The presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the last general election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, in this interview, bares his mind on last Saturday’s off-cycle elections in Imo, Kogi and Bayelsa states
Recall after the general election you said you were not going to court even though you claimed the three leading parties cheated in the election. Are you taking the same approach on the Kogi election?
This time, I am not the candidate, but he is our candidate. We supported him. We worked with him, and he himself said the INEC was transparently dishonest and disorganised and that there was no point for him to go to court. The party has met and has reviewed things
The people, everybody who voted for us, and supporters within and outside Kogi all said let us give INEC an opportunity. What we are doing now is to believe in INEC, hoping that INEC itself believes in democracy and wants a country that works, and being an entrance institution into government , we want to make sure that INEC itself allows politicians who come to power to know that institutions must work. So, INEC will review it.
But if INEC refused to review it, then, we have the option to go to court, and I think the party at the national level, Shehu Garba, our national chairman, our national secretary, Dr Olu Agunloye and members of the NWC have said they are going to court and we are working towards that. Again, we are doing our own review with an open mind. We are not desperate to win. We want to win within the law. We are not out taking the opportunity to throw a shot at INEC. We went into the election with a victory speech or a concession speech. Either way, we are okay. But we found out INEC’s announcement of the result is not in compliance with the law and with the regulation set by INEC. For that reason, INEC as a commission is by law given an opportunity like before where someone could do anything in their name and say sorry, so bad, we can’t do anything about it. Under the new electoral act, INEC has seven days to do a review and we are giving and assisting INEC with all information to ensure they listen to other people, including the observers, and I believe INEC should review it. If the review is done properly and thoroughly, even if the review doesn’t favour us, we are SDP, we are a law abiding party, we respect the country, we will abide by it. But if it is not done or poorly done, we would take extra steps on calling on the judiciary to intervene and look into it, and we are making sure that we narrow our claim to the judiciary to things we are sure of.
You are talking specifically about Kogi, I believe.
For us, we have serious problems with Kogi. Not only us, other people have. I have heard of similar problems in other states, but we are focusing on Kogi now. Even the governor of Bayelsa State, who has been declared the winner of the election, still said that in some parts of his own state that the BVAS was bypassed. So, if the governor and the winner of the election also have that observation, then INEC should know that what we are all trying to do is to better the lot of all of us.
We are not saying INEC is hopeless. We are not saying so. I believe INEC is a human institution and a necessary institution, and I have confidence that there are good citizens who work in INEC. So, I have no problem with the INEC but I have problems with the INEC process with which they derived the results in Kogi State and we have taken every step to warn them before the election day , to warn them even about the irregularities about the voters register ab initio. They said they were going to look into that. We warned them about disloyalty about many of the operatives, and they said they were going to look into that. In the course of the election , we brought to their attention so many irregularities over voting, fictitious results, and things like that, the returning officer, a certain professor, was highly uninterested in additional information . He was even threatened to have our man removed. So, he returned the mic to him and said we shall inform INEC officially. Now, we have written a two page petition to INEC clearly stating what happened, giving INEC all the options and citing the law that enables INEC to do a thorough review and we have not heard from them since Monday when we gave them the letter. There was no telephone call, nothing till now, no reply.
We believe that we need INEC, whether you call it by any name, you must have an electoral umpire that people can believe in. Nigeria is not unfortunate that we cannot have 20 people who cannot run elections in the commission. We cannot be that unfortunate. We need to have confidence in the system, and there is no alternative to democracy. We tried every bad alternative and every good alternative, and we ended up coming back to this same electoral system. I want Nigerians to believe in INEC, in the government , and to believe in democracy and the only way to do that is to continue to interrogate INEC however difficult it may be to raise this question in order to ensure that we get it right.
What would you do differently to help turn things around, especially around the challenges you enumerated.
Three things you need to do. Firstly, you need to have good political parties. Maybe parties that look more like SDP, where people do not want to break the law. You could see that nobody has accused us of doing anything wrong.
Secondly, you have people in institutions who are patriotic, who go there to serve, just to do the right thing.
Thirdly, when things go wrong like this, we don’t condemn the entire system. You come out to pinpoint errors that we can correct. We, as SDP, we are saying whatever we are complaining about because it is not just to grab power at all costs. It is to make sure we fine-tune the system and correct the errors. Those are the things we can do. There is no country that will not have this kind challenge from time to time. People who don’t deserve to be in certain offices, you will find them there. They will start to misbehave, but we must not throw away everything. Pinpoint where the errors are, shame those that need to be shamed, and remove those that need to be removed and correct what needs to be corrected. What has been done to the SDP now , they will not see the end of it until we get justice.
You tried but failed to win the presidency. Where do you stand now politically?
What stands for me is to make sure that the government gets full and maximum support of the citizens, and at the same time, we give them criticisms regarding so many errors they are committing, as you can see now. It’s one error or the other every day. We criticize them to correct those errors. And we organise our people to have a culture of democracy. That is why we worked very hard in Kogi and other states. We will keep working to ensure we give our people an alternative. We must not be demoralised in the opposition whereby everybody will run towards the ruling party.
*Continue reading from the source: The Nation