Barrister Adewole Adebayo is a presidential aspirant on the platform of an emerging coalition of political parties. In this Interview with EMEKA NZE, he speaks about the rot in the country masterminded by leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Excerpts:
What changes would you want to bring to the table, if elected?
We have elected many governments and most of the objectives, the national programmes we have set for ourselves, have not not only been disconnected, many of the games that we thought were secure, have now come under threat. In this country today, the most painful and dangerous thing happening is that the oneness and unity of this country is under threat and it is not only under threat by those who are at the periphery of power, those who are marginalised, it’s under threat even from those who have benefitted or who have defined the identity from what Nigeria has given to them. So there is no holy ground anymore, there is no common ground on most issues. A country can do well with a very good government and a country can also still manage to get bad with a very bad government because there will be another time to elect a good one. And the lessons you learn when you have a bad government helps you to appreciate a good government when it comes and to be serious to run it.
However, there’s a culture which we’re resolving into and that’s the culture that is dangerous, a culture where failure has become successors to failure and those who aspire to leadership do not extol their own virtues anymore. They only say well, I have vices but the vices of the other side are even worse than mine. And that’s what happens to Nigeria today. We have the All Progressives Congress (APC), which came to power in 2015, on the mantra of change and the issues that we are confronted with that time -security, corruption unemployment and generally bad infrastructure and low currency management. Now that government had a second term, have had seven years plus to put their ‘change’ into action, what we got from them is change for the worse.
The insecurity is now worse and taking a new dimension – banditry, killing and all sorts of threat to human life. The infrastructure we’ve not seen much of it, but we still have a lot of debt. The foreign exchange has gotten worse. It couldn’t have been worse than what it was before but they managed to make it worse. Now we have no employment and the price of staple food and basic things have gone up and the country is being given an excuse that well, as bad as the APC government is, its badness came from the previous government of PDP. And we have in the opposition the PDP which goes without apology that it ran a very bad government but it’s always taunting us saying okay, you see, we ran a very bad government but look at the one you replaced us with, they are even worse than us.
So let us come back and run another bad government for you because we have a franchise for running a bad government. So when you are having these raised to the bottom, in your analysis, you discover that it’s time for ordinary citizens to come out. There are five reasons why I’m coming out. One, to give hope to Nigerians again because hope is that commodity that costs you nothing but through this hope you get other things an Nigerians used to have it, it was common to us in the Guinness Book of Records, any message, any survey you do, will tell you that Nigerians are the happiest people in the world and you cannot be happy if you are hopeless. So the government has robbed us of that hope and Nigerians now, for the first time since civilisation, Nigerians now believe that “tomorrow no go better.” But tomorrow go better used to be our motto in this country that the person who had the worst day will be sure that tomorrow would be better, that has been stolen from us. So we need to come out and bring a new narrative to show that we have hope. Second, there’s these private treaties that politicians sign with one another, it’s a conspiracy of perpetual underdevelopment whereby you say, well, let me help you to come to power; you do it anyhow you want to do it, people are happy or not, then you rotate it to me, you also help me to come there.
So the equation does not include the people. I thought that what we should do is to listen to what people are saying and you see many people who are coming out to run, always say they helped Buhari to come to power or they helped somebody to come to power in the past and they are promised that it is their turn but no one is mentioning the people. So I thought that we should come out and let people know that whatever bounced cheque you are given out on the corridors of power, it is not binding on the people. People want to elect a government that comes from them.
The third issue is that of recent, we’ve been having leadership crisis where gross incompetence is exaggerating ordinary problems to look unsolvable and if you do analysis and listen to the media and listen to government people talking, you will think that the simple task of removing refuse from the gutter or from the way is so difficult to do. Everybody is telling you that government is mysterious and managing and sustaining foreign exchange is difficult to do; that giving employment to people is difficult to do, closing IDP camps is difficult to do, putting a bullet in the head of the bandit or terrorist is difficult to do. Everything is difficult to do and it gives you a feeling why Nigerians have become metaphysical. Everything is committed to prayer because it is believed that this is beyond belief.
If you had a lion and a goat in a cage and you come back the next day, the lion is dead and the goat is alive, people would start to wonder, something is wrong and that is what is happening between the government and Boko Haram and bandits. So they are trying to depress the people mentally and how do you know this is happening? The young people will tell you they want to leave for Canada, they want to leave for Niger. There is no country you call in the world, even ‘Neverland, if you open the Neverland embassy, Nigerians will not find whether it exists or not, they will apply to go there. So there is this disinheritance that people are having in this country where young people believe that if you put people in government, they are never going to look after me, so I need to leave this country. Secondly, those who have been operating at national level before are now receding to their regions, tribes and ethnic groups. There is no consensus about development. So people go back home, or to some places and bring parochial consensus and when you have all these conflict of parochial consensus, it makes the country look like it’s difficult to govern. Some people go as far back as the years of Lord Lugard to think about how Nigeria is a country that it shouldn’t have been, whereas the existence of Nigeria is the greatest gift to the black people. So we thought that we should come in to stop that. Then the fourth element is lack of professionalism across board. Every institution has been compromised. Every institution is there to serve those who are incumbent, whether it’s the police, judiciary, army, DSS, whatever institution, insurance, whatever. Once you set institution up, those who are in government, those who are supposed to work in those institutions, strengthen them, leave them alone for the next person to take over, privatise and personalise these institutions.
So these institutions start to conflict. So you find out that DSS is fighting EFCC, EFCC is fighting police, police is fighting army, the Airforce does not want to give air cover to the soldier because it’s fighting with the chief of army staff, the NSA does not greet the chief of army staff, everything is upside down. These institutions which are supposed to be complementary and work with one another to give continuity to the state have been personalised by those who are there and the character and indiscipline of those who are there are now reflecting on these institutions. So the new people who go there pay money to enter because they see these institutions as a means of exploiting the people.
They don’t go there reflecting the philosophy of the institutions. Lastly and very importantly, is the question of the role of money in politics. Everybody will tell you that you first have to be a thief before you look for public office or you have to go and register your name among those people who are thieves so that they can sponsor you. They don’t believe the ordinary Nigerian can come out and vie for any office in the country and offer a platform, so we thought that we should do this. And for me personally, it would be a case of gross malpractice for me and for all that Nigeria has done for me, in became 50 years old last week, and I been reflecting on my life, if I live another 500 years, I will not be able to pay back to Nigeria what Nigeria has dine to me and I have many friends all over the world who are my age.
They either have gone to war to defend their country or they served their country. I lived many years in America, and practised law there and many of my colleagues who were born in America, whose parents came with the Mayflower to America still had to pay college loans to go to university and i went to University of Ife, the highest amount they ever took from me was N90 and as I paid that N90 and i was very happy and we went go back to my room and some older students will come to us and say “Are you people stupid, you paid N90, we paid N45, let’s go back and collect your N45 back. So we made a lot of noise for a whole week, the school never slept. But they refunded us our N45. So based on that N45, I became a lawyer and paid N20,000 to go to law school and even my first case was enough to pay for all my education from day one. So this country has done so many other beautiful things and I thought that if I’m just sitting down here saying I’m made, let me join those who are trying to ruin the country. No, I wouldn’t do that and I think if I spend the rest of my life just making an attempt to pay back some of the debt that I owe the country, that is what i should do.
What political party platform are you aspiring for the president?
I didn’t mention a political party because its obvious that I can never, in as much as I don’t expect the right thinking Nigerian to pitch their tent with the APC which is currently misbehaving or the PDP which set the good standard for misbehaviour. What I think we should do is to find an alternative to the two of them and it is not hard to find an alternative because they have been doing merger of themselves. If you look at the Presidential Villa, just look at those who are working there, who are principle officers, look at the federal executive council, look at so many other things, you will see that it’s a unity government for the wrong people. They have come together- APC and PDP. They are two sides of one coin, so you have to throw the coin away. You cannot hold the coin and say you like one side of the coin and you don’t like the other side of the coin because it is the same coin. For us, what we decided to do was to be a movement first. Because it is a movement you know where you are going, then you can be a political party. What we have done is to start talking to different political parties and we have been having series of meetings to say that we do not want to make the mistake of 2019 where there are 79 parties saying the same thing and never working together. So we decided to work together. I’m not the leader of this movement; I’m just the presidential hopeful. By the end of this month, the movement will announce a political party. When you see the political party, you will not be surprised. It would be what you imagine Nigerians should do in the first place, which is to coalesce with serious-minded opposition to forming one platform any Nigerians what we need to do of finding a pathway and that’s what we are going to do and when that is announced, you will know but they are readily existing political parties and coming together to join effort so that we will not have this merry go round that happens every four years between the PDP and APC.
How would you convince the voters that you are ordinary Nigerians?
I’m an ordinary Nigerian who has lived an extraordinary life. I have survived in spite of the mis-governance that is foisted on all of us. I haven’t taken any public office before and i don’t do business with government. I wake up like any other Nigerian trying to make a sense out of the abundant opportunities that God has given us in this country and the way I have lived my life, I have done a enough of 50 years now and I have been a lawyer for over two decades.
So my work, my association, you can go into the archives and see my interviews for the past twenty years with different media and so you don’t want to fall into the same trap of somebody coming to explain who I’m to you which was what happened in 2015. Whenever anybody is talking of an imaginary saviour, we didn’t look back to see what these persons stood for. So i have always been on the side of the ordinary people and what I’m bringing to focus is the fact that the average Nigerian who is well trained professionally is alright, is equipped with sufficient competencies to execute the office of the President of Nigeria. What is happening in Nigeria today is reflective of what is happening around us.
That is to say, these great offices have been created to perform certain functions but people go to occupying these offices without attending to those duties. So it is a typical thing that happens to you in a police station. You can lie on the wall in a typical police station, they will talk about everything from morning till night, they are not going to pay attention about how to fight crime.
And you manage to bring crime to them, they will look at you like you are at the wrong location. Unless you have private money to incentivise them, they are going to leave there. I use it as an example to show to you that it is not only the presidency that is failing, go to your typical local government, the local government chairman is not going to go around looking for potholes to fill, he is going to be attending weddings or follow the governor somewhere. So these offices are there to serve the people. Why it looks like we are having bad government is because we are having no government at all. What we are having is continuous politics. So you can find the governor of Sokoto state will spend a lot of time with the governor of Rivers to commission some things in Rivers or plot politics, he would not pay attention to his state. It happens at the federal level; you look at the Federal Executive Council, they only go there to award contracts every Wednesday. Nobody asks questions of the contract they awarded before, no minister is going round giving feedback to the president. I can tell you categorically and you can ask them, there are Ministers who spend four years in government, but don’t see the president probably for three times. There’s a general abandonment of duty and where duties are abandoned, it makes it look like the work is hard to do and you have to now come from heaven to be president of Nigeria.
No. Many of our colleagues all over the world have carried their professional competencies to public offices and because they do the work, they may make one or two mistakes along the way, but they actually pay attention to the work and every other person pays attention to their own work, and they are able to get governance going. It’s not as if you have to be perfect but you have to be perfectly ready to do the work and I can tell you that the presidency of Nigeria is being given like a reward for many years of experience in politics of non performance. So if you have been there for sometime and those who are within the levers of power will say “well we know him, he’s going to be generous to us, so let’s support him, it’s never about whether the person is competent and if you look at the task and the challenges facing the presidency in Nigeria today in terms of security, in terms of the economy, in terms of social cohesion, being a good head of state, which is to be father to everyone or mother if the person is a woman, to everybody in the country, so that when you are in the Villa, it doesn’t matter which state or local government, ethnic group or religion you belong to, you feel like you are at home and if there’s a problem in any part of the country, the president will deal with it with the same equality. So that is the skill you find in every enterprise that I have led. I don’t have a problem of that nature.
How can you bridge the dichotomy between north and South?
I don’t see any North and South. My parents are from Ondo state. I have lived majority of my adult life in the northern part of the country. I have lived overseas as well and anywhere Nigerians meet one another, the issue of north and south does not occur. When bandits waylay a vehicle on the highway, they don’t say northerners less ransom than a southerners.
When Buhari managed his fantastic economic idea that allowed rice to go from N7,000 to N35,000 there is no special price for northerners or special price for southerners. When you are suffering injury having plunged the pothole on the highway, everybody in the vehicle either going to die or get injured; there is no issue of north and south in it.
So I think that we need to be serious. If you look at the new calamity they are cooking in the villa now where they want us yo pay through our noses to buy fuel and they are trying increase the fuel to N400 or whatever figure they are threatening our lives with there’s no price for northerners, there is no price for southerners. So I think we should understand that these are artificial practices which they use to take power among themsleves, it does not apply to Nigerians. What I expect to see is that the rotation of the power should come from the people.
The upper echelon, the elite who are the inheritors of powers transfered by the military in 1999 have been rotating the powers among themselves; its high time the president came from the people and if the president comes from the people, it would have the agenda of the people and you will see the way we will run our campaign, you will see that we are coming from the people.
We know their problems and those are the problems we are coming to solve and so I don’t have a problem of north and south and I can live someone for so long without even knowing where their state of origin is and for those who think that’s the politics they want to emphasise, we will tell them that they are wrong. If you go to the armed forces today, those who are dying in the fronts in Sambisa, in the northeast, in everywhere, both southerners and northerners take the bullet together, christian, moslem, non believers or whatever believers take the bullet together and even Boko Haram, bandits they attack mosques, they attack churches, they attack indiscriminately, there is no holy ground.
So anyone who is still talking about north and south now, that’s one way to analyse who we are not going to work with at all. If anybody comes to me out of office now or when I’m in office in the name of the north or south, that’s sufficient reason to walk such a person out of my office because i do not see that as a major thing.
