The candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 2023 presidential election, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has said SDP members who are caught working for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) will either be relegated or expelled when caught.
He said this while debunking the rumours in certain quarters that the party was covertly working for the ruling APC.
Adebayo said he was not aware of such an arrangement, stressing that the only thing he knows is what the party is doing to strategize ahead of the 2027 elections.
He, however, agreed that some party members could have their loyalty outside the party, stressing that it is one of the problems that the party leadership is battling to solve.
His words, “We don’t know the rumours and talk, but what I know is what the party is doing. I only participate in what the SDP is doing officially.
“But what I find out is that people who are in political parties tend to have loyalty outside their political parties. I think it’s part of the problems we try to solve by bringing more ethical leaders.
“But all my politics, 100 percent of my own politics is done inside the SDP. And this day and time, there is no way you could have a relationship with people that there won’t be evidence of it. Either they will see you with them, you will take a photo with them, they will trace their money to you or they will trace the activity to you.
“So, if you really want to know where somebody belongs, if you want to know, other than just passing rumour or propaganda, you will know.
“So, there may be elements of people in the SDP who have sympathies for other parties as well but what we intend to do is when we catch them, we relegate them or expel them,” he said.
On Nigeria’s 65 years of independence, he lamented that the leaders have failed to live up to the founding fathers’ dream.
Adebayo lamented that corruption and rule of law have remained a campaign thrust 65 years after independence; a development he said was quite unfortunate.
He noted that everybody knows that corruption is bad and unacceptable and should not be in the system but lamented that instead of seeing it as something that should not even arise in the first place, successive administrations have used it as a campaign thrust.
He also stated that Nigeria’s perennial problems is traceable to its history.
Adebayo noted that the history of Nigeria is rooted in trade; that of an external necessity for trade. “Nigeria started merely as a trade zone, just like you have a free trade zone or export processing zone nowadays.
According to him, “So it’s a zone. It’s like the arbitrariness with which they created areas for discos. Lagos disco, Ibadan disco, Benin disco, Yola disco, different discos, you know.
“That’s how Nigeria was to the Royal Niger Company. It was just a trade zone. And those trade zones are different kingdoms and communities and all of that,” he said.
