Adebayo: Tinubu Is Not the Only Alternative Nigeria Has
The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, in a chat with journalists at the maiden edition of the Prince Adewole Adebayo Christmas Marathon in Ondo town spoke on the state of the nation and other sundry issues
Many people believe that the hardship in the country today was caused by the subsidy removal and the floating of the naira. People have been saying that until the government reverses those two policies, things will not be better in this country. Do you share that belief?
It is an exaggeration. Even before President Bola Tinubu came, there were problems. We had problems with our economy, even under the colonial government because of the satellite structure of our economy where the British wanted us to be producing raw materials for their industries in Liverpool and other places, we had structural economic problems. In the First Republic, we had impediments, if you studied national development plan, first one, 60-65, we had import substitution, industrialization, we had problems there as well, especially the funding of those policies. During the military time, we had a terrible economic situation because of grid collapse, we did not even have electricity, it cannot be that Nigeria was a paradise, and Tinubu came and it became a hell. Tinubu’s problem is trying to decapitate somebody who is complaining of migraine. All he needed to do was to give the person pain reliever and try to give other therapy that will make the migraine go down. But they worsen what they met. They are not responsible for all of it. Anybody who took over from Buhari was already sure to have ill-luck because Buhari alone, just in one transaction wasted N3.7 trillion by ways and means. Goodluck Jonathan almost finished everything before Buhari came. It was a succession of issues. Obasanjo handed over a fairly robust reserve, but he wasted money in his eight years without infrastructure. He left with undone jobs — East-West road, Niger Bridge, Kaduna- Kano road, rail lines, electricity — all those things he didn’t do. So, Tinubu met a fairly parlour economy, but he made it worse because he did not understand economics at all, and he is an accountant, who understands finance, those that if I meet N20 billion, I raised it to N30 billion, adding 10 billion. But if you have to damage N100 billion to get an additional N10 billion, he is not aware of that, and he has no economists in his team at all. Wale Edun is a banker, if you are a rich man and you have a lot of money, and you want Wale Edun to place them all over the world for you, as an investment banker, he can do it very well. If you are in business and you want loan, he knows where the lenders are all over the world but he doesn’t understand the multiplier effect in economics.
Many have accused the judiciary of committing infractions. What do you think the government can do for the judiciary and judicial officers in terms of salaries or other emoluments to curb corruption?
Well, if you were a judge, and government wants to pay you more money, more salaries, and a lawyer like me say ‘don’t pay them,’ when they see me in court, they won’t be happy but I don’t think money is their problem, there is even too much of it already. Nigeria is not an industrialised country, you can’t pay your judges far more than you pay your cleaners. How much do you pay the teachers who train the judges? Judges are not from heaven, why should two brothers who went to school, one decides to be a lecturer, ones decides to be a judge why should the one who is a judge be paid better than the one who is a lecturer? Most people don’t use judges, everybody uses doctors, teachers, nurses, drivers. Most people don’t use judges, they don’t know what they do, they see them well-dressed like foreigners inside one room, the door is locked, they speak Latin, most people don’t go there, so why should all the resources of Nigeria go there? Judges should not suffer, they should not have fear that they will lose their jobs, they should not have cause not to be unable to pay their bills. But overall, if we improve inflation in the country, improve economy, and everybody uses less of their income to do basic things, it will affect judges positively. I think it is better for us to do the economy well because if you pay a judge very well, but you don’t pay the judges driver, how will the judge get to work. It is part of injustice in Nigeria, the elite just select themselves to tell you let’s pay the senators well so that they can be honest, they are all elite. Let’s pay the president more money, let’s pay governors allowances and pensions so that they will not steal while they are there. Everywhere elite are represented, they quickly say let’s pay them more but where the common people are, they will say let’s be patient we cannot afford it.
But the problem with the judiciary is that most Nigerians don’t even know them, they only know them through the election petition and other high profile cases, and one of the ways to help the judiciary is just to take this political question from them, so that if you take the political questions from them, they can go into backgrounds and they can be satisfied with people who need them. Most people’s encounter with the judiciary is at the magistrate level. Magistrates do most of the jobs and they are not even well paid, they don’t have good court rooms and all of that. How many people go to the Supreme Court of Nigeria? The practice in America is that the Supreme Court can decide which case to hear and not to hear, they are not peoples court, they are just up there. The same thing the Nigerian Supreme Court, even though by constitution, any question of law or final judgment, they can force it on them but they don’t hear them for many years. If you bring your appeal to me, 10 years you are still in the Supreme Court, so I think, if you ask anybody who says the judiciary is bad, he never had a case before. He has never been a witness before, it’s just that he supports SDP; SDP loses an election, and SDP also loses the petition, so he is annoyed. Have you read the judgment? No, so if you want to help the judiciary, take them away from election matter, create a constitutional court that does not have regular judges, judges who have retired because election petition is so simple, it is so simple to the extent that you don’t have to be too intelligent to decide the winner, it is a simple arithmetic. So, you can now take it to constitutional court, where you have retired justices, very senior lawyers who no longer practice, you put them there, you constitute them ad hoc, they hear the case after and they stand dissolved till the next election time. That will allow the regular judiciary who are doing a good job in other areas to continue to do that. But more importantly, the laws have to be just, most laws in Nigeria are not just, even before the law gets into the judiciary, it is already a bad law, so where laws are bad, the judges are supposed to do justice. Let’s say for example, like this your camera now, we don’t know who is the owner, but anybody who produces a receipt with their name on it, law says that is the owner of the camera, whether he forged the receipt or whatever, the judge will say he produced a receipt, ‘see that the camera belongs to him, according to the law, I presume that he is the owner’. So the judge is not able to know who the real owner is. It is through the evidence you give that will invalidate that he is not the owner of the camera, if the evidence is done by the word of the mouth, he won’t get it even if it is true. Our laws are foreign to us, and so many other things in the jurisprudence. Nigerians are still behaving as if the British are still here. When we go to court, we even put wig so that we can look like British people, the way they used to do in the time pass. Our court system is done that way.
So there are many areas as president, when you appoint an Attorney-General, not regular, there are many areas you have to make reforms, the laws will resemble the culture of the people and, judge will be forced to reason like a Nigerian. There is a saying among those who go to law school, a judge must reason like a man on a Clapper bus, Clapper is an area in London, where common people live, and common people take bus to go there, they say a judge must reason like a man on Clapper bus. Even when I was at Ife, and they were teaching, when my teacher said that I must reason like a man on Clapper bus, I said why must I think like a man on Clapper bus? Why can’t I think like a man on Lagere bus. Lagere is in Ife, he said, ‘well that is up to you, what is written there, you must reason like a man on Clapper bus.’ An average Nigerian does not reason like a man on Clapper bus because they don’t know where Clapper is.
What do you think the National Judicial Council (NJC) should do concerning the controversy surrounding election petitions?
There are three things I can say. One, there is nothing the NJC can do because the NJC is not set up to interfere with wrong or right decisions of a court. The NJC is to address say corruption, abuse, if you are over-aged, and you lied. If you are not qualified, and you lied. If you collected bribe, if you were too harsh, you threw somebody out of your court who didn’t do anything wrong. But the way our law is, judges are entitled to reason according to the law and the fact, but because it is a reasoning process, it can be faulty, you can make an error, the law may escape the judge . The judge can make an error, the judge can mishear something. I have been to court before where my client wrote a petition against a judge and that matter went all the way. When we got to the Court of Appeal in Enugu, Justice Okebe, highly intelligent, fantastic judge, one of the best in the world, in his judgment mistakenly said it was my opponent that wrote the petition, he criticized him thoroughly, whereas it was my client who wrote the petition, that was an error, it was an honest error, other two justice by his side didn’t pay attention because that criticism was not part of the judgment, nobody paid attention to it. It shows to you that judges can make mistakes.
Secondly, Nigerians from my experience as a lawyer who has done election petitions, as a person who has paid attention to it, as a person who has also contested an election, Nigerians don’t go to judiciary for justice in election matter, they go to the judiciary for the confirmation of the person they support. If the judiciary doesn’t confirm that person, he is already biased, so it is a game. Politics is an emotional game, it is a game of bias. If a referee awards a penalty to the team you support, with a little push, you say it is good, but if your own person tackles somebody to the ground, and the person is limping, they award a penalty, you will say the other person is acting. So politics is an emotion. Politics is not rational. The voters don’t vote for the best person, they vote for the person they like, it is a game of bias. So if you didn’t start with merit, how will you end with merit? That is why in other places they don’t like the court to judge politics because they know that it is emotional, they don’t bring it to the court. Even when you go to court in America or the UK, they don’t determine who is the winner, but they can give a little interpretation of an aspect of the law that an average person cannot interpret.
If you look at the famous US case, Gore vs Bush, go and read it. When we were doing Buhari’s case, and I was representing Yar’Adua, they kept shouting Gore vs Bush, I looked at them, I said I’m an American lawyer, you Nigerians are not. You don’t know anything. If you go to that judgment where the did the U.S. Supreme Court say Bush was the winner? In the USA, court cannot answer a political question but you can go to court and say is this ballot counted according to the law of Alabama? Because it was counted with a machine and the law of Alabama said it must be counted by hand, they must interpret that aspect, the law says it must be counted by hand therefore, it must be counted manually by hand. Whatever the consequences of that, you go and sort it out there. In the case of Gore vs Bush, Bush said it must be recounted that the county vote must be recounted and the county clerk said I cannot recount it by hand, if I recount it by hand the time of the return of the election will not be met, and Gore went to the Supreme Court and the Bush escalated the case, and the US Supreme Court had to decide one issue only, whether a candidate can ask for a recount by law, he said not all votes are equal nationwide, if other votes are, you cannot be insisting. By and large of this is that the judiciary cannot come out on a good note to determine who is the winner in an election. Most people complaining against them are complaining not because the law is good or bad, even in the last election, something as basic that we lawyers know that the law says that FCT is not a state, it is clear there however a certain aspect of it became controversial.
The point is that elections are so badly conducted that with the nature of your complaints that you cannot get justice from the court. On many occasions, if you look at what people consider to be the concept of justice, a good judge, you will consider Solomon, a good judge where Solomon had to determine who was the mother of a child. One said cut the child into two, give me one part and give the other person the other part, the other person said don’t cut the baby into two, if you don’t believe me give the baby to the other person and the baby will be alive.
Solomon came to the conclusion that this other person who had the compassion, was the mother of the child. Now in our case, neither of them will be the mother of the child, because if Solomon gave to any of them, he had already lost the case because the real mother could have been locked up somewhere, and that there might not even be a baby at all, so it is just a doll dressed like a baby.
The long and short of it is that elections start to get rigged before they begin, they won’t follow the due process from the primaries. It is from the primaries that the parties will start having delegates and they will be bribing them. The media who supposed to cover campaign will follow the person who gave them the most money, they won’t follow the other person who has ideas, give candidates the access to present their case, media will not do that. So, essentially, elections already have problems far before the elections are held. Campaign financing, people don’t pay attention to that where the candidate can raise money from any criminal source and spend any amount far above the legal limits. When you put all of these together, by the time you go to the tribunal, you hardly complain about what happened on the election day, and the tribunal only listens to what happens on election day, but most problems with the election, far before the election, that is why it is difficult to use the judiciary to resolve electoral dispute. I recommend that overall, we should improve our elections, and the way to do them is to follow the law from the beginning. The umpire has no interest beyond the rules and people who are privileged to play a role in elections should jettison personal gains including selling your votes, take bribe and stuff like that. Lastly, in an election, everybody who participates should understand that you have the right to participate, you don’t have the right to win, except when you actually win. It is not every election that you lose that somebody has cheated you or anything or the cheating why you lost, it is mix of things, none of it judiciary can resolve.
But don’t you think many Nigerians are hopeful ultimately about the policies of the Tinubu’s administration?
Nigerians should be hopeful at all times, even if there is no government. During the civil war, people had no food, they had no security, they should be hopeful because hope is one thing you can invest in yourself. So, you can be hopeful despite bad governance. You can be hopeful despite unserious leaders, you can be hopeful despite bad policies. So, being hopeful should not be conditional, hope is what you need not give up but if there is not much to hope for in the government, that government will also go. Whatever President Tinubu is doing, whatever he fails to do, he is not the only alternative Nigeria has. He has a limited period of four years, so the hope should go beyond that; even while he is there, the policies that he is implementing are not the only policies that he can implement, so there is a lot of hope. If you are going on a journey, and you have a bad vehicle, you still hope that there are other vehicles you can take. If you have a bad driver, there are other drivers you can take, so, your hope is not invested in one government, your hope is not invested in one individual, it is not invested in one period because the country is continuous, on that basis, Nigerians have a very good reason to be hopeful.
Many people have commended the president’s media chat, what is your take on this?
People will commend the president, the same thing you see in a family, where you have a six-year-old who has not been speaking, but the day he calls baba, everybody will be excited about it because they were already losing hope that this child may never speak, but after a while that this child has already spoken, this will wear off because the president is not a ceremonial masquerade that speaks only on Christmas Day and October 1, he is a public servant that gives account of his activities, who has to convince his employer, that is the people, that he is on the job, and that he understands what he is doing, and also understands the effects of what he is doing for the people, that he knows that he is leading other people, he is not a sole administrator. Under the constitution, he is the sole secretary but he has since looked beyond that to appoint lesser executive under him, and that he is supervising them. If what he said on that day, many of which I disagree with, but if what he said that day represents the day he came to power, if that is what he has to say in several months, almost one and a half years, I’m not impressed with that. The presidential media chat should be routine, should be done regularly. President should answer questions on a day-to-day basis, to convince the people that he understands what he is doing; understands the philosophy behind his actions, he knows the implications and he has a kind of vision on what he wants to do, and I assume that the media will not go there like Christmas guests, who are being polite to their host, they should go there and do their own job too. Overall, I’m not impressed. But that the president can speak, it is great.
Does that mean you agree with the president’s submission during his media chat that the government is doing very well?
I don’t agree because he is not in government, he is only in power, he is not using the power to govern. He is slightly better than President Muhammadu Buhari, who was neither in government nor in power, but Tinubu is in power not in government. He is using the power for other things, so he is not able to know what it means to say the government is doing well. He missed the opportunity to set up a sound government. He had some talents, but he missed the opportunity to use those talents in the country, even within his own party. I’m not saying he should leave his political party and look for talents. Even within his political party, he did some patronage within his followers, but he has not used the strongest hands; the most clever hands; and the most agile bodies, and he is not using the best ideas. He is wasting opportunities. So, if he says, the government is doing well, I can understand because he is not in government he is in power, and anywhere he goes, everybody gravitates towards him. But in FCT for example, that is one area you can say you see a sign that they want to govern, the minister that he put there, and the one in Interior, I think the two ministers are making serious attempts to govern, outside that, I’m sorry, there is no sign that they want to govern. So, I don’t agree with him that his government is doing well.
Did you feel bad losing the 2023 election?
I was sad that we lost the election because of the kind of government we would have brought into existence. Not sad for me personally but I was sad it was another wasted opportunity. But I knew that the system, the way it was being played was not sincere. On October 1, 2021, on a live programme in Abuja, I told them that it was a bad idea to rely on electronic transmission because INEC could shut the server, and I said many other things. I knew we were going to be in trouble in 2023 when I saw the amount of money people were spending in primaries. SDP was one of the few parties that did not pay money to delegates. Many parties paid delegates in dollars, I don’t know any delegates who came to me and said ‘give me money’. I saw other political parties where they were even budgeting $50,000. For people like that, if they can do that in their primaries, what would they do in the general election? Look at the spendings on delegates, many of them are far in excess of what is allowed by law. So when we lost the election, I wasn’t satisfied but I knew that with the nature of what went wrong, many things would go wrong. So, when we lost the election, I knew they were not the things you could tender in court. So, I can’t go to the court and complain all these things I told you now, they are not tenable under election petition. I should only complain about the returning officer, balloting, most of the crimes was already committed even before that date, that is why I felt it is better to do advocacy. Lastly, let me state it for the last time that in 2023, there was nothing the justices at the Supreme Court could have done because all of them who went to court were liars. The petitioners were lying, the respondents were lying, court could not do anything for them.
Quite a sizeable number of people believe you are a presidential material but your platform (SDP) was not a popular party with the people. Is that right?
People have a wrong attitude because if you are trying to change the country, you build a platform to change it. If you try to be in government at all cost, the best party to go to is APC, because they have all the means, they have the attitude, and they have no scruple about how to grab power. So, if you want to get into government at all cost and you don’t care how you get there, go to APC. If you have money and you want to use the money to buy anything, go to PDP. You can remove the chairman this night, if you want. After the election, I started talking to my fellow candidates and people who worked with them, they were talking about how much they lost, I didn’t lose one per cent of that. I know what I invested, I even spent more money on the election of others in my party than on my own because there is no way I can give you money to vote for me or to support me, I believe that I’m offering myself. For that reason, many people said you should have gone there because you have the talent. But if you get to the government in a wrong way, go and find out Buhari’s government especially, Jonathan government this one that is there now, many people with talents when they get to government, they look foolish. That is why you don’t want a situation whereby you over-expose yourself to all these people. When you get to government, you spend all your time trying to pay them. You should go with comrades who believe in you, who believe in the country. If you get there, that attitude which you campaigned, that volunteerism, how you campaign, how you get to power will determine how you are going to govern. If godfather put you there, you will not have peace because the godfather will also want to remove you, telling you what to do, what side of bed you must sleep, so easy comes, easy goes. If you are funded by businessmen, businessmen want more money, you can’t ask them to pay tax, they want waivers, you can’t ask them how to do their business according to the law because they put you there. You can’t ask bankers that gave you billions to stop stealing billions from their customers, excessive COT and all of that. These are all the problems that will make you not to select quality people, because the person that gave the most money sends you a list of morons to make ministers in important places . A governor who stole state’s money gave it to you, who rigged the election for you in the state, you go and put him in charge of critical sector, he continues his governorship there. These are all the problems that we want Nigerians to understand. You must give signal to the political class that this is what you want because politicians will make heaven because all the prayers against politicians won’t work.
Presently, the opposition to the ruling party appears very weak, what is the SDP doing to collaborate with other parties to ensure that there is a very strong opposition to APC?
There is no strong government. How can there be strong opposition? The issue is that we are no longer in the parliamentary system, where the opposition is in parliament. I would have been a leader of the opposition party in the parliament because everybody who would be in government would be in the parliament. So the opposition we have is the opposition of ideas, not opposition of government to government, so where my ideas differ from that of the APC, which is a lot, I canvass it, that is the role of opposition. I don’t need to oppose them on the street. If you are doing something that you are not supposed to be doing, I will speak to the nation that what they are doing in government now is not right, it is not supposed to be done while we are there, we will not do it, these are the reasons it should not be done. if you are not doing something well, we will come out and say these things they are doing, they are not doing well. This is how it should be done, this is how we would have done it, and for that role I cannot praise myself and I cannot praise SDP, but that role we are playing. You will see me talking about not only in the media, you will see me practising in it, you will see Shehu Gabam, National Chairman of the SDP, is on air, he is the most visible of the party chairmen, talking on issues, talking on policies. So, we are doing our part, we will do more if there is any area we need to do more, but I think the main job or the main role of the opposition is to do things differently, not just to criticize. If you look at how we conducted our own primaries compared to how APC and PDP did their own, if you see how we campaigned compared to how they campaigned, if you see how they behaved compared to how we behaved, even in governorship elections, even in states we are strong like Kogi and co. If you see how we recruited our candidates, these are the alternatives that we give. But about joining the other parties or forming a grand opposition against APC, you come together based on ideas, it is more logical for PDP, Labour Party and others to join the APC and support themselves. In a way, they form an alliance already because there is a unspoken alliance between the APC and PDP because when Nyesom Wike was made FCT Minister, he took the permission of the PDP to accept the appointment, and the PDP gave him go ahead. And when you look at the National Assembly, APC has the PDP support, so I don’t blame them for that because their ideologies are similar. So if you are asking us to form an opposition, stronger or bigger opposition, it has to be with people with similar ideas, it doesn’t sound logical for me to oppose APC policies on subsidy removal and go and join PDP to do it, PDP also believes in it.
It is not sensible for me to oppose APC policy regarding foreign exchange, and then go and join Labour Party that believes in that same thing, so it is the people of similar minds that can come together. But all political parties can be interacting so that some parties can change their minds and see a point, but until that time when you all agree together, you cannot form opposition. What they have been calling opposition is the marriage of convenience, the conspiracy to take power. Where you don’t agree with one another and you don’t make efforts to agree with one another, it is just let us gang up and collect the power. When you get there, you will have crisis because you will be forced to be in government, you will be forced to serve somebody you disagree with, that is why we are not interested at all. We are not interested in joining APC because we don’t agree with them on many ideologies, we don’t agree with their attitudes, we don’t agree, neither their temperament in government, and we believe that we should have an alternative against them. Anybody who cannot agree with the APC, who says he agrees with the PDP is confused because they are the same thing, not only in terms of ideologies, in terms of personnel. So how can you say I don’t agree with APC, but I agree with PDP? Everybody in government, apart from the president and vice-president, everybody in government today, was in the PDP before. Whether you are a Senate President, whether you are a secretary to the government, whether you are Minister of Works whatever you are a Minister of Defence. We try to talk to the Nigerian people that we try to promote alternative politics. One advantage of alternative politics is that you only need the people, once the people believe in you and they can take the initial risk with you, you are also in government that is what we are working towards, and we are long term about it, we are patient about it.
Until you joined politics, little was heard about you what were you doing before now?
Well, I was doing good citizenship. I tried to visit a lot of countries. In Nigeria, I tried to make a lot of contributions. As far back as 1999, if you go to TV and radio stations, you will know what I was doing, even in terms of contributions. You know typically, if you come out to run for mayor in a city, even in London, a counsellor, no media man will ask you because they already know it, not to talk of you want to run for president of Nigeria, what your mother was doing when she was 10 years old, the media will know, but here, the media ask the candidates himself, but they tell a lot of lies, so we have gotten to a point where media should invest in background information about candidates, even if there are things candidates want to run away from, like what you did in primary school, they will know. Basically, I have been a lawyer, I have been practising both in Nigeria and oversea. If you go to the Supreme Court of Nigeria, and read law reports, you will find dozens of Supreme Court cases that I argued. In the Nigeria Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, there are 100s, and countless in the High Courts, likewise in the U.S ., Washington DC, Federal Court District, Washington and other places, if you go to Supreme Courts in Australia, you will see my law practice. Many of my colleagues, like I said during the Nigeria Bar Association that I don’t need to talk here because other presidential candidates talked, you are my colleagues, you should know my character indices, sometimes we are on the same side, sometimes we are on opposite sides. Judges see me practise before them, so I can’t go to the NBA where I belonged and say I’m a good person. Just by hearing my voice, you should know; they should be the ones telling other people in my profession, I’m one of the excellent ones.
There is no former head of state who was in government when I was already a full adult, who you will accost and say ‘did the Prince tell you something about governance, did he try to help you?’ None of them can deny, they will say, ‘yes.’ Since 1999, there is no head of state that I did not do something for, trying to help in this or that area. I have never gotten a government contract before, I have not been paid government salary before. There is no government that will say he didn’t try to help us. That is what I have been doing, and when I saw that it was the turn of my generation to lead. I looked at the leaders and said okay, whatever your opinion about them, their time is gone; in our generation now, what do we do? We need to start to come out and offer leadership instead of offering advice. The role now is reversed. Those who we used to try to help in governance, we used to assist, now need to step back and also be offering us advice.
You just held the maiden edition of the annual Prince Adewole Adebayo Christmas Marathon, what is this initiative about?
The initiative is not going to be just a marathon, the marathon is just what we did, but I’m interested in sports talents and all of that and I thought that it would be a good thing for Nigerians to engage in sporting activities because sports, music, entertainment, all the way by which you can transform poor people within one generation to stardom. We are in talents period of human history now. Education, we do that a lot, sports, we are trying to do that a lot now. These are all the areas to reduce poverty. Secondly, sport teaches discipline, because discipline is a problem in Nigeria and anybody who can run marathon is a disciplined person. We also want Nigeria to feature in the sporting calendar globally, by next year, we want to get to where the Olympics international body will recognize our marathon event. This event will take place same period every year, same 30th December. The thing will take place for the next 1,000 years, it will be regular. We found out after the race that the person who came second is from Benin Republic. Some runners from Kenya were also available even though they arrived late due to flight issue. We hope that they will come next year. We had a 14-year-old who had never ran marathon before, who registered. We said he was too young, and he started crying and we said okay, two of them competed ahead of adults. When we took them to the palace where they were all recognized. The a 14-year-old who never thought he could be recognized, was recognized in the palace, to the point of being honoured with garlands. Those are the things we are trying to do with the marathon. People came all over the world, all over Nigeria within the community and different age groups and all of that. These are things we can do without waiting for the government for anything.
How would you describe the year 2024, and what is your projections for 2025?
To me, 2024 was a good year, speaking from a personal point of view. It was a good year, once you are alive. It was a good year for me as a professional, but to the country, it was a mixed year. We had a lot of good things, but it was also a challenging year, because of the continuation of the economy we inherited last year, and the other social issues. On security, it was the year the Emir of Gobir was killed. It was the year we had major challenges. It was towards the end of 2024 that we had tragedies in Ibadan, Okija, and Abuja, over the distribution of foods and other things. So, it was a very tough year for the Nigerian people. That was the year they felt the bigger impact of the policies of 2023. We saw a lot of prices rising as a result of inflation, we saw the exchange rates fluctuating, and on the macroeconomic scale, unemployment and all of that, but it was also a good year for Nigerians in the sense that we had no serious community clashes. I don’t think we had serious religious unrest in 2024, and what we are just facing is just the normal consequences of governance methodology.
You appear to be fond of white colour, your houses, your wears, and other things you have, are in colour white. Any special reason for sticking to one colour? Why is it that you do not wear wristwatch?
I’m attracted to white because it is easy for me to detect if it is not clean. It also depicts transparency. I don’t like something to be unclean or dirty, white lets you to know that this is unclean. As a lawyer, I wear white and black, white symbolizes transparency, that is the way I see it. As regards wristwatches, the original purpose of a watch in the time past was to tell you the time, but now, there are many ways to get the time, so I don’t see any reason, carrying an additional burden on my body that does not do function for me. I even inherited some watches from my parents and grandparents, I look at them now as museum pieces. I’m even told that some of them are quite expensive, that if I bring them out some people would want to buy them. Wristwatches have been overtaken by telephones and so many other things, even your camera has time piece. Wrist watches have become an obsolete thing. The same reason I don’t ride horses. You can see horses in my compound, but if I’m going from Ondo to Lagos, I go in my car, the watch is obsolete like a horse.
What was your growing up like, how close were you to your parents? How much of influence did they have on you?
Well, growing up was very good. I thank God for the family I come from, that is already an advantage. When you are born into a family that wants to take care of you, they have a long history of being together. The government was better at that time because I was born during the time of Gowon, I was born in 1972, and that time, many people were great. When I was born, people like Femi Okunnu, Shehu Shagari and many others who took government seriously, were in government. Clement Isong was the governor of the Central Bank when I was born, you can’t be luckier than that. Imagine you had a child now under Emefiele. These were the people who knew the public service in the country. I come from a royal family that has been around for close to 2,000 years. However, I lost my dad when I was two years and three months old but you wouldn’t know in the royal family because you will not feel it. All the children of the palace, we were growing up, we had aunties, uncles and I knew my great-grandmother. When I was born, I had a great-grandmother, grandmother and my mother. For example, I did not change address from the day I was born till I finished my postgraduate and I became a lawyer in America, I had one address. It gives you stability as a child when you don’t have to change of address. Your address remains the same. So, before they collapsed the entire postal system, as an adult, I would still get letters posted to my address. That gives stability. The schools were very good. To show you how committed Ondo State was, when I was in secondary school, about a quarter of my teachers were foreign teachers. In fact, more than half because it was a Catholic set up school. When the Ondo State government took over, before long, they discovered that some of the Catholic priests left, and there was a shortage. The Ondo State government went to India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and other places where they had better teachers, and brought them. Nowadays, when I look at what people pay in private schools, we paid nothing, but the state government went to find these teachers because they thought we were weak in sciences. Many of our science teachers were foreigners. They were training the teachers but if they saw any gap, they would bring foreign teachers.
And then, when I was 18, I was admitted to Ife to study Law. Though my aunties, my grandparents who went to Ife would say Ife was better in their day, but it was very good in my day because I remember that when I wanted to become a lawyer in America, and I was studying, almost everything that I was reading, the statement of the law, all of them were available already at Ife. If you go to Ife now, Oluwasanmi Library, I don’t know if they have not removed them. But then, you would see Nebraska School Law Report, you would see Harvard Law Report, if you graduate in Ife, you would have all those exposure. Even public libraries, my uncle had a public library in town, we would go there and study, so library was everywhere. I think when I was studying for JAMB, I scored the highest nationwide in Economics, so it was because my uncle had a library, and when I was studying for my JAMB, I would go there to study Economics. There was a section in the economics book that I was reading, and it was giving me serious headache each time I read those books, I would come back and read them again, so it just occurred to me after I had finished about 10 of them, why do these books have so many graphs? I would calculate the graphs, I just looked at the back, I discovered that they were specially prepared for PhD students, but I was in secondary school, they were in a section there but I used to read them but I was having serious headache so, I would go back, look at the graph, calculate, do everything and all that. So any economics test it was just like straight forward.
I did my NYSC in Kogi State, I had a good experience practising law. Then, children don’t need much, children only need environment of safety, and environment where you can have friendship with adults, where you can go confidently and talk to an adult. When my great-grandmother died, my grandmother was the one taking care of me, I saw my mum like a young girl because I was raised by aged people. My grandmother taught me how to read and write, even before I started primary school. The idea was that you had confidence, you were trained as if you were playing. If you ran into something and broke it, the only requirement was to report yourself, if you report yourself, no punishment, we understood that with my grandmother, anything you did, go and report yourself before she discovered, as she was coming back, just say, “as I was playing here, I broke this window, she would say what kind of play is that, don’t do that again.” But if she discovered, there was punishment, why don’t you report yourself. The worst was, if she discovered and you denied. We understood the rules the same thing when I was at college, as a bunch of kids, you could gather yourself together and go to a teacher or principal and say this mango is ripe, we want to harvest it, they would tell you ‘come on Wednesday,’ if you came and they look at it and it was ripe, they would tell you to go and harvest it, and share it. But if you were found without asking, and you threw a stone, that would be the end of your career, they would expel you from the school.
With that kind of orientation, you realize that you can succeed by just being simple, honest. That is how I saw it. If my child comes to me and says ‘I’m not the one,’ ‘I would say go,’ he didn’t do it, I don’t investigate because when I was growing up, if they asked you, ‘have you done this?’ and you say ‘yes,’ they would leave you, you know the consequences of you being discovered later, having done it is huge, it is like having killed someone. So that confidence is there.
I come from the family of service who don’t serve themselves. If you put your children in school, it is not an achievement, it is when you put children of other people in school. That for many generations of people who are just to serve, there is no personal achievement people recognize, you can’t come to my family and buy a big car, people won’t look at it, they have more respect for your cousin who graduated and went to a village to be teaching, they will appreciate him more, this person is making sacrifice somewhere. Growing up was good.
How did you meet your wife?
I met my wife in the line of work. All my things are in the line of work because you know in the National Assembly, it is not only today they have been a pain in the neck. I was a lawyer to a U.S. company, Colgate, they had an investment in Aba, at that time. One of my clients was the MD of Guinness at a time, because he had worked in Colgate, he left Colgate to become the MD of Guinness. The National Assembly was investigating them repeatedly, in my view unjustifiably, but in my wife’s view correctly, because my wife was the lawyer to the Senate Committee, so they would call us today, we would go there, we would argue, it was a contentious hearing. On one of the occasions, it took us to Senate Committee of Police Affairs and my wife was a lawyer to that Committee, when we went to Hilton after the break, I was telling my client, don’t worry, we will win this case, and I will marry their lawyer, everybody laughed. I think towards the conclusion of that hearing, because when I first saw her, she was very serious, my wife is 10 times serious than me. When I met her, I talked to her, she talked to me more professionally, I asked to know her, she didn’t show any interest, but towards the end of the case, we were going, I think she just took pity on me and said, ‘you, bring your number,’ I got her my number and she said ‘if I need you, I will call you.’ Later in the evening, she called me, she asked ‘are you in Abuja?’ I said yes, she was staying in Maitama, she said come to a street, I went to her and she said let’s go and have a drink. We went out, she started asking me questions, interviewing me like a job applicant. After a while, she came to see my office where I was working, and then we continued like that and here we are.
What are your regrets in life?
I made mistakes, most of my mistakes are easy to correct, so I don’t regret. Sometimes, I’m not be nice to somebody, I just go to the person and apologize. I have not made a permanently irreversible mistake. Like my wife tends to be right, she would advise me don’t do this, I still go ahead and do it and when the consequences come, I would realize that she had advised me. She is not the type that would say, I told you so. She would still sympathise with me when the wahala comes, I would say remember you advised me not to do this. I don’t have regrets but I have errors. I try to correct the errors, for example, during the last election, Kwara State that was the state that liked me the most, and Nasarawa and Adamawa, but I didn’t have time to honour Kwara, they were calling me come to Kwara, come to Kwara, this and that, I didn’t see Kwara as a state with large vote, I would spend time in Kano. Kwara would hold rally, I would not go, I would send somebody, at the end of the election, Kwara gave us the highest votes, even though INEC said we scored 22,000 votes but when I investigated the result, we scored 122,000. So, I went to Kwara after the election to stay there, I helped them campaign for their governorship, I apologized for not coming and everything, and so instead of regretting that I neglected them, I tried to do that, after I lost the election, I went there to work with them and I still go there. Now in Kwara, they know that even if they are doing something tiny, and they call me, I would come. In Nasarawa, I corrected my mistakes and so many other things. I’m very good with apologizing to people, I correct many of my mistakes, if I make wrong investments, and I lose the money, I will go and work harder. Like after the election, I saw first all my mistakes before I talked about Yakubu. I saw first my own mistakes before I saw the mistakes of my party. I first saw my own mistakes before I saw the mistakes of my agents, I try to correct all my own mistakes before I tell you your own mistakes. I don’t regret. My be I should be more careful because as you grow older in life, there are some things you cannot reverse, like when my daughter told me that I don’t spend enough time with them. If you don’t change that, you can regret because the child will soon be an adult and it will be too late to correct, but ordinarily, I don’t regret.
How do you relax?
I’m relaxed talking to you now. Basically, I have interest in sports, but one of my ways of relaxing now is to stay at home because my work takes me round the world. So if you check my airline accounts, even before I joined politics, my airlines will call me million miles, my boarding pass has million miles on it. An airline will recognize you once you fly over a million miles, that is a lot of miles. But when I’m home that is relaxation. Some people say when they want to relax they travel and go to places, may be they work in the office all the time, but for me, when I want to relax, I stay at home. Second to that is that I relax by doing sports, even at Ife, I was a football coach for the years I was in Ife. I have interest in sports, I play soccer. I used to have serious interest in boxing but my wife is not happy with it. She is a very good boxer. I have interest in farming. I’m a farmer, and if I was to be judged as a farmer, I’m one of the top farmers in Nigeria because I farm a lot. For many years until recently, even in this compound, we were not buying food, we were doing a lot of farming. I have ranches in the north. I do forestry, I plant a lot of trees, outside politics now, my aim is to plant at least 100,000,000 in my life time.
