The candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 presidential election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has described President Bola Tinubu as a maverick in politics but a failure in governance.
Adebayo said Tinubu could easily obtain A1 in politics but score F9 in governance.
The former presidential candidate added that the president had been unable to convert his high score in politics into quality governance in the form of substantive legacies.
Adebayo, in a statement from his media team, said, “That is a problem because the A1 in politics only means that he knows the political class very well; he knows what moves and motivates them as well as how to recruit them.
“He sometimes retrenches them, retires them and re-engages them because he knows what they want. But I wish he knew what Nigerian people want, which are basic services, economic stability and security. If he cannot save lives in Benue, Plateau and many parts of the country, then he has failed,” he said.
The SDP leader said President Tinubu ought to have known that politics ended immediately he ascended the presidency which required him to provide the needed governance and manage Nigeria’s diversity well.
He further said the president lacks the administrative capacity to govern Nigerians, including a poor understanding of how to manage the country’s economy.
He added that the only skill the president has in the management of the economy is the economisation of truth, which basically is “what they do rather than manage the economy.”
He added, “What we want to do differently in the SDP is to focus the entire politics on the welfare of the people. There will be less controversy if we address the issue of our people going hungry, their health, housing, education problem and others.”
Adebayo also lambasted politicians who are defecting from the opposition parties to the ruling APC, describing them as the government’s tools to dampen the spirit of the opposition parties ahead of the 2027 elections.
He noted that many of them did not join opposition by choice, stressing that those who joined by choice can never defect to the ruling party without tangible progress on ground.
He said: “The so-called defections are sometimes coming out of the closet of people claiming to be in opposition because they have been compulsorily retired into opposition, not by choice. “When you choose to be in opposition by choice, you have access to the ruling party but you just don’t agree with them, and the reasons for that are well articulated, which has to do with the interest of the Nigerian people.
“There is zero risk of you defecting unless those fundamental disagreements or problems have now been eliminated.
“Everybody in Nigeria will know that poverty is no longer there, that insecurity is no longer there and corruption and poor ethics that have dominated our politics have now changed. Anything other than that, you will find out that people who miss the bus of the ruling party tend to wait at the bus stop of opposition until the next bus comes and then they hop along. There is nothing new.
“Many of the defectors are being primed and kept waiting for the dramatisation of resurgence by the ruling party. They just keep them somewhere so that when the time comes, they will use them to demoralise the opposition”, he maintained.
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