By Mike Odiakose, Abuja

Leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and its presidential candidate in the 2023 general elections, Prince Adewole Adebayo has described the SDP as a party of ideas and discipline that can only accommodate those who believe in its ideas. 

He advised those who don’t agree with the party’s ideas not to bother joining the party because it would be counterproductive since party members have a set of ideas that they believe in.

So, this discipline is what has kept our party, so we enjoin anybody coming to join us to be law abiding and to do things according to good conscience and the rule of law.

“In our party, we use democratic methods, so we do not use any desperate methods.

He equally said his party has been playing the politics of development and measurement, such that it has been proffering solutions to the numerous problems confronting the country, hoping that whenever President Bola Tinubu and his team decides to have a second thought, they would look at the solutions his party is proposing and start to adopt them.

He noted that just as President Tinubu stole his campaign slogan in 2023, he would be happy if he could again steal his ideas now and use them to better the lives of Nigerians.

“I hope that President Tinubu  will steal some of my ideas just the way they stole my slogan during their campaign, and use them to better the lives of the people. 

“I want President Tinubu’s government to succeed. I don’t want their government to be a colossal failure in order to be able to defeat them in the next election, because if you are waiting for them to fail even more spectacularly than they are failing now, the people are going to suffer irreparably,” he said.

He stressed that the policies that the president and his team are now implementing, that people are crying blue murder, are the things he and his team predicted when they were campaigning as they pointed out the implications then.

He lamented that it has now dawned on President Tinubu that he is in serious trouble because he is approaching half time and none of his policies has worked. 

“And he is running out of propaganda to use to explain it because a hungry man has no doubt that he is hungry. So, there is no amount of ‘food is coming’ that you can use to deceive a baby. It is only when the food comes that the baby knows it has come.

“So this is the situation. They are not improving in any index, they are not generating any employment, they are not bringing inflation down, they are not bringing prices of goods and services down, they are not doing better with getting people jobs, they are not doing better with security, they are not doing better in any area that is of importance to the people.

“So, whether it is food, clothing or shelter, education or health care; things that are measurable, they are nowhere and those are the things that we are discussing. All other sentimental issues, we have left for those who are very good at the politics of emotion.

“But, we are for politics of development and measurement, and things that even when we say them; even if you are Tinubu’s best friend or a member of his political party, you know that these things we are saying are quite true. 

“Those are the things that we are talking about now and the manner in which we talk about them is such that we proffer solutions, so that should they have a second thought, they will look at the solution we are proposing and they will start to adopt our solutions,” he said.

He also told Nigerians that their current suffering was not by accident as he raised the alarm about what would befall them if they did not vote for the SDP, but lamented that Nigerians ignored his advice.

He, however, called on Nigerians to listen this time around as the country prepares for another election in 2027 so that they could get out of the current quagmire by rejecting Tinubu and his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC).

“Now you listen because you have an opportunity to get out of this quagmire by ensuring that in the next election, you just get rid of the APC and let President Tinubu go and enjoy his old age, and then we can sit down and put a proper government in place and then solve these problems that we shouldn’t be having.

“There are problems that we will be having whether we are developed or not but there are some problems we shouldn’t be having in this 2025 like food shortages, insecurity, lack of access to basic education, lack of access to healthcare and all of that. Those are not problems we should be having now; we should be having bigger problems,” he said.