What has your party, the SDP, been doing since the 2023 elections?
Well, what we have been doing after the election is to let people know that the conversation continues, because while we were campaigning, part of our talking points was for the immediate electorate. Most of it was for a longer vision about the country and it wouldn’t matter who won the election or who lost the election. Some issues would not leave us. And the earlier we build consensus around those issues the better so that hopefully they will not be subject of campaign.
We are probably one of the few countries in the world that are still campaigning about corruption. Every decent person knows that corruption is not good. It’s not a political programme. It is admitted by most people in the world that a corrupt society will not go anywhere. So, if we all agree about that, no one will choose a president with respect to the attitude towards corruption because all presidents, all presidential candidates, all politicians and all leaders at different levels of our national life will agree that corruption is bad. The fact that we need to be united around certain principles, like fairness, justice, equity and rule of law, should not make them political programmes.
Are you still in the SDP or in another party now? What are your political leanings, thoughts, and plans for 2027?
I joined the SDP in 1991 when I was 19 years old and even when the party was banned, I didn’t join any other party. As close as I was to those who were running the PDP in those days, I didn’t join the party even though some of them were my clients. I have relationships with some of them, and when they started this APC, I didn’t even consider it for a second. So, basically, the only party, the only political party I’ve ever joined in my life is the SDP, which I joined when I was 19 years old, and that’s where I will remain, unless the party ceases to exist, but I can’t join any other party. I will remain in the SDP.
There were rumours that the SDP was working for the APC or open to negotiations. What do you have to say about that?
Well, we don’t know the rumours and talk, what I know is what the SDP is doing officially. I only participate in what the SDP is doing officially but what I find out is that people who are in political parties tend to have loyalty outside their political party. I think it’s part of the problems we try to solve by bringing more ethical leaders. But 100 percent of my own politics is done inside the SDP. And this day and time, there is no way you could have a relationship with people that there won’t be evidence of it. Either they will see you with them, you will take a photo with them, they will trace their money to you or they will trace the activity to you. So, if you really want to know where somebody belongs to, other than just passing rumour or propaganda, you will know.
There may be elements of people in the SDP who have sympathies for other parties but what we tend to do is when we catch them, we relegate them or expel them. But for the SDP, we know it has three different epochs. There was the SDP which I joined in 1991 which was the SDP of the third republic; that’s where you will see people like Rashidi Ladoja for example. He was our senator. You will see people like Lekan Balogun, Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar and so many of them like that, who were in the SDP at that time. So if you look around those who are in politics today, many of them were in the SDP.
There were two political parties at that time, the SDP and the National Republican Convention (NRC). It looks like those who went to the NRC are not as successful as those who went to the SDP; you don’t see many of the NRC people any more. But the SDP ones, you’ll find them in every policy. So, sometimes when we go out, when we meet them, this is always our party, we’re all together and things like that. So, if President Tinubu and many of the people around him still have that nostalgia about the SDP, that’s one epoch.
The second epoch of the SDP was when Chief Alaye came with Pat Utomi and so many of them like that, and they started and they revived the SDP. And so anywhere I go now and I say I am a leader of the SDP, Utomi is quick to say, ‘no, that’s my party. The position you are in now, I used to be there.’ So that’s the second epoch of it.
The third epoch is what we are doing now, which is the SDP of young people who don’t have the history of having occupied any office in the SDP. We just want to revive the little to the left principle of it, which incidentally coincides with chapter two for our constitution, fundamental objectives and direct principles of state policy.
How will the SDP build a strong, sincere party with an ethos and manifesto, given that most parties are just platforms for seizing power?
It is possible and it has happened. When it comes to Manifesto, you have the school of politicians and governors. You can ask the director to ask your students to analyse, do a comparative analysis of the manifesto and look at the SDP and juxtapose it against what the constitution says. So, the manifesto is okay for us, we are fine with the manifesto. And you also remember that our manifesto did not arise from an emergency company of words put together for election. It is the product of the Centre for Democratic Studies. So at that time, there was some ideological grounding that, along with the party, was founded. And I thank Chief Alaye, Professor Pat Utomi and others who, when they had the opportunity to create a new political party, decided to say, let’s go back to the SDP. Kofalaye was there, he ran for president on that platform.
So the ideology is okay. What is required is democratic patience, because in my background, we are asked to do revolutionary patience. Not everybody wants to be revolutionary like me, so we say democratic patience, which is that I am running for president on ideas. I will do my best to win based on those ideas and if I win, I will govern based on those ideas, but if I don’t win and my time passes, another person is coming to carry that torch. That’s why, Abiola is not here but I’m running on farewell to poverty and insecurity. I’m running on the last programme; we still play the same Abiola mantra, the same jingle we’re running now in Abuja for the area councils and for Dr Obinna who is running for the Abuja Metropolitan Area Council, AMAC. He came to me and he had done all his manifesto, logo and everything. It’s following the same thing which the SDP used when Wole Adesina won this election. The first election to elect the mayor of Abuja was won by the SDP in 1992. Same thing that he used to campaign; same logo was added to the Abiola, so it continues
The situation of our country is going to speak to our standing in the world and all of these things if they are the main reason you’re in politics I have no doubt that you would be patriotic and you will stay in your party and you’ll do what is right.
There are people in the party that I don’t even speak to at all. I don’t preach to them. I don’t speak to them because I know how their heart bleeds for the country. So, when they have reason to make a decision in the party, I don’t disturb myself. I know that what they are going to do is right. But there are other people whom we have to discuss with.
There was a candidate in one of our recent government relations. He just joined us, and for some reasons, the party leadership thought he should be the governorship candidate. I was overseas, I came back, I saw him and I said, okay. He said he wanted to meet with me. And he came with a brilliant way by which he could bribe voters. He knows the commissioner of police, he knows the United States, he knows this and that and that, and we can win the election. And I said, I’m sorry, we don’t want to win that way.
You know, if this is how you want to win, we cannot do it. So, he said in his former party, he used to help them, but they never made him a candidate. Now he has been made a candidate, he wants to help us. I said,’ I’m sorry, I can’t do it but talk to other people.’ And when he talks to other people, more and more people are saying, well, we can’t do it. You know, and recently, when they were putting together this coalition, they thought that maybe some of us were too rigid and we didn’t want to win. And when we started talking to other leaders in the party, the same question of ideology, purpose and credibility were being asked.
There are many people, old, young, male and female, who are committed to Nigeria and they’re working through the SDP.
What is your opinion of Nigeria at 65, the journey so far?
We started accidentally. There is no great philosopher or great thinker within our population who says, oh, let us all come together. Let me unite people. If you study the history of some kingdoms, some countries, some societies, it will be indigenous, maybe warring tribes, warring groups, disunited by many factors, by politics, but united by culture. And a great leader rises among them and says, let me unite my people. That’s not the history of Nigeria. The history of Nigeria is an external necessity for trade. So Nigeria started merely as a trade zone, just like these days you have a free trade zone and export processing zone; it’s a zone. It’s like the arbitrariness with which they created areas for discos. So we created Lagos disco, Ibadan disco, Benin disco, Yola disco, different discos, you know. So, that’s how Nigeria was to the Royal Niger Company. It was just a trade zone.
Let’s have this trade zone. And those trade zones were different kingdoms and communities and all of that. And somehow for the efficiency of the business, they decided to hand it over back to the British government and run it as a protectorate and part of it as a colony. And then after a while, they ran it as protectorates, you know, next to each other. In 1914, they said let’s amalgamate together. So, but 46 years later, the people who put it together just said, we’ve had enough of it, let’s see, let’s hand it over to the locals now. And young people who had never run anything before, but who were united by the philosophy that these are indigenous people, right from Herbert Macaulay in Lagos took charge. And those who gave a lot of trouble to Lugard and Clifford were called Trousard Negroes by Lugard, because he was highly irritated about them. And if you look at the way Lugard analyzed the elite who were asking for home rule, and asking that the British should leave, he considered them to be Trousard Negroes who had no knowledge of the country, who were in Lagos, sending their clothes through a dev star company to Liverpool to be laundered and well ironed and sent back to them in Lagos. And they didn’t know anywhere 100 kilometers north of Lagos. They didn’t know anything and he dismissed them. But over time, they organized a center of the Nigerian youth movement, they split into political parties, the NCNC, Action Group, Northern Peoples Congress, and within a short order, they were getting independence. So if you look at what happened in 1999, if you look at the period between when Obasanjo came in 1999 and now, it’s about the same period that the independence movement started, and we got independence within that short time. Without independence, we had people that were going to parliament who did not know anywhere 25, 30 or 100 kilometers away from the hometown. There was no sense in going to parliament in Lagos coming from, maybe, somewhere around Ikom which is now the Cross River State. Even when they went to Lancaster House to negotiate independence, they went there as strangers because I remember that my uncle represented Ondo at that conference and went with the Action Group delegation. And they were going there almost like the way Ukraine is going to meet Russia in Washington or somewhere or Switzerland. So, but somehow they managed, elections were held and all the promises that we had at that time, majority of the promises arose from the self-governance of the regions. But they managed to create a region in 1963, not only that, to declare a republic. So somehow, whether they knew what they were doing or not, the politics of that time made them declare a republic. We are now on our own. We have nothing to do with the British judicial system, British Privy Council and all of that. The Queen is no longer our head of state. Nnamdi Azikiwe, our Governor General, is now our President and head of state. But you know, we didn’t manage hard to join so far. Secondly, the First Republic was a disaster because dishonesty happened in the election. Corruption crept in; collection of 10 percent was introduced; streets were named. Half the people had not achieved anything. So the guys wanted to remove British colonial imprints but people like McGregor and all of that made Lagos liveable. You will see the McGregor Canal and all those streets named after engineers, volunteers, and many people who pioneered. They named the streets after themselves anyway. So, they were cheating each other, killing each other, criminality, and all of that. And then the Republic collapsed and the military took over. And for some reasons, the military too could not have a consensus. So, there were two coups in 1966. And we are still debating why we had two coups in 1966 but if we had questions about the first coup, the second coup was clear.
The second coup was meant to retaliate for the first coup. So, that was the end of a spirit of order regimentation in the Nigerian army because we had to take a young officer, Yakubu Gowon, to be head of state above his seniors. And for some reasons, all the training they got together in Sandhurst, all the marching together, all the training that Welby Everard gave them and all the officers, everything collapsed. And the two factions of the military caused the civil war and fought that civil war for a long time. And the civil war, we thought, was a very brutal one, not very good, no accountability, many victims of unlawful killing, rape, robbery, and maltreatment generally. They lived, some are still living, but some died without any compensation or any inquiry, because we ended up with the vicious statement of no victor, no vanquish. We didn’t set up any inquiry. So, impunity came into it and we got a series of poor demobilization, which led to armed robbery because they were going all over the place. So the military started to do coups against each other and then Obasanjo came with Murtala. Murtala started it and said; ‘Okay, you know what? We are going to have a transition to civil rule.’ And at that time, apart from Kashim Imam, who refused, almost everybody who was asked among the politicians of the first republic, starting with Awolowo, Kori Haripo, Enahoro, Joseph Tarka, Mallam Aminu Kano, many, many people who were in politics supported the military.
So that was the first unity of the political class with the military.
Then secondly, the intellectuals also served with the military. So by the time we were having the Constituent Assembly in 1977, the political class, the military, and the intellectual class, including people like Bala Usman, people like Chinua Achebe and many of them came together and said, there was a Constituent Assembly in 1977, and that Constituent Assembly was the foundation for switching from the parliamentary system to the presidential system, a one party national party. The last one who started making regulations for forming political parties was not as liberal as it was in the first republic where you and people in your village can form parties. But now the party has to be national. So, we’re trying to nationalize our politics. And we had a beautifully written constitution where F. R. A. Williams was chairman of the drafting committee; very sound constitutional lawyers joined them. And we had a Constitution, and in that Constitution is where we put Chapter 2, and also Chapter 4.
Chapter 2 contains fundamental objectives. What is our way of running? What’s our government about? What’s the principle behind the government? If you are going to the government, what’s the purpose of the government? So those issues were raised there. How do we manage our economy? How do we manage our resources? How do we manage opportunities? And the issue of national balance and all of that was put there. And then we have Chapter 4 of the Constitution, which was the Bill of Rights, fundamental rights and how to enforce fundamental rights, because of the abuse of fundamental rights, especially by the native authority police and by local chiefs and kings in those days in their courts. So if you read Awolowo’s path to Nigerian freedom and many of those things, you will see many of them and what the people of the Northern Element Progressive Union went through in the hand of the NPC in the North, and so on and so forth. So, we started to have the Western structure of the political party system, with FEDECO established in the constitution, and you can register now. And then, some national parties came out of it. Politicians went through many troubles when they were forming political parties. You had to think of someone from far away to be a member of your executive. You had to have structure in every state across the country, especially politicians from the north. The Northern People’s Congress never had a branch outside the north. They never had anything. They would only do alliance with the NCNC at the beginning. They would only do alliance with the democratic party, they would do alliance with South-South NNA people and all of that. So now we transited to the second republic with Shagari and the election was terrible as well because the military was learning on the election. We had the infamous two-third (2/3) argument with the Supreme Court. So, in the Second Republic, the Supreme Court decided who was the winner. It was not by consensus. And you can remember how Shagari managed in four years, three months; the economy was relatively poorly managed. There was a lot of corruption. Even though Shagari himself was not a man who was personally corrupt, he was permissive. Before Goodluck Jonathan, there was Shagari, a soft person who looked harmless on their own, but everybody around them took advantage and they were losing the country, one way or the other.
And then the military came back again, with Buhari. But, the most transformational aspect was when Babangida came. It was quite theatrical, he tried to run the military government as if it was a civilian government, even still with strong tactics, but with endless transition like that of Gowon. Endless transition that should have ended in 1990. But it continued and that’s how SDP-NRC came up and we found ourselves at a point where we conducted the 1993 election.
Then the intention of Babangida showed because when the election was successfully conducted, they annulled it and they had a terrible government which was very problematic for the country. There was an international crisis; NADECO was formed, and it was like the country was looking like Zaire or Congo. Eventually, Abacha died, and Abdulsalami came with an 11-month programme. We found ourselves having a civilian government but what do we have? We had a civilian government that was essentially military because the president that they gave to us wasn’t democratic. They trusted him and they brought him out and essentially he was already like a pretty dynamic candidate And if you look at the election results, it was very doubtful if the election result was what was used to determine who the winner was. And there are many people who have researched and can’t find the presidential election result. I’m not sure what his official result is. So, Obasanjo started using his own experience and he tried to mock some of the losers. And because he was under sanctions imposed on us during Abacha, he was able to get many of the sanctions off and the Congress started having a life. Obasanjo had experience about how to govern, but he was not a democrat. He’s not a democrat. Maybe, he is now a democrat, but he wasn’t as a head of state and as a president. He wasn’t because the 2003 election is one of the worst elections in Nigeria. You can go and get the notes of Jimmy Carter, who was asked to come and be an election observer. We thought that was bad enough, until 2007, when the winner said, this election leaves much to be desired. We’ve been having these bad elections like that for 26 years. The thing we’ve achieved is that we’ve continued to have a civilian system. We’ve not, the Nigerian elite have not woken up the militant wing to go and get their uniform and take over. I think all the crimes, vices, and evil that could be done are already permitted under the system. So there’s no need for you to break it, it’s already performing; they all remain there. So we, the democrats, are happy that we have had a broken civilian system but all the promises we’ve not been keeping them. Not one of the promises has been kept and not one administration, from Obasanjo to Yar’Adua to Jonathan Goodluck to Muhammadu Buhari, now to Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has kept the promise. But as bad as the presidential system has been, we are in more trouble at the subsidiary level. The governors have been worse than even the presidents. Today, the best government in Nigeria is still the Federal Government. The most accountable, even though they’re not accountable, but the most accountable is still the Federal Government. The National Assembly is totally betraying the people. They’re still the best legislative house in Nigeria because the rest are just there as the lapdog, the governors of the state; totally responsible. So this is where we are. That’s the journey of the country in politics. The journey of the country, the social history of Nigeria, is that we’ve managed somehow to domesticate certain virtues. Education, which unfortunately has too much of a Westernisation in it, but we’ve managed to domesticate that. And some of our brothers in the North who have a Middle Eastern orientation to education, who are on the Almajiri system, have also been very good in the curriculum and liturgy of Islamic education and they’ve given a good account of themselves. So we are a fairly educated society even though we have a large amount of people, especially the younger ones, out of school. The quality of the education has not been rising as much as it should but a bit of it has been attenuated by the paradigm subsidy of the global ICT revolution. So you could attend a polytechnic but if you have access to the internet you could have a peer review contribution to your education. You could be in a university, but you have access to some journals online and all of that, so you’re not limited to the physical library in your school or lack of it. So it has also made many of our young people to be able to pair very well with their peers in the world, but a vast majority of our people are left behind.
On the economic side, we’ve managed to mismanage ourselves completely because our GDP, the GDP of Nigeria today should have been the GDP of any state only, not even up to the GDP of Lagos or Oyo, or Kano, or Anambra, or Rivers so we have done poorly in our economy and there are three principal reasons for that. We’ve stolen and exported a lot of our wealth overseas and a lot of this wealth is now being frozen. Many of the people who took the wealth can’t invest well and they can’t recover a lot of the properties that they have there. So, we’ve exported our money. There are two parts of the exportation of our money. So many people will buy public servants so this money is taken away by families, friends and proxies. It is a loss to the economy. You will excuse me but our GDP is so small that a country of three million elsewhere has a bigger GDP than us. A country of 10, 20 or at most 60 million, has better GDP than us. So, it is our money being stolen and taken overseas. And the second part of the money being stolen is the money being stolen through over-invoicing and other wastages to foreign elements who come to help them take the money.
Before you can steal $1 billion, you have to let the foreigner to whom you are stealing it to exaggerate their entitlement to $10 billion and take the money away. All they are doing with solid minerals; they just come and take all the resources away and there’s nothing anybody is doing.
So now, the second reason our economy is doing poorly is lack of opportunities. We are not employing our people because the elites are claiming money they don’t need. Oil is big enough taxation so is solid minerals. They don’t really need you as long as they have enough money to buy houses on Island, buy estates in Dubai, buy houses in the best part of Europe, London and wherever. So I thought they have that; they don’t think that that is enough but they don’t realize that for Nigeria to be a country that can take out these people, we need to be budgeting about $300 to $350 billion annually in our federal budget. While at the states will do other things; I’m talking about federal budget a lot because when I did the calculation during my first time running for president, I realised that to meet the manifesto, to meet the objectives in the constitution as enunciated in chapter two, the budget needed to be $30 billion, and I had to continuously budget that. And I look at that year, the budget was 35 billion, so I had to budget 10 times more. And I started thinking, how are you gonna fund this so that I don’t look like a clown? And that’s what led me to that famous noise I was making regarding that majority of our crude oil at that time, 80 percent of the crude oil was being stolen. And then I see the amount being stolen in the solid minerals. And when you see the amount being stolen in other ways from the fiscal aspect of the taxation and all of that, I realize that you can raise that kind of money. I want to see the amount of labour that our people can generate, productivity that they can do. If you produce 10 million pairs of shoes locally, you have where to sell them. And you see all the other skills. If you farm ginger and you have ginger oil, you could make more money. If there was a Nigerian ginger oil company, it would make more money than any business. Then you go from sector to sector like that. If you go to fisheries, you will make more money. So I realized that if we invested a little more in our universities, we would save all the money. Some will still go abroad because of fantasy or other reasons, but you will have a net inflow of undergraduates from other countries coming to Nigeria to pay money, to attend University of Lagos and go anywhere you have schools in Nigeria; people will come. So, with all that investment being made, if we do housing, that will throw our GDP up, and people can just by virtue of having an NCE certificate and letter of employment, be given houses to buy, and they can pay for 35 years. They will buy and then they have a structured way by which they know they have to work.
So the third element why our GDP is small is because of poor recording of the GDP. Recently, we did rebasing. When Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was minister, we did a rebasing and the GDP shot up. But a lot of people have been captured in our GDP. And now, you can build a house in many parts of Nigeria, build a house, rent the house to the tenants and collect your rent. And today, I can tell you, statistically, there will be up to 200,000 people who pay their house rent today. And I’m not sure that it will be recorded anywhere, because rent income is not recorded. Maybe some states are trying to adapt.