Presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 general election, Prince Adewole Adebayo has attributed the current wave of insecurity in Nigeria to what he called “absent-mindedness of Tinubu government”, which he said, had become rudderless.
In this interview with Ihechukwu Sunday, he takes a panoramic views of the current security situation in Nigeria, threat of invasion of the killing of Christians continues by the US president, Donald Trump, the presidential order to cordon off forests, particularly in states where bandits are running riots, the order to with police details from the VIPs and the role of the opposition in the prevailing security threat, among others. Excerpts!
How would you describe the state of Nigeria as at this moment?
Well, it’s still orderless from the point of view of governance, and primary duties of the different tiers of government still lie unattended to, and the dire situation that our people find themselves, or we all find ourselves remains unchanged. There are indications that the government has lost its map, and it’s just waking up every day reacting to any new incident, or the umbrage, whether local or international. There is no rational observer who would say, ah, this is the trajectory of where the Tinubu presidency was headed to.
What is happening in November 2025 was what they planned in November 2024. President Tinubu has lost control of his own government, which he hasn’t had time to put together to start with.
And however much you speak for the government; you cannot say that where they are now in 2025 was where they planned to be when they were planning a year ago or two years ago. They definitely are in the wilderness, and if the captain of the ship cannot find his way to the bridge, and he’s not able to locate where the ship is situated, he cannot determine the direction the ship is going, he has no control over the speed of the sail, the passengers on that ship are entitled to a new captain, or they give up on that ship, and you cannot give up on Nigeria. So, it is easier to say that we have a bad government in a good country than to say we have a bad country, because I know that this country, if well managed, is second to none.
When you say that this government has failed Nigerians, are you not making governance so simplistic; is it that simple? Are you saying that the government is intentionally looking away from the people?
The first enemy of the government is the government. The first enemy of the people is the government. You cannot commit a crime and last one week, one month, if you don’t have government people cooperating with you.
I cannot go now to the bank manager in my bank and say to them that I want to withdraw N6 million. They will not answer me. They will say scam, EFCC, money laundry, whatever.
But people are paying millions of naira in ransom. The people who collect the ransom are not worried about where they are carrying the money to. If you want to try it out, just keep collecting your salary and taking it to cash. When it’s up to N10 million, try to take it to the bank and the bank will tell you all kinds of stories. What I’m letting you know is that President Tinubu, in my own humble view, has lost control of his government and is flailing around.
He needs to put his ass together, organize his government, and make sure that he understands that police cover this country effectively because every local government in Nigeria has a police division. There’s a DPO. In some large or massively populated local governments, you have more than one division of police there.
And are you telling me that in Eruku, in Isapa, and all those places, there’s no division there? Are you saying that if there’s a youth corps member in Eruku criticizing the APC or criticizing the government, they will not go and arrest the person?
This is a government that could capture somebody in Nairobi, Kenya, and bring here for trial and sentence the person. But they cannot capture people who are going around. How do you go and carry hundreds of people? Have you been a nursery school teacher before? To get 35 children to cooperate with inside the class, is it easy? How are you going to carry 35 people and carry them somewhere?
Some people have accused the opposition of exploiting the current misfortune under President Tinubu’s administration just to score political points. Do you think your criticism is actually helping the country right now?
Well, if the president wants to be helped, from what we say, he can pick up enough help. But if you say we are making capital of misfortune, then they are producing too many misfortunes because if you think that the opposition is taking advantage of your misfortune, then you should reduce the amount of misfortune you have. You can’t fail in every aspect, critical, primary, basic and even tertiary. You fail in security, fail in the economy, fail in culture and fail even in sports. So, you fail in everything. And you expect that people are not going to remark on those failures. Are you saying that a community with people running helter-skelter, where even you, people in your administration, don’t feel safe, where even the community you come from doesn’t feel safe, is okay? And the vast resources of Nigeria are located in the northern part of Nigeria.
The entire north is closer to Somalia than it is to what Nigeria used to be. So, you cannot Afghanstanise your own country and expect people to sing your praises. You cannot take every index that you met and make it worse. Unemployment is worse, inflation is worse, security is worse, the international profile of the country is worse. You either don’t have the competence to appoint ambassadors, or you can’t find competent ambassadors to appoint. Either side of the coin is a failure. So, you can’t police the state, you can’t secure the state. You fail. You don’t even have enough mental capacity to explain your failure.
The US President, Donald Trump, recently repeated his description of Nigeria as a disgraced country. Do you believe that is a fair description?
I don’t agree with President Trump of the United States that we’re a disgraced country. But, he’s speaking the language of international diplomacy. When you see the president of a country, you say Nigeria is here. So, what he meant is that the Tinubu administration is a disgraced government.
The Secretary to the Government of the Federation suggested that recent surges in attacks may be linked to foreign interests, particularly from America. Does that explanation hold any water for you?
It is like a goalkeeper saying that the attacker or striker from the other side is shooting the ball too fast. That’s an admission of failure. Your job is to catch the ball. So, whether the attack is coming from within or from without, your responsibility is to stop the attacks. And every tool in the world that you need to stop the attack is given to you, and on every occasion, at every opportunity, at every juncture, you fail to use these tools for what they are meant to be used for. Nigeria has enough money, enough manpower and enough institutional experience in the military, enough association of friendships all over the world, enough technological and scientific and other skills within Nigeria to defend this beautiful country.
You don’t believe there is any explanation that makes sense as to why Nigeria is struggling with the scale of insecurity that we are dealing with right now?
The explanation that makes sense is that we have a failed government; that’s it. There’s no other way because the kind of challenge or challenges that we are facing is one-tenth or one percent of what Ukraine is facing, or what other countries are facing, including what America itself is constantly facing.
Are you saying that Ukraine has the kind of support that Nigeria doesn’t have; I mean the support of Europe and the US?
Where Ukraine is today, where it will be tomorrow and where it was yesterday is a reflection of the kind of leadership it has at every point in time. If you had a leadership that is more serious than the one you have now, even the war would not happen. And if you have one that is not as strong as you have now, they would have fallen long ago. Let us understand something clearly; the job of the government of a country is to secure that country, and you need resources to do so. And when those resources are available to you, you have no excuse to give. Why stay on the job when you can’t do it? Some of the reasons they are giving that the job is tough or that it’s unpredictable, are reasons you give when you’re resigning. Those are not reasons you give when you’re on the job.
So, if you bring a security guard to your house, and he says, oh, the gate is too heavy, the intruders are too many, he will tell you he is on his way out and why he can’t do the job. You cannot say that you do not know, or you did not know, in 2023, when you were saying it’s my turn, it’s my turn, that you did not know that it was your turn to fight Boko Haram, your turn to fix the economy, your turn to grow the potentials of the country, your turn to represent the country internationally and your turn to make Nigerians happy.
If it’s just your turn to occupy the seat and nothing more, then you’re taking that turn to go away, because the discussions we are having are not surrounding things that are optional. We’re not discussing subsidy, price increase, we’re discussing life or death. We’re discussing the continuity of the country or a fracture.
Do you see the current insecurity as an existential threat to Nigeria?
Of course, it is. Two problems we have. Problem number one, non-state actors have infiltrated the government. The government is absent-minded, absent from duty. Now, it’s also deceiving itself, politically in a way, to elongate its tenure, even though it cannot do the basic function. Those are the problems. The citizens have been coping. They should have been on the street long ago, but I do not recommend that. I recommend that you should be patient, but our people have been overly patient. The disturbance in the country is now causing international concern to the point where world powers are debating whether to take over the whole thing, as if we’re not a growing concern. The manner of their intervention, the angulation of the argumentation, is suggesting that they have a particular section of their population that they feel sympathetic towards, and that is going to create internal alienation in the country.
The presidency announced that the US has reaffirmed its readiness to deepen security cooperation and share intelligence. Isn’t this a positive development and a possible way out of the crisis?
There’s no ending yet. There’s nothing to be happy about yet. There are three problems in these first statements. One, what they say the United States government is willing or ready to do is what they’ve always been ready to do, and they have been doing. Many of the platforms our armed forces are using come from the United States or from the allies of the United States who would ordinarily not give these platforms to us, except the United States agrees. The Super Tucano that was sold to President Buhari during Trump’s first term is a mark of US willingness to cooperate — unlike the Obama days, where Obama was, to my view, unfairly and unreasonably non-cooperative with the government of President Goodluck Jonathan because they were political about it. They had become partisan in Nigerian politics. So, the US under Trump, has always been willing to help, but he’s like trying to carry a child and the child refuses to raise his hands, or you are dragging him and kicking and screaming. The government, until this fire was turned against them, did not take this matter seriously, it was business as usual, and they had gotten comfortable with the business of the commercial aspect of insecurity, the making of money and turning things over, and trading in insecurity and taking that as a status quo.
So, some of the fire-brigade approach that they’re using now has always been available to them. Even if you would not choose ambassadors all over the world, you will choose ambassadors to the United States, to the United Kingdom, to Russia, to China, to France and to be a member of the Security Council of the United Nations. That’s common sense. If you can’t do that, there’s no reason for you to be calling yourself President of Nigeria. So, you may choose not to send an ambassador to Estonia or some other country, but you cannot fail to send ambassadors to Germany, to other places where you have your core business people. In india, for example, you cannot fail to do that. You have to send a high commissioner to India. So, you didn’t do that. Now, you are sending a national security adviser to go and have discussions with people who, as a member of the opposition, as a known politician in Nigeria, when I go to Washington, these same people have discussions with me. I cannot last two, three or four days in Washington or London or anywhere. Once they know I’m around, there will be the ambassador or somebody who will say, oh, you are a leader of a party in Nigeria. We want to talk about your country. So what is special about that?
With your own international contacts, have you and other opposition figures been working behind the scenes to calm tensions or have you simply been watching the Tinubu administration struggle?
We are not bystanders because it’s our country. It’s not Tinubu’s country. Tinubu is a mistake. The country is a reality. Number one, I’ve been to the House of Lords. I’ve been to London. I’ve talked to people there. You can’t say, nobody can say, they don’t have a Nigerian intelligence agency to give them reports. Nobody can say I spoke against the country. I’ve been speaking to Americans for a long time. I’ve never spoken against the country. So, we speak for the country. But, we cannot deny the fact that what is obvious to the people you are talking to, if you don’t want to lose credibility, is that they know you don’t have a proper government at home; a government that behaves like a government. So, they will ask you, what can you do to make things better, because they too, in some areas, want a better partner to deal with at home? I was in London two weeks ago. I was admitted to the House of Lords. I sat with them during their proceedings. We talked about Nigeria.
After that, we had dinner, lunches, where they were raising people to talk about Nigeria, what you think about this? You must have seen my intervention, my opinion in The Independent of the UK. You’ve seen some of my intervention in the media, including the international media. I’ve always been supportive of my country. I’ve always said, do not invade Nigeria. Do not throw bombs into Nigeria. Try as much as possible to cooperate with the government that is in Nigeria. They have shortcomings. They’re not a serious set of people but remember that there’s a longstanding relationship between Nigeria and your country, and you should expand your interaction with members of the civil society, with the opposition, and all of that, and to see that, overall, we’re not treated like a banana republic, even though we have an amateur government in power now. But, we are a regional power in our own right, and I reminded them of the role we played in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Lebanon and Congo and in many places. So, we deserve respect, and they understand that. But they have, during the George Bush administration, unless you abandon your work and start impersonating members of the government, which I’m not, you cannot lay their bed for them. They will scatter it by themselves. They’re not orderly. So, for example, they have a diplomatic problem. They are making it look like a public communication problem. So they are sending argumentative, loquacious people to go on foreign media and annoy everybody. Instead of going to Washington, go to London, go to Paris, go to Moscow, go to Delhi, go to Beijing, and start to talk softly to people, try to know and use relationships with people. Forget about opposition, you can say maybe we’re going to sabotage you along the way. You have people who are neutral in the country. You have experts, you have retired ambassadors, you have a whole institute of international affairs, and I’ve spoken to people there.
There have been some military deployments and rescues in recent weeks and the president has ordered the withdrawal of police personnel from VIP protection duties to the frontlines. What do you make of the government’s response so far?
I don’t have police guarding me. However, what I can let you know is, number one, nothing’s wrong with the armed forces. They have the wrong commander in chief, full stop.
It was the elected commander in chief. Yeah, you can elect the wrong person. You can buy the wrong shoe that doesn’t fit your feet.
So the issue is, you can use someone to buy the wrong shoe and have foot poisoning. The problem facing Nigeria today is that the commander in chief is not a good commander in chief. He can make a good commander in chief out of himself if he wants, but he’s neglecting that mission.
Now I’m happy that he also knows that he doesn’t have to go all over the world on a fashion parade, that he can actually sit at home, go to the situation room, and interact with his security chief. Isn’t that what he’s been doing? I mean, he didn’t go to South Africa, he shelved some of his international engagements to stay back home. We are talking of episodic, reactive actions. We are not talking of systematic work of a commander in chief.
I saw a picture of the president talking with the chief of army staff. As commander in chief, that’s not how I’m going to do it. So he needs to take a cue from previous commanders in chief.
Ibrahim Babangida is quite articulate, talk to him. No matter what your political disagreement with him, he’s got to know how to be a better commander in chief. Because I did all of those things, preparing myself to be a commander in chief. He’s not commanding the armed forces properly; he’s not interacting with them.