Adewole Adebayo, the presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, is a man of many parts, being also a lawyer, philanthropist, and entrepreneur, among other vocations. In this interview with GBENGA ADERANTI, the politician who also has interests in farming and sports speaks about his private life, why he lost the 2023 presidential election, and the state of the nation, among other issues.
How would you describe the year 2024, and what are your projections for 2025?
To me, 2024 was a good year, speaking from a personal point of view. It is not easy to see the end of a year. 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 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 prices rising as a result of inflation. We saw the exchange rate fluctuating. But it was also a good year for Nigerians in the sense that we had no serious communal clashes. I don’t think we had serious religious unrest in the year. What we are facing is just the normal consequences of governance methodology.
Overall, I hope many families in Nigeria can say it was a good year. But if some families or individuals say it was not a good year, then they have a case. We sympathize with them and we hope that they still have hope in 2025, to be a better year.
Many people believe that the hardship in the country today was caused by subsidy removal and the floating of the naira. Some believe that until the government reverses those policies, things will not get better. Do you agree with the position?
It is an exaggeration. Even before 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 study the national development plan, the first one (60-65), we had problems there as well, especially the funding of those policies. During the military time, we had a terrible economic situation. Because of the grid collapse, we did not even have electricity. It cannot be that Nigeria was a paradise, and Tinubu came and it became a hell.
Until you joined politics, little was heard about you, what you were doing…
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 counselor, what you did in Primary 1, no media man will ask you because they already know it, not to talk about whether you want to run for president of Nigeria. What your mother was doing when she was 10 years old, the media will know. Here, the media asks the candidates themselves, but they tell a lot of lies. So we have got to a point where the 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.
I have been a lawyer. I have been practising both in Nigeria and overseas. 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, and 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 the Supreme Courts in Australia, you will see my law practice.
I told my colleagues during the Nigerian Bar Association meeting that I did not need to talk there 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 then, so I can’t go to the NBA where I belong and say I’m a good person. Just by hearing my voice, you should know.’ They should be the ones telling other people. 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 that. They will say yes. Apart from the military ones; I was still young. But since 1999, there has been no head of state that I did not do something for, trying to help in this or that area.
I have never taken a government contract before. I have not been paid a government salary before. No government will say he didn’t try to help us. I have always been trying to do that. So 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 offer us advice.
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 to curb corruption?
Well, if you were a judge, and the 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. 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, and the other one who 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, and 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, and most people don’t go there, so why should all the resources of Nigeria go there?
Judges should not suffer. They should not fear that they will lose their jobs. They should not have cause to be unable to pay their bills. But overall, if we improve the economy, and everybody uses less of their income to do basic things, it will affect judges positively.
I think we should do the economy well, because if you pay a judge very well, but you don’t pay the judge’s 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. 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 the 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 election petitions 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 attend to the 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 courtrooms 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 people’s court; they are just up there.
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 is just that he supports SDP, SDP loses an election and SDP also loses the petition, so he is annoyed.
So, if you want to help the judiciary, take them away from election matters, create a constitutional court that does not have regular judges, judges who have retired because election petitions are so simple, it is so simple to the extent that you don’t have to be too intelligent to decide the winner. It is simple arithmetic. So, you can now take it to the 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.
These are my contributions regarding the judiciary. 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. Let’s say for example, like this your camera now, and we don’t know who the owner is. But anybody who produces a receipt with their name on it, the 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 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 wear wigs so that we can look like British people, the way they used to do in the past. Our court system is done that way.
So there are many areas as president when you appoint an Attorney-General, many areas you have to make reforms. The laws will resemble the culture of the people and the 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 the bus to go there. They say a judge must reason like a man on the Clapper bus.
Even when I was at Ife, and they were teaching, when my teacher said that I must reason like a man on the Clapper bus, I said why must I think like a man on the Clapper bus? Why can’t I think like a man on a Lagere bus? Lagere is in Ile-Ife. He said well, that is up to you. What is written there, you must reason like a man on the Clapper bus. An average Nigerian does not reason like a man on a Clapper bus because they don’t know where the Clapper man is.
What do you think the Nigeria Judiciary Council should do concerning the controversy surrounding the 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 the wrong or right decision of a court. The NJC is to address corruption, abuse, if you are over-aged and you lied. If you are not qualified and you lied. If you collected a 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 facts, but because it is a reasoning process, it can be faulty, and 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, the Justice, a 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 criticised him thoroughly, whereas it was my client who wrote the petition. That was an error. It was an honest error. The other two justices by his side didn’t pay attention. Because that criticism was not part of the judgment, nobody paid attention to it. It shows 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 the judiciary for justice in election matters; 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 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 through that judgment, where did the U.S. Supreme Court say Bush was the winner? In the USA, the 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. Whatever the consequences of that, you go and sort it out there.
Even in the last election, something as basic as 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
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, 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 that 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 remember only one state in our party, when the delegates arrived at the international conference centre where we were having primaries, somebody mentioned to me that this particular state said that they would only vote for a candidate who reimbursed their transport or whatever, and I said I don’t want their vote.
Later when I saw the chairman of the state, I said ‘I was told that your delegates said that they came to Abuja and only the candidate who can reimburse their transport that they would vote for.’ The man replied that it was not their official position. But I saw other political parties, where they were even budgeting dollars. People like that, if they can do that in their primaries what would they do in the general election? Look at the spending on delegates; many of them are far more than 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, are not tenable under the election petition. I should only complain about the returning officer. Most of the crimes were already committed even before that date. That is why I felt it is better to do advocacy.
Lastly, at that point, it is the case I don’t want to revisit. Just 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.
I noticed that you are fond of white colour — your house, your dress and other things are of that colour. What is the thing about the white colour?
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 unclean or dirty. The white colour allows you to know when something is not clean. As a lawyer, I wear white and black. White symbolises transparency. That is the way I see it.
Why is it that you do not wear wristwatches?
With regards to 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 perform any function for me. I even inherited some watches from my parents and grandparents. But I look at them now as museum pieces. I am 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 the telephone and so many other things. Even your camera has a time piece. Wristwatches have become obsolete. The same reason I don’t ride horses. You can see horses in my compound. The watch is obsolete like the horse.
How do you relax?
I think I’m relaxed talking to you now. I have an interest in sports, but one of my ways of relaxing now is to stay at home because my work takes me around the world, if you check my airline accounts, even before I joined politics, my airlines would call me a million miler, my boarding pass has a million miles on it. An airline will recognize you once you fly over a million miles which 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, maybe they work in the office all the time, but for me, when I want to relax, I stay at home.
Secondly, I relax by doing sports, even at Ife, I was a football coach for the years I was at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State. I have an interest in sports, I play soccer. I used to have a serious interest in boxing but my wife is not happy with it.
I have an 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 one hundred million trees in my lifetime.
How did you meet your wife?
I met my wife in the line of work. All my things are in the line of work.
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 the 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 the 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 ten times more serious than me. When I met her, I talked to her, and she talked to me more professionally, I asked to know her, but 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, but most of my mistakes are easy to correct, so I don’t regret them. Sometimes, I’m not nice to somebody; I just go to the person and apologize. I have not made a permanently irreversible mistake. My wife tends to be right, she would advise me not to do this, but 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 sympathize 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, was the state that liked me the most, and Nasarawa and Adamawa, but I didn’t have time to honor Kwara, they were calling me come to Kwara, I didn’t see Kwara as a state with large vote, I would spend time in Kano. Kwara would hold a 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 22000 votes but when I investigated the result, we scored 122,000.
So, I went to Kwara after the election to stay. I helped them campaign for their governorship, I apologized for not coming. Now in Kwara, they know that even if they are doing something tiny, and they call me, I will come. In Nasarawa, I corrected my mistakes and so many other things.
I’m very good at 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 first saw all my mistakes before I talked about Yakubu. I first saw my own mistakes before I saw the mistakes of my party. I first saw my mistakes before I saw the mistakes of my agents, I try to correct all my mistakes before I tell you your mistakes. I don’t regret it.
Maybe 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 it because the child will soon be an adult and it will be too late to correct, but ordinarily, I don’t regret it.
Culled from https://thenationonlineng.net/our-economic-problems-date-back-to-colonial-times/
