will use the money to do some other things and probably add one more doctor to you guys. So, the conversations are not aligned. People are asking for better electricity, and the government is asking for better pricing or higher pricing. When you have a market economy in every sector, there will be a buyer and seller. So, you will look at them and say, this is our government, they look at themselves as suppliers of services for money.
So in the kind of Social Democratic Party government that I would have led, and I will lead, by the grace of God, I will see myself as your servant.
I will have an abiding duty to educate your children. So, I will find the money and I will run the schools. I need to give you energy for you to be able to be productive and to be creative. So, I will look for the money and I will make sure I give you energy. In the system that they are running now, which you voted for, whether it’s All Progressives Congress (APC), Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), or the Labour Party (LP), they see themselves as operators of markets. So, the school is the marketplace and the children are buyers of knowledge, and the school is a seller of knowledge, so you pay.
The government sees itself as operators of power systems, generating, transmission, and distribution and they look at you and say, if you can’t afford to pay, it’s just darkness. If you go to Chile, you get enough of that. The dialogue is going on in Argentina now so it is not anything peculiar to us. It is a long-held debate. The whole Cold War was fought over after the Second World War, there were two systems, the system where the idea of the state guaranteeing minimum comfort and experience and giving opportunity to everyone to have access, and then you return, you work. That’s the reason why there were two Germanys, East and West Germany. So, these are serious issues. And that’s what you find here. Though ours may be masked by distractions around ethnicity, religion, and other things that are kind of colourful for us, all those anthropological issues that we have here.
But fundamentally, when it comes to economics, the discipline is there as to whether you want to use state policy to have some minimum guarantees, or you just want to leave everything to the market. I think that the majority of Nigerians are either not paying attention, or they are subconsciously sympathetic to the market. So, I’m still looking for a majority that is going to mobilise behind Chapter 2 of the Constitution and insist that the government we have in place must be consistent with Chapter 2 of the Constitution, that is the fundamental objectives and directive principles of state policy.
I went around the country and campaigned on fundamental objectives and directives for state policy, broken it down, given lectures everywhere, and gone to the communities and I’ve seen that it’s not as clear to people as empty slogans like, Renew Hope, Privatise NNPC, move Nigeria from consumption to production, whatever that means. So, that’s why I think that this generation has to confront this now.
What is happening is like that biblical story where a new king said to the people, “My father chastised you with whips but I’m going to chastise you with scorpions”. So that is the situation now. Because the trajectory is that Tinubu is stronger, firmer, and more market-oriented than Buhari. If you follow that tradition, the president that will come after President Tinubu will even be more so. So, none of these prices will ever come down unless you have a social revolution, where you say, no, I don’t want that because the ding-dong that goes on in Brazil once people get serenaded, and they forget, and the neo-liberals take over in Brazil, everything goes haywire, they exploit the people and they leave poverty everywhere, yet Brazil is doing well, producing jets like Embraer and all of that, so you have a thriving industry, but poverty continues. The poverty will not go away because you have a government that’s not interested in investing in the social sector. They will just price the entire country out of your reach. So Nigerians will find mountains somewhere to go and live, where they can get fresh air without relying on electricity. And if electricity is even improved, it goes from arguably 5,000 megawatts to 50,000 megawatts, you just wish there was no electricity at that point because you would not be able to afford it.
So that’s what the country is doing. So I don’t want people to turn me into a social critic or a condemner of government policy. These are policies to which there are alternatives. So you have taken the alternative. If you decide to ride a motorcycle downhill without a helmet, I offer you a safe vehicle covered with a seatbelt and everything, and I predict to you that riding a motorcycle downhill without a helmet will lead to concussion when it happens, you don’t want to make me your advocate to help you sue the Okade rider because you had an alternative.
Phillip Shaibu has been impeached from office as deputy governor of Edo State about five months to the expiration of his tenure, what do you think?
There is no policy disagreement between Shaibu and Gov Godwin Obaseki. It’s just a personal disagreement. Whatever brought them together is what scattered them.
It’s not a major national issue. The only thing I can remark on is how the State Assembly perceives their role. It appears that the House of Assembly does not appreciate its constitutional role. It’s supposed to intervene only when the state official has breached his oath of office, or committed high crimes or misdemeanours. They’re not supposed to be an instrument to resolve the political differences between a governor and a deputy. So that’s the only significant thing. I hope these institutions will understand that their role is to protect the people’s interests.
And in the disagreement between the governor of Edo State and his former deputy, as in many cases between governors and their deputies, the interest of the public is not compromised. It›s just personal disagreement and whoever has more influence in the state, House of Assembly, which sometimes is concomitant to who has more ability to please, which is sometimes whoever can grease their palm more.
The disagreement between Obasanjo and Atiku, then was more than this. The National Assembly did not intervene or interfere. So I hope that a time will come when our state House of Assembly will be mature enough not to be used by deputy governors or governors when they have their issues.
I want to refer you to Section 188 (11) of the 1999 Constitution which says “Gross misconduct means a grave violation of the provisions of this Constitution or misconduct of such nature as amounts in the opinion of the House of Assembly to gross misconduct”, does this mean that gross misconduct could differ from one state to another?
No, no, that’s not how the Constitution is. There is what we call Sui generis, I don’t want to bring in Latin language into it. But the conclusion is that you’re already guided. So if I say, don’t allow goats, cats, other domestic animals etc, domestic animals will not include sharks, they’re not in that class. So when you are guided like that, I choose to say the kind of crime against the Constitution as reflected in the oath of office cannot be exhausted in the definition under that subsection.
So they›re just giving you similar things that may happen. It doesn›t mean that if the deputy governor and the governor don›t greet each other, that means that there is a high crime and misdemeanour there.
So they know. We know in Nigeria, one thing we have seen time and time again is that people do not follow the law, they follow interests. People do not interpret the law, they interpret interests. So it’s part of the political maturation process.
The governorship election will be coming up in Ondo State on November 16, while your party may not be showing very active interest in the election, the outcome will affect you as an indigene of the state and as a stakeholder. What kind of candidate do you expect to emerge?
Well, the quality of the electorate has to improve first because if you are looking for a good governor, you first ask who is appointing him. If the quality of the electorate does not improve above the quality of the electorates you had before, the choice will not be better.
And the challenge facing Ondo State can be deciphered from how they used to make their choices since 1999. So if they don’t change the way and the rationale for making their choices, you won’t see any difference. In the last few elections, the electorates in that state have not put quality in their choices. The politics of that place require a new electorate. We can see what happened to Abia State, if the electorate changes its mind and tries to say, oh, this time around we want to improve the quality of our choices, then you have a different outcome. I think the only thing that can come out of those states is the electorate.
So that’s where I’m paying attention. It’s not about changing the political party one way or the other. The only thing I’m asking the electorate is to look back at the choices they made in the last five elections, what determined who you voted for? If it is vote and collect your cooking money and if it is still what will determine the next election, it doesn’t matter how many political parties are vying. If the politicians know that the person who offers the most attractive cooking money is the person who is going to win the day, they will be laughing at social democrats or any other person coming to propose alternatives. If the outcome is not different, any other developmental ideas will fall apart because the candidates will be walking towards mobilizing that money to the polling unit.
But structurally, if you bring any macro-economics to the state, they will tell you that they are not doing their politics where their economics are. The state is a maritime state. The wealth and the best opportunities for economic miracle are in the south of the state. And the politics is determined by the Centre and the activists are from the North. So half of Ondo State is locked down into darkness. So where all their wealth is, they are not going there.
That southern part has been taken off the map in terms of energy supply, in terms of road connection, in terms of and infrastructure. It looks like the governor who is there now is from the Southern part of the state so let’s see how in this short time that he is there, he is orientating the developmental agenda towards that side. The instructions, directions, and leadership I give to the SDP are to find candidates who abide by these rules. And if you don’t have, you find, or until you find, don’t go and tell the people that what they are doing now is a way forward.
It appears both the APC and the PDP zone, have the governor’s seat ticket on the South Senatorial zone, is it a deliberate action?
I don’t want to go into the internal affairs of those political parties, but what I know is that in those states generally, they like to be equitable and they try to have inclusiveness. So if you study their history over time, they tend to make sure that every zone in the states has a feeling of, yes, we can also access power. So I think if you look at it, that’s how it has been. So, hopefully, when it goes around, the quality will improve.
Olusegun Mimiko from the Central senatorial district, was elected for two consecutive terms, he was succeeded by Rotimi Akeredolu from the North, who was also elected for two terms, though he died in office and was succeeded by Lucky Aiyedatiwa from the South. Some people are concerned that if Aiyedatiwa picks the APC ticket and is elected, the South will not have the opportunity to serve two terms of eight years going by the amendment to the constitution, what is your take?
That’s the internal politics of the APC, that’s what they will say for their internal primaries. That’s not my concern. I’m not a member of their party.
I’ll leave it at that. What’s more important to me is that whoever is governor of the state, every day that the person is there, he has an opportunity to improve the lives of the people. And if the person implements Chapter 2 of the Constitution for two years, he will do better than someone who spent 16 years or 8 years without following Chapter 2 of the Constitution.
So I am more interested in what the person does, not how long they are there. So, I just say, that the most significant governor since that state was created, was Adekunle Ajasin who served only four years, and the second most significant governor has to be Olusegun Agagu who spent four years and a few months. So if you are putting governors in order of impact, Ajasin has no equal and he is followed by Agagu, who is a distant second. So it’s not about the length of time you spend in the office. The metrics that I use are how that person understands development and how they can ginger development, not how long they stay there.
Opposition parties are talking about another merger to form a mega-party ahead of 2027. I know that before the 2023 elections, you were part of the National Consultative Front (NCFront) consultations that eventually adopted the Labour Party and Peter Obi as the preferred platform and candidate. What do you think went wrong with that negotiation?
What went wrong from 2022 to 2023 was that, the activists and the people putting together the merger were still looking to join the establishment politics and establishment politics has been on since independence. It doesn’t change. What we were hoping for when we were in the NCFront was that it was going to give an alternative to the establishment politics. But it went back to the establishment parties, ex-PDP, ex APC and all that.
My disagreement with my colleagues there was that I didn’t see Peter Obi as anything new, I just saw him as another sensation from the establishment politics. So, and in many policy issues, even Tinubu is more radical than him. But they thought that we could make a superstar out of someone like that and win the election. You can see in disagreement between the Nigerian Labour Congress now and the Labour Party, you could see already that where the ideological depth there. So for me, if you are now coming back, I’ll just be watching you because all I’m interested in is to let Nigerian people know that the whole essence of democracy is to have alternatives, and an alternative platform must have alternative ideas with alternative agenda going in an alternative direction. If you don’t have it, the rest is just a struggle for power.
So mega this, mega that is only going to change the person who is funding them. That’s all. These activists are only looking for an election season and looking for who is going to fund them. But they are not ready to change the direction and once the direction is changed, you will go from the same complaints against Yar’Adua, the same complaint against Jonathan, the same complaint against Buhari, the same complaint you are going to get against Tinubu because policies are the same, personalities are changing. So that is where I’m different.
In other words, you won’t participate in any new…
(Cuts in) There’s nothing new. They are just repackaging. So if you are not a smoker, if they are going from Benson and Hedges to John Player, Goldleaf to Marlboro, how does it concern you? You are not a smoker. You are the non-smoking party. So, changing the brand that they are smoking is not of relevance to you. If you are not an alcoholic, you won’t care whether they change from one beer brand to another because you are not a drinker. So I’m not involved in this establishment politics. I am trying to get Nigerian people to say, look at what has been going on since independence to date.
Opposition parties are talking about a merger to form a new mega-party ahead of 2017. You were part of the National Consultative Front (NCFront) consultations that eventually produced Mr Peter Obi and the Labour Party, what was wrong with an alliance that produced Obi?
What went wrong from 2022 to 2023 was that, one, the activists and the people putting together the merger were still looking at joining the establishment politicians.
And establishment politics, as we all see, is making independence. It doesn›t change. What we were hoping when we were in the NCFront was that it was going to give an alternative to the establishment politics. But the proprietors of the NCFront went back to ex-PDP and ex-APC politicians and my disagreement with my colleagues there was that I didn’t see Peter Obi as anything new. I just saw him as another sensation from establishment politics. And in many policy issues, even Tinubu is more radical than Obi. Many of them thought that we could make a superstar out of someone like that and win the election and face the consequences later. You could see in the disagreement between the Labour Congress now and the Labour Party that there is an ideological depth of differences there.
So for me, if you are now coming back, I’ll just be watching you because all I’m interested in is to let Nigerian people know that the whole essence of democracy is to have alternatives.
An alternative platform must have alternative ideas with an alternative agenda going in an alternative direction. If you don’t have it, the rest is just a struggle for power. All of these sentiments are part of the politics of incumbency and the politics of establishment. And whichever way it resolves, it only resolves if it’s for one personality or the other. It does not change the fundamentals.
So we are on a ship going in the wrong direction, rotating the captain without changing direction; it is of no use to someone like me. So if you say, oh, it›s the turn of South West to bring the captain, I was, okay, if you choose me, will I still be following the wrong direction?
No, I don›t want to be the captain. Sorry. I›m going to sit down and turn the ship. I will try to set up a crew that when you vote for us to take over the bridge of this ship, we will immediately change direction from where you are going, if you are not ready, don›t elect me. I›m ready to run, ten elections and lose, or I get the mandate to change the direction of the country.
So mega this, mega that is only going to change the person who is funding them. These activists are only looking for an election season and looking for who is going to fund them. But they are not ready to change the direction, and once the direction is changed, you will go from the same complaints against Yar’Adua, the same complaint against Jonathan, the same complaint against Buhari, the same complaints you are going to get against Tinubu because policies are the same, personalities are changing. So that is where I’m different.
In other words, you won’t be part of any new…
(Cuts in) There’s nothing new. They are just repackaging. So if you are not a smoker, if they are going from Benson and Hedges to John Player Goldleaf or Marlboro, how does it concern you? You are not a smoker. Changing the brand that they are smoking is not of relevance to you. I’m not involved in this establishment’s politics. I am trying to get Nigerian people to say, look at what has been going on since independence to date. See how many republics we’ve blown up. Why don’t we get together a political platform that is going to say to the Nigerian people, let us go to Chapter 2 of our constitution, let us reorganize our government, let us reorganise our politics, let us reorganise our civil services, and let us make the people who are in National Assembly, State House of Assembly, and the government houses and the State House, Abuja, let’s make these people implement Chapter 2 of the constitution.