The 2023 presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Prince Adewole Adebayo, has stated that Nigeria took off as a country accidentally. He also lamented that the decision by the successive governments from 1999 till date to sell critical public enterprises under the guise of privatisation was one of the major reasons Nigeria is currently facing massive infrastructure challenges.
In this interview, he spoke on a wide range of issues, including how wrong the policy of privatisation is, Nigeria’s socio political journey from independence till date, his party strategy ahead of the 2027 general elections and the rumoured involvement of the SDP in the formation of a coalition political party, among others. Excerpts!
Sixty five years after independence, not many people agree that Nigeria is where it ought to be. What is your assessment of Nigeria’s journey 65 after independence?
I think that there are two journeys taking place, like a parallel universe. There’s a journey of the country as a whole, and there are individual journeys inside the country. So in Nigeria, the 65 years is like someone who is on a train, maybe a train conductor, or someone who’s a cleaner on a train or someone who doesn’t work on the train. And the journey of the train is one journey. So, you look at the journey, the train started from Iddo in Lagos and it’s going to Talata Marafa up North in Zamfara State. And so you see how the train is trucking along. And you can see for 65 hours, this train has not arrived at its destination in the journey that should have taken just about 12 hours. At the same time, the attendant inside the train is going from coach to coach, doing his duty. And it’s also counting whether he’s doing his own duty and how many journeys you are making around the train.
And for Nigeria, we started accidentally. There are no great philosophers or great thinkers within our population who say, 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.
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.
I think one of the tragedies of the journey from 1999 to date was the mistake of selling off our public assets; it is how Obasanjo just sold everything. The idea that you can sell NEPA, sell NNPC, sell shipping, sell national insurance corporations in a developing country that hasn’t got an alternative to it and no pre-existing private sector equivalence is wrong. Even the US has not sold Fannie Mae and the other ones, you don’t do that.
So, that was part of the reason why we have massive infrastructure challenge, we have massive savings challenge, we have massive unemployment, and we don’t have where to train people because in those days, if you finish school, you join NEPA, they will train you, raise you, many engineers produce there, many people who are great products.
So, you have somewhere to go and work and then we destroy the public works department. So any state government, if you see them in front of the camera trying to commission or start a 10km road, you will see one Lebanese person standing in front of them. Even simple work that they could do with the public works department, they will not. I have more equipment inside my compound, you know, than the entire ministry works. I have more caterpillar equipment and other things that I create inside my private house than they have in the works department in Akure. So with that, what have we benefited from privatization? And the service is working. That’s the problem. If people look at it, some people have gotten rich out of it, but the service is working.
We also have a telecommunication problem because most of the carriers are still relying on NITEL; they are still relying on NITEL exchange and all of that. They do the company investment. So that will require them to carry broadband across the country. They can’t because the private sector will not do backbone investment. People are now generating electricity but what has happened is that many of these investments will rely on you to buy your own transformers.
The idea is to reconstitute and raise new Nigerians who are going to now man these enterprises and then grow industries out of them is not a good one. So there are many things we can do, and I don’t want to look at this journey from differentials in the manifesto, because everybody in the country, every politician can’t believe in the same manifesto. So somebody can say I believe in privatization, others can say I don’t believe in it. Somebody can say I believe in a mixed economy, where we raise public resources to do certain things, and anything that can be done on the private side, you can do it.
But what I’m not going to do, I’m not going to have a sector that is fully public. Every sector, including defense, law enforcement and private persons are welcome. What I would never do is transfer public assets to you. Once you just start it, we’re trying to transfer some business to some people. So, you don’t need privatization; it doesn’t mean you carry assets of the public and give to the private person.
No, you privatize the industry, the sector, not the enterprises. Privatization of government enterprises is wrong. What you need is to open the sector