Adebayo: Nigeria Needs Quality Leadership for Things to Keep Working 

The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, in this interview, said Nigeria is essentially practising a quasi criminal organization called government, as Nigerians realize that if you invest in banking, agriculture or whatever, you get a single digit return, but if you invest in politics, you get a million fold

The Northern League of Democrats visited former President Obasanjo and discussed among other issues, regionalism which had a lot of fond memories for everyone. What do you think of the visit and discussion?

Every contribution to a public discourse must be put in the context of why the discussion was made, why the comment was contributed. From what I gathered, it was a courtesy visit by the League of Northern Democrats. That name suggests that it is a league of northerners who have democratic aspirations for the country and in that context, I wouldn’t think it’s to be a speech or regionalism generally because regionalism will mean different things. I think what the former president was trying to drive at is that any discourse about a common problem in Nigeria should not exclude anyone. It should be made available for everyone who wants to contribute. From Chairman, former governor Shakarau to the convener, Dr Umar Ado, and many of my brothers were there.

These are my friends, supporters, these are my believers and these are people I consider to be democrats. If they form an organization that’s just seen as the League of Northern Democrats, what President Obasanjo was saying was that to some people, it is that ‘Northern’ that they see, they will not see the league and they will not see the democrats in it. But if you’re able to see all the three words, you will understand that these are Nigerians of northern extraction who are concerned about democracy and there’s nothing unusual about that.

But for a president like General Obasanjo who joined the Nigeria Army, not Northern Army, not Western Army, who ruled as the head of state and as your president and join the national party called the PDP, when you come to him for anything that is sectional, that is regional, that is not all in inclusive, he will buck at it.

My view about regionalism as a system of government, as a method of administration, that’s a different discussion, that is political science discussion, that is discussion of history. It doesn’t mean that the regions were not good, the regions were great. But in modern times when you are discussing national issues, you need to discuss it on a national basis. What I believe is that many things that are national today started as regional. Even the Federal Road Safety Corps started as Oyo State Road Safety Corps. So many things can start from the region, it can start from anywhere, as long as it is for national benefit, we should try to listen and we should try to expand it.

What’s your perspective on the regional system of government as it affects national governance?

My perspective is that problems that are regional and local should be addressed locally. You cannot federalise every issue. Nigeria is a reasonably sized country, and it’s just the right size to be one entity, and I believe in that one entity. However, many things were done better in the region, not just because they were regional, but because the nature of the problems were localized to those regions. Also because the region was very effective. Some of it has to do with the effectiveness of British administration generally. They were good with the civil services or public services, but I don’t think that we can rule out regionalizing certain aspects of things. For example, on the issue of collapsed national grid, maybe if we had regional grids, at local levels, state levels, and I made that speech during my campaign, two years ago, with respect to how to manage power, how to decentralize the national grid, and make the national electricity grid to be a backup so that if there is a collapse in one section of the country, you could willpower to them for the time being.

But the idea you assume that if something is called federal or national, automatically works better or automatically unites people. No. In fact, it will surprise many people that, in the regions in the past, it didn’t matter if you came from those regions. There were people from the East and West who were senior in government services in Northern Nigeria. So, none of this guarantees success. None of it guarantees failure. I think efficiency matters, but regionalism will be used on many occasions because of geography, because of the localization of the issues, and things like that.

Consider where we are today. With many asking questions about whether or not our federal system is really working in the real sense of the word. If a senator comes up with a bill to strengthen the regions. What would your response be if you saw that?

My response would be nuanced. I would engage on three basic principles. One, the regions worked, not just because they were regions, but because the people around them were interested in running proper government. Even if you don’t change anything today in terms of regionalization, if you keep the structure and the constitutional framework that we have now, if you have patriots, and highly knowledgeable people to run things, things will run well. So, don’t say those regions ran because they were regions. They ran because of the quality of the political leadership, the quality of the public services, and the general direction and the moral compass of the country at that time.

And the leftover of the efficiencies of which the British were known in public services. You may disagree with them over colonialism and anything, but as efficient public servants, you don’t like them as you get the British. Now, what I will say in addition is that those who are running the country today as at present, if they were asked to run the regions, they would have ruined the regions. If they have displayed the same attitude today now, if they display them when the regions were there, they will ruin the regions. So it is not the form of government that is the problem of the country, but the quality of leadership that is running these governmental institutions and frameworks.

The second thing is that you do not over regionalize. You don’t overcorrect. Don’t go and eliminate everything you like in the country and regionalize. For example, you cannot regionalize the Armed Forces. You cannot regionalize postal services. You cannot regionalize diplomacy. You cannot regionalize trade. You cannot regionalize currency. So there are many things you cannot regionalize.

However, any other thing, you could regionalize them, and you could even localize them. For example, the police. If a goat belonging to Mr. Nwosu is missing in Owerri, it is not the business of the IG in Abuja to have a say in it. But it does have a say in it because if the person who stole the goat is the son of a senator, the senator is going to call the IG, and the IG is going to arrest the owner of the goat and free the thief. So you don’t need all of that. You need to localize issues. You need to localize public education. People should be able to develop an educational system that is very conducive to them. Mathematics will always remain mathematics, but you want people to run their local schools. You want states to be able to run their roads. There should be no federal roads. Essentially, you should be able to just have roads. And once trade is federalized, any road you use is okay.

Efficiency, management of the roads, it’s important. We should allow states to generate revenue and as much as possible to support local industry, to support local ability to run fiscal management and local governments should not be federalized. States should be allowed to create as many local governments as is conducive to them.

Those are the things I believe in that you should do. The third thing is that no matter what system of government you create, whether it’s regional, whether it’s local, every Nigerian should have access to it. Anybody from the old Western region or Eastern region or Midwest when it was created in 1963, could go to the North and get a job. Because Sir Ahmadu Bello, Saudana, who was leading the government, and those who were supporting him, like Makama Bida and many people, were not racist, they were not racial, they were not ethnicists.

They saw that the region belonged to them, to everybody who was physically in the north. It didn’t matter where you came from before.

So you could become a judge of the High Court of Northern Nigeria, even though you are not Hausa, Igbo, Fulani, Tiv or any of those ethnicities, indigenous or not. You could come from anywhere. And that is the approach. Our law was giving free education to anyone who was in the Western region. It did not ask where you were born and all of that. And I think that is the attitude. If you went to Port Harcourt in those days when Opara was Premier of the East, nobody knew who was from anywhere. So many people from many parts of the country, if you live in Port Harcourt, and you are the garden city, you have a person or boy or girl, you went to school. So these are the three principles that I would want us to understand. One, that regionalization or form of government is not it all.

Secondly, that efficiencies are better, some at local level, some at the federal level. Thirdly, a Nigerian should be able to enjoy equal rights under all these forms of government, whether local, regional or federal.

The statement that strikes me the most is your very nuanced response to regionalism, because as a result of how the regions work, a lot of people really don’t long for the regions. They long for those days when, you know, competition was at the heart of it. Are you arguing that it wasn’t just the regions?

The regions didn’t work because they were regions, but because of the quality of people. And some people will argue that as a result of governments being everybody’s own and nobody’s own is one of the reasons why we are where we are.

They never saw it as theirs. And so they were able to take ownership. And maybe that also reflected in the quality of people that were there especially at the federal level. Would you accept that argument?

I will respectfully disagree for three reasons. One, people steal local government money nowadays. They  steal town union money nowadays. They steal money belonging to temples, churches and mosques. So it’s the general moral decay. Because if you look at those who were at the federal level in those days, they came from the regions, but they were very loyal to the Federal Government. It didn’t matter where they came from. They were highly loyal and they did their job effectively. The problem now is that if you go to EFCC records, they steal state’s money more than even federal money. You’re more likely to have a governor who finishes from his office and report himself at EFCC or be looked for by EFCC. So if you think that it is only the Federal Government people don’t have a sense of belonging to, why would somebody who was born poor, who was raised by the public, who was the child of nobody, and turned out to be a governor, are still everywhere dry? Even though the state capital is his hometown, or just one hour from his hometown. So these people are doing all of this thing called governance today, they don’t know anything about governance.

Even if they wanted to do what’s right, they don’t know what is right. We need to have a new philosophy about our government. You can do a survey around the government. The number of people in the public service, whether elected, appointed, or career, who understands the three pillars of modern governance, which the British call PPE, Philosophy, political science, and economy. They are less than 1% of 1%. And the people we elect nowadays are not politicians, they are financiers, who believe that politics is like investing money in any other venture. So when you invest money, you will reap in abundance. So many people who ordinarily will be in business, will realize that if you invest in banking, agriculture, or whatever, you get a single digit return. If you invest in politics, you get a million fold. If you give a billion naira to support a political party or a candidate, you could have a whole ministry given to you. And that is what is dominating the issue. And ministers, commissioners, and other senior government people are recruited to help the boss get his money back, to protect procurements and other business opportunities for their clan, for their clique. So no pure government is going on. They are recruiting themselves to govern it. The reason why our politics is failing is because our philosophy of governance has failed.

You will see a lawmaker, he doesn’t care about lawmaking, he is evaluated for lawmaking by bringing goodies back home, motorcycles, and giving money to people. I saw a video recently of someone saying that the lawmaker representing Kwara South was to give them laptops but he took photos with them and never gave them the laptop. Both of them are wrong. The senator is wrong. Secondly, the citizen who believes that the senator owes him a laptop, where is the salary of the senator to give a laptop to every youth in the constituency? What we are running is essentially a quasi criminal organization called the government where we go there to audit our own laws, to go there to organize together and do things which if we did them in your private capacity, you will spend a long time in prison. That’s what we do in government. So that is why the system is not working. If you break the region and become 12 states then you go 19 states then 21 states, 30 states, 35 states, you have 774 local governments, you have crime going on all over the place because there is no governance.

The first thing a minister does when he is appointed by a president is to go and lie flat and say thank you daddy because he thinks it is a gift. He doesn’t know that the person who appointed you is in trouble because he is taking a public mandate which he cannot handle by himself all alone so he is bringing you to come and help him. They are supposed to be his first critic, his first sparring partner, the devil’s advocate that wants to give the counterpoint so that you can have a robust cabinet. The ministers are all scattered all over the place. If you stop President Bola Tinubu today and say give me the home addresses of your ministers, he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know because President Obasanjo and some people advised him including El-Rufai, they sold  off all the government houses. So ministers don’t live close to each other. They are far from the State House. The government is disarticulated. So when a minister leaves his office to go to consult with the president, the whole day is wasted.

Whereas in those days in the colonial system, in the First Republic system, the minister of finance would live next door to the prime minister then, after that, the attorney general, the foreign affairs minister, the minister for the interior and all of them live together there. They can just walk over in the evening and have a talk about the government and everybody leaves. When it is a cabinet meeting almost every minister walked up to the cabinet room. They scattered all of that, this shows to you that they are not even organized properly. They are all isolated in silos all over the place. So that is what we need to reorganize before we can now start to talk about a form of government. Run the one you have now effectively. When you run it effectively, then you can now start to see where the effective running has some glitches you can make amendments. You can always amend the legislative list and next to the constitution. They are not written, they are not laws of Moses, they are not cast in stones. They are to be implemented and we can always amend them.

But the key thing worrying us is that even today, one of the challenges I had when I was running for office and I called my people, that in the SDP, my political party, if I was elected president, I told them we don’t even have enough quality people to constitute the entire government, we have to go back outside our party and get people, we have to go everywhere in the country and get people to come around government because the idea of running government, the business of self-governance is not a joke.

Knowing how divided we are right now, do you think that names like that will be able to make much impact in a country?

I think so. Let me tell you why I say so because even though it is called the League of Northern Democrats, there is nobody there who is not a Pan-Nigerian. Anybody who wants to protest patriotism which Umar Addo won’t go far, and Sakarau is a great man, the ex governor of Kano but he is a patriot of the highest order. So I know many people there Aminu Shagari, Murtala, Yar’Adua and many other people that I know. When they were discussing the formation of the group they spoke to people who are outside the north. I remembered Dr Addo briefing me extensively, sending me materials and all of that. So their own interpretation of what I can summarize for them is that they thought that with the role that the north plays in politics and if you look at election results, 19 states out of 36, the North is very significant

Two, the vast majority of younger people are in the north because of that differential.

Thirdly, if you look at the current crisis that we are facing, almost every problem has its headquarters in the north. Insecurity, hunger, economic dislocation and things like that and even climate change etc. So they thought that they could get Nigeria right if they got the northern mindset right, because if every political inclination from the north is democratic and wants to get good governance, then politicians who need votes from the north will follow that. They will be serious about it but they are immediately making contact with people all across the country.

President Tinubu just sacked some ministers and replaced them with new ones. Were you expecting it?

With respect to any expectation, what I can say is that as a citizen of Nigeria and as an aspiring leader, someone who would like to be president, my expectation of them is that they should conform with the constitution of Nigeria, with respect to chapter 2 in particular. They should respect their oaths of office, and they should respect the code of conduct for ministers and public officials. They should respect fundamental objectives and directive principles of state policy, which have been enshrined there to guide us regarding the purpose of government, the mode of government and the attitude of running a government. The orientation of our focus in governance. I also expect that they should be candid to the president in advising him in discharging the functions of their offices. When they find there is conflict within their conscience and the instructions of the president, they should let the president know and if necessary, they should give him his job back. They should upgrade their conscience so that they will not do in public office something they do not want the public to be aware of.

Basically they should look at the interest of Nigeria and understand that this is a representative government and the government itself is there in a representative capacity and they are there to assist them and that the ultimate boss will remain the Nigerian people, and the ultimate judge will remain the history and the posterity of their history. That is my approach regarding what to expect of the ministerial nominees and the new ministers including even the old ministers who are returning. Basically, I want to say this from a political history point of view that this is an improvement over the situation with President Muhammadu Buhari who appeared to leave everything in his cabinet as an autopilot whether there was storm, turbulence, problems, misdirection, whatever it was, he just kept the autopilot on. He didn’t change any of the ministers in the full term.

He did change some when he came second term, but when we are looking at cabinet reshuffle, usually within the term, he did not do anything in guiding them within the term.

So for that reason this is an improvement over President Buhari on the part of President Tinubu which shows that where he is, at least he is paying attention. I do not know the criteria for determining who performed or who did not perform best, what the reason could be for replacing some ministers. But looking at the ministers that have been asked to leave, none of them is leaving one day earlier than they should have left, they should have left much earlier.  There are still many more dead woods in the administration, it is up to the president to look at the issue critically and decide what to do. I am enthused personally by the appointment of Mrs Bianca Ojukwu for the reason that she has very good experience in foreign service. 

She is always a good representative ambassador of Nigeria even in her private life as a Miss World contestant or Miss Universe. Also as an ambassador to a number of countries on behalf of Nigeria. And the fact that she is not a member of the ruling APC, she’s a member of APGA from what I know. It shows a bit of diversity in that regard. And she will bring some context to the position. I think that is also a good one.

It is within the constitutional prerogative of the president to appoint ministers, deploy ministers, supervise ministers, reassign ministers and replace ministers. Because under Section 5 of the 1999 Constitution, the president is the sole executive. All the executive powers in the federation are vested in the president. And it’s only he who is the executive and shares that power with no one. Therefore, when the president decides to reshuffle his cabinet, he has that constitutional right, the same rights as he had at the beginning when he selected his ministers and appointed them.

I would never be on any side that would criticize the president for the kind of appointment he makes, the timing of It, and the nature of it, because that is his constitutional right. The voters who trusted him through the mantle of leadership should also trust in his judgment that he would only appoint people he finds suitable for the purpose of carrying out his constitutional mandate as the chief executive. I have no expectation of the new ministers, because the expectation I have is on the president. He is the one who was elected. He is the one who has the powers vested in the constitution. He is the one who is the captain of the team and the coach of the team and the manager of the team. He is the one who is going to look at the criteria that fits his mission. And is unlimited in the wideness of scope and the talent hunt that he can do across the country, both at home and in the diaspora across all ages, gender, and all diversities that Nigeria offers. So it is the president I look up to, to choose only those people who will be a reflection of his own vision for the country. And for individual ministers, I do not have any expectations.

If the appointee is expected to bring the desired change in the country, the change that the country needs, they can only do so as part and parcel of the effort of President  Tinubu. So it is to the president that I look up to. 

Of course, every minister, every appointee, even an average civil servant and even a man on the street can inspire the president, can support the president. But ultimately, the president is the decider, he makes his decision, so, it is to him that any desired change will come. I hope and I pray that the main motivation for this change of the cabinet or some adjustments in the cabinet membership is borne out of the desire for change and for the benefit of the common good and it is not just pure political calculation. Nigerians are suffering. Things are tough. The policy promises have not been fulfilled. The policy pains are all over the place. And it is time now for the government to bridge the gap between the policy pain and the policy gain. And that gain is what Nigerian people are waiting for.