 Social Democratic Party Candidate Adewoli Adebayol alleges PTOB of the Labour Party at Iqwabubakar, PDP and Bola Tinubu of the APC cheated through INEC. This is PLOS Politics. My name is Nyamgur Aghaji. Prince Adebayo Adebayoli, the Presidential Candidate of the Social Democratic Party, SDP in the February 25 election has alleged that the Labour Party, LP People's Democratic Party, PDP and all progressive Congress APC received their peace of the independent National Electoral Commission's cheating during the 25th of February poll. The presidential election may have come and gone, but mixed reactions continue to trail the victory of the president-elect Bola Aghaji Tinubu. The SDP candidate also accused INEC of a aiding cheating which affects its credibility and then called on the president-elect to reach out to aggrieved contestants. He also flayed INEC calling it a crime syndicate demanding dollars to make politicians winners. INEC he alleged has highly dishonest staff. Well, we're being joined now to review the presidential elections by the presidential candidate himself of the SDP Adebayo. Welcome to the program sir. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. Okay, it's a really contentious event that happened on 25th of February 2023. Everybody was looking forward to this day. Everybody was looking forward to this election because for the first time a lot of people, a lot of candidates were speaking to the issues, you were one of them speaking to the issues rather than just campaigning with arrogance and saying nothing and just hoping to clinch the ticket or the presidency without anything. But now just like Chatham House has said, you also have come out to say that it was fraught with irregularities. What else did you see in that 25th of February polls that is what commenting on? Well, you see, there will be a lot of commentary on it and sometimes the window for commentary can close. At the immediately after the election results were announced, I was made asked by the media to react. At that time no one had to file a petition. So I'm a lawyer, so once the mother is in court, you can only talk about the developmental aspects where people can learn from and you don't want to look like you contested with people and one person was declared, some of the contestant went to court and now you are on television proskuting the same matter. So when I spoke with I think a rise TV, I'm sure that's where you got some of what you said, at that time no one had gone to court, but even today people were in court over the matter. So it will be on simply for a lawyer like me to be discussing the exact same issues that are before the court. However, I can make general honest commentary regarding the fact that we missed an opportunity to perfect our electoral process and we ought to be honest with ourselves regarding what we need to do to eradicate once and for all the notion that we cannot conduct credible elections and if we are going to do that we need to learn from those who participated and for what they learn, like me for what I've learned, I think that it is not subjudice to say that Nigerians need to learn to participate in an election without cheating, that voters should develop the spirit of not expecting politicians to pay them before they come out of vote, that the political class should have some class when it comes to how to assess power and they should not try to cheat in the process, three that political parties themselves have to be extremely patriotic to the country, four that those who have anything to do with election management, whether it's Ainec Chairman, whether it's the commissioners, whether it's the rest of the electro commissioners, whether it's their staff, permanent staff and ad hoc staff, starting from five Sencelos to NYC, UCO members, that everybody including the media that we should understand that it's a patriotic duty and that it doesn't matter actually in the end who becomes president or governor or senator, if we cannot collectively run a system that works because if it's seen as to win at all costs this is what I've observed, the desperation to win at all costs and where if you don't use sharp practices you regarded as not ready or you are not wise or you are foolish and every camp all sides are using the same methods to try to game the system and I think that is not going to serve us well in the long run but if you have elected a government you have to live with that government and the process which is going on in the court now is also a legitimate part of the election area in that if you participate in an election and you don't like the outcome of that election if you go to court to challenge it whether you have a good case or you don't have a good case it's legitimate part of the process what I was guarding against was the situation where people would not comply with the peace accord it is called a peace accord for that reason that it should guarantee peace but if you want justice you can go to court to pursue justice but the peace is what the peace accord guarantees so anything you do which does not threaten the peace you are in accord with the peace accord and that is my understanding of the issues so for as long as the matter is in the court commentary would be careful to avoid the situation where anything you say will be seen as an attempt to influence the court or pre-empty the court or prejudge the case but there's wide latitude for us to interrogate our attitude to election area over time in this country and how 2023 was a good opportunity with the use of technology with the fact that there was no incumbent contesting with the fact that we registered a sizable number of younger people with the fact that INEC had all the resources given to it and with the fact that the number of candidates reduced from several dozens which it used to be to now just by 18 hopefully maybe there will be a better way next time to also for that shrink the number so that it will be less cumbersome for everybody concerned but I think that nobody who says that we've done well is not reliving on the system we haven't done well at all and you don't have to rely on me to say that you will see that almost everybody who is involved in it both the winner and the losers are complaining okay um we will try to skip what we can skip but if it comes we will be careful about it as you have said but uh let's try to to see what we can address um let's go a little bit more personal than just talking wide you promise to unite this country and eradicate poverty and now you lost an election how far with that dream how do you intend to pursue that dream or have you dropped it for good no not at all you see i am more concerned about poverty and insecurity i believe that there's a basis for unity is already there it's just that it's a unity that is affected by a crisis it's like a couple they've agreed to get married and they have now married but if they are dealing with housing issue dealing with how to feed the family dealing with unemployment you you see that you have a lot of irritation there will be a lot of tension in the relationship and that is what is happening in Nigeria Nigerians are united to be together uh for people like me even people before who are older than me we've known no other country uh than Nigeria i don't think anybody is alive today very few people are alive today who were not born Nigeria's because anyone born since 1915 has always known Nigeria so and i used to listen to my great grandmother telling me about time before Nigeria was created you know but i don't see anybody around now these days who knows that and majority of the people who have now were born out of independence so you see that this is the only country we have and everything everyone you see now has always been around every ethnicity every religion so we are in this together but what i wanted to do was to remove areas where we have conflict and that area will be the area of the artificial scarcity which our means governors has created so where we compete for things that we should have in abundance so we compete for job placements so as a result of that competition we use religion we use ethnicity to compete we compete for school enrollment so if you have one million students trying to go to university and you have just about three hundred thousand spots then you are likely to be doing area of zonal thing you start to do cashment area you have to do all of that if you have kids trying to go to federal government colleges where you are supposed to have one per local government or one per senatorial district or per federal district you have like one in three states so then you would have to now start rationing it then you will say okay even from this state you have more of your type of your people in that place so these are all the things that bring attention so i during the campaign i made a lot of references to how it used to be when you were graduate from school five jobs waiting for you there was no room for you to remember that you have somebody from your family working there or from your town because you had five options you had to choose one but now if you're trying to recruit simple thing like policemen you are trying to recruit 10,000 200,000 will apply then you will not be forced to say okay we cannot take all the 10,000 from one place therefore let's ration it so these are the things that are called attention they rationing as you're saying it a lot of people have blamed it and blamed it on on the population and a lot of things that are going wrong people have also blamed it especially those people at the helm of affairs anyway said that the the population is causing things to be scarce as you are saying so do you think the five jobs that we're waiting for the people in the 60s for instance could have still been the order of the day now that we have a population of over 200 million it's not it's not the population is mismanagement of resources we have more resources now than we had before we have more skills now than we have before what we don't have is we have a wika leadership than we had before we had a we had a fair leadership before we had many parts of Nigeria at that time were not developed they were not much when we got independence how many industries do you have but they were serious about it they tried to create opportunity what is happening now is that we'll be having government adults that have not been creating opportunities and why don't create opportunities especially where structured opportunities there will be artificial scarcity and when you miss apply resources what it means is that the the portion of the population that has access to public resources will be shrinking further and further and you leave the rest to fend for themselves so it's about making investment structure so there's a government now that is coming in so this is where they need to pay attention it is it doesn't matter who who won the election the problems will remain the same you have to deal with security you have to keep the concept secure in terms of territorial integrity in terms of neighborhood safety in terms of law and order you need and in terms of order security that we need to have employment is a form of security because it guarantees that you have an income so if you are working for example in nmpc you know that unless you means behave you like to spend your entire career there so you are secure if you work in central bank if you work in the university as a as a professor as a lecturer you know that once you get employment into these places unless you means behave you you are secure and many of the other good companies so we need to create more of that so that people have that sense of security and that way they would kind of plan their life they will behave better and they will be able to also assist others who are coming because the essence of of governance is that you solve immediate problems you solve historical problems you are solely a foundation to predict the future and solve the problems that is why for the manpower that you need now you train people but why do we put kindergatani why do we put them in school why do we put five years old six years in school because we are trying to put put due to doctors of tomorrow the journalists of tomorrow so these are the roles of government and the essence of my running for office is I've seen the resources that the country has I've seen the opportunities the country has I've seen that we have everything and but we we we don't have a leadership account direct and now the nation has been lost on one it is the duty of the persons who are now uh to direct the government to pick up those priorities especially given that in this country it's much easier for you to find your way because we are one of the few countries I think India is also one of them that has this fundamental objective on the right to principle state policy so that when you come into government you don't have to scratch your head and start afresh and say where do I start now how we're going to govern how the government should be what priorities should be the principle around which we govern all of them have been agreed and then the constitution chapter 2 okay so all you need to do is to create the policies I look forward to is the policies in which that becomes the national consensus and that when people are making choices of who to become presidents governor they are making it in the security that any of these people that you elect will still go and implement now what I was asking you and I'm still asking you is that you had all these lofty dreams for the country but the fact that you did not clinch the ticket or you didn't go to the throne as it were to be the president and do all these means that those dreams are still somewhere how are you going to share these dreams with the incoming president or so or how do you intend how for how long do you intend to wait are you coming back the next time to talk about these or to do what you intend to do now or it is over no it's not over I I made a promise when I became 50 years old last year that I will spend the rest of my life surfing the country so I spent 50 years growing up and taking care of myself so I'm fine so I will spend the rest of my life surfing the country but surfing the country is not always I must have the government what I'm doing now is public service I believe so and we have said enough not only me other people we've said enough for those who want the election if they want to do well the first of course you didn't have to implement their own program because they believe in their own program but I believe that their own program will not be enough so they have enough from what we have said all the debates we've had all the interviews to go and pick up some ideas that they may find useful but I believe that it is assumed that the Nigerian people also had everybody it may not be the case but I assume that Nigerian people had everybody and they have made a preference that those people I don't want they want to listen I don't want to implement their own but what we have brought on board allows us to continue to continuously interrogate what they are doing and compare to what we will have been doing and to continue to give Nigerian people at the differential to say you see they've made 13 percent investment in education whereas they're supposed to make 23 percent investment in education we had promised that we're going to make if we're more than that so you could see the difference in your choice now and what or to be and in the areas where they are doing well to say so but I want people to understand that I will continue to be in politics I will continue to pursue that dream but two things are there one there is no compulsion that if you want to serve Nigeria you must join every administration there are so many museums you will not join either because you do understand where they are going or because you can't work with the people who are there secondly the fact that you are not in government does not stop you from reminding the people of options and if the people who are in government do something that is good if people misunderstand them you can actually recommend and say that measure is a good measure and people should cooperate with it but the people in government do own Nigeria they have a four-year tenure to go and serve in specific offices the country still belongs to all of us so that is the money they are spending will be public money the buildings that they use for their residences and offices public property the time that they spend is public time so and all the resources that they are managing or that we have belong to all of us so there is no stake that the president elect has over me in Nigeria except that he's been given illegal authority to society that office so you give him the difference the difference where he immediately makes his decision we automatically are entitled to say it's a good decision it's not a good decision it's not good enough and things like that it's our country okay let's go back to the election and some some other specifics you said in your interview that I was privileged to see that you are the most aggrieved of the of the contestants and you also said that you also sort of passed the blame to the electorate of the choice that they have made whether that is a in contention or that is debatable is inconsequential but let's start with the fact that you said you are the most aggrieved in what ways would you say that you could see that a lot of people some of the candidates started complaining only when they saw the results and the results were not wasn't going their way some started complaining when they got to the election point pulling units and they getting feedback I started complaining much earlier if you go review my interview I've been complaining that one many of these candidates were not keeping to the law they were not keeping to the spending limit and if you look at them you will see that if politics was too expensive they were spending obscene amount of money and I've had generally asked me if you have to want to spend so I assume that that those generally don't know me because they know me they won't ask that kind of question they will know that if I want to spend I have to it's just that you must be lawful second you will see that many of them were not allowing spending those were in government they were not allowing other people to campaign quite well many of the governors were misbehaving those in government were misbehaving do we also see that many of them were campaigning in the wrong places in religious centers which is against the law things like that so you also see that decided if on election they started enticing voters with material things some were giving money out so this kind of behavior I've been complaining for a long time and I so I feel aggrieved that we went into a race and people were not keeping to the terms of the race because if you follow what INEC specifies in the book you will see that it will be more even race I complain about the media coverage as to the fire media over commercialized the issue and it cannot be the case that if you spend more money you should have more access to the people that is not how it's done for adverse yes if somebody wants to place 100 jingus no problem that's to be commercialized but if you want to give access to people to present their message to answer questions to do debates you should give equal access to everyone so these are all the accumulated grievances that I've had and in this so it is only when the final blow was now delivered in the in the corner to the election that you will start to complain that's have been complaining over time many of those complaints have not been addressed and when you put them all together you will see that it I find it difficult to align with anyone with respect to sherry picking what you want to complain about whereas I can cite and say you yourself were not in compliance with many critical aspects of the lesionary even on the lesion day you were not in compliance with many things and why I need to refrain from over litigating the issue is that people have gone to God and if you pay keen attention especially when you see the pleadings when you pay keen attention you will see that this is what I'm talking about in general terms the evidence of it will come in the trial so the agents those who might be irritated by how I'm approaching the issue when they see the petition the cross petition the evidence and the counter evidence and they see they will see that it's a mess all around is it one of the reasons that made you not to go to court because some people including myself I'm expecting that if you are grieved you will address it in a legal way except you just want to give up for peace to reign because you did say that in some pulling units even your own votes that glaringly were given to you were not recorded they gave you maybe 19 where you should have had 90 something and all that so are you just giving up because you want peace to reign or you don't think that should even be an option at all you see okay people need to understand that first I'm a lawyer so because I'm a lawyer if something like that happen to somebody else typically I'm the one they will come for advice who will say well I know what happened to you but here's how the court looks at it so that's one second is that I will see over time when you see how the when the court started to rule on it you will understand the wisdom of what I'm saying now second you will also know that I've not given up given up means that I just buy a ticket and fly to New York and you ask me what happened I said I don't want to talk about it that's given up racing it in the consciousness of people talking about it emphasizing it and addressing it from the systemic way it is you are going to court you are having a specific prayer from the court and the prayers you can pray to the court are limited you can ask the court to cancel the election you can ask the court to declare you the winner now I've tabulated that if if all my legitimate votes were given to me I don't have enough to tell the court to declare me the winner so because that's the first thing I did but they could declare some of the people my party for example we want to send it so it's likely that somebody will go and challenge us on those things but nobody has complained so far we want five it wants to want five out of the six house of reps we say I've got no ships that I believe will win quite a number of them so the notion that I can go to court and say the court should declare me winner in places where I didn't win I can complain that where I won my votes were not duly recorded but I cannot make a claim that if you restore my votes because because okay I've had you if I restore all the votes they took from you after three months six months of trial you still didn't win the election so today that angle of saying declare me the winner is out but there may be other people other contestants who when they put their own votes together they will say ah the court can declare them the winner then I'm not going to comment on their own opportunities they can do and do that so maybe where you took 2000 votes from me you do 20,000 from there or 200,000 they have a better chance of going to complain of going to get it realized second thing is that when I put all together uh the cheating the cheating is number one person so and in law you I can say the election is marked by irregularities but the law is that if it's marked by regularity regularity must be such that if you remove all the regularities the person won't want to still not win no no no yeah I'm trying to I'm looking at it from the no I want to explain to you because you are looking at it from a legal point of view and I'm saying that if you have a wrong done to you in a society there are some of the wrongs you can go and write in the court and there are some of the wrongs you can write by advocacy and for me I have looked at my own case I'm not going to comment on another person's case and I will sort my opinion on the matter two things I decided to do one is that anything that will be a breach of the peace demonstration whatever whatever I'm out of it why not because I don't have a right to protest but because I'm running for I was running for president and I went to a gentleman's agreement that if I was cheated or anything went wrong I was not going to breach the peace I was going to take legal legal costs so that issue of me leading the demonstration is out of it for me second if I am going to pursue things that are wrong in the election I have people who I have grievances against that are not even candidates at all I give an example that inside our party we are doing reviews so I have seen cases in our party where certain officials of our party took our party agent's tag and went and gave it to the opposite party the court cannot help you in that situation maybe the party can discipline them, expect them for the party or sanction them so for example I'm sure you have reporters and they do for that they do reporting for you or maybe they reported to you already you will see cases where people were selling their votes those people selling their votes I cannot take them to court I'm not the police and I cannot sue them in the election petition and say this person sold his vote therefore no so what I can do is to say okay I've been exposed to how we conducted this election and if I am invited as I'm invited by you to come and explain I owe a duty to you to explain in detail what happened and also to make recommendations of what we need to do if for example INEC invites me then I can assist INEC with detail of how they need to reform their system you remember that in 2007 when Yara Dua was elected there was a hue and cry even louder than this regarding that election and what and some people went to court, General Buwari went to court I think Elijah Buwaka, Atiku went to court as well but what Yara Dua did was to come by way of advocacy now we standing at the case cases were in court he said this election was not a perfect one I don't want to misquote him and that he would do something about it and he set up the waste panel so many of the things that went wrong at that time were the things the waste panel looked into and they were the things we included in our electoral act now I suspect that the president elect now if he's well advised and if he wants to lead with credibility and honesty would have to toll that line and say I think something is wrong with this election but if he for example pretends to himself that nothing is wrong with the election and his election is perfect is the best we have done so far then he will have failed in leadership okay let's just let's just take a short break because there's a lot to talk about in this very issue for clarity anyway not uh yeah we'll just take a short break and we'll be back in a moment on go away you're welcome back it's still it's still plus politics and my name is Nyamgul Agadji we're here with the presidential candidate of the social democratic party uh Ade Wole Adebayo who he lost yes but he is going through other ways to make sure that the process is better tomorrow right okay before we went on break I asked you about what you're going to do if you are still having that dream and how you intend to pursue it and you said something about the fact that even if all your votes are added you will still not win the elections so there's no point now I was asking for clarity because sometimes they say posterity should know the the exact thing that happened for instance if someone accuses you falsely and you go to court and they say that you are supposed to pay a fine of go to prison or pay fine of ten naira and somebody says I'm going to contest that and see it to the end the reason that will give you is that if I pay it I'm still an ex-convict no matter that the ten naira is small so the exact thing should be known no matter how small it is now how would posterity see the election that you conduct that was conducted that you were a part of if the votes that were supposed to come to you whether they are just 1000 or 100,000 if they are not recorded against your name don't you see that as an injustice done to you because we need to know in 2023 when he conducted when he contested in an election this is how much he had if you're going down in the next election let's know by how many votes if you're going up let's know by how many votes so don't you think it is a problem to just leave it go no you're not leaving it if I was leaving it I won't talk about it all I'm letting you know is that I'm a lawyer I know the good process so when you are going to court in an election matter and I'm trying to run away from talking about election matter so that people will not assume that I'm signaling other people's cases what I'm letting you know that I know that what went wrong when beyond what a court can look into because there are there are grounds if you are finding little bit is a very technical lawyer called a sui generis that's the very technical process very technical procedure so if you go to court you will see that when if people have read previous judgments for example let me give an example that's how I was talking about Yara Edoa if you read the waves panel report are you comparing which was not implemented though partially it was the duty of Gula Junata to implement them it was his duty but he probably didn't want to implement them fully but a lot of the recommendations are included in the electoral act that we have now but what I want you to understand that if you look at that waves report on the election and compare it with the judgments in Buwari Faso Yara Edoa and Atiku Faso Yara Edoa it doesn't look like there are the same elections because in a litigation mode people deny everything the people object to every evidence but in advocacy people don't so when you come before waves panel when you come before you actually bringing out because now there's no sanction so you are bringing out what happened so if for example you are you want to do a research on voodabai if you are doing inside court everybody will say I never bought foot it's not me not me at all because they are trying to run away from sanction but when you bring it out in terms of trying to correct the process people will be more open to that so do you intend to do yeah exactly because like Inaik after I address Inaik you will see that Inaik came out and said that the lesson they did had a lot of thoughts but I can guarantee you that when Inaik goes to court now Inaiklaia will not say that Inaiklaia will say go and prove this and that because the nation of litigation I worked as truth and recondition commissioner in Liberia after the war I have seen how let me give you an example look at how South Africa did the truth and reconciliation look at our puta pane in South Africa the truth and recondition commission was done in such a way that there was no sanction involved but they wanted to get to the truth of it so many people in South Africa who had killed people that were not even charged to court people didn't discover they came out fallen trailing and said you know there was a particular person that died I killed the person and I want to come and make atonement they were volunteering to come out everybody who did something came out because the atmosphere was they wanted to know the truth of what happened but when we did our puta pane people were coming with lawyers deny obvious evidence because with the spirit of trying to know what happened rather than trying to blame somebody so that is why I feel that those who are complaining now those who are making noise now they will go to court cases will be won and lost but I want to find out why you see that in this country with everything we have gone through there are still people who will not vote unless you pay them to vote I want to quarrel state after after the election after my election I want to quarrel state to campaign for my governorship candidate but I met with my party people and I was asking that question why do you belong to a political party and you want to represent that party and you don't want to be loyal to that party what is the reason why do you join it at all you get the pandemic so there are these conversations we need to make I was talking to some of my fellow presidential candidate today I asked some of them are you going to court some say they are not going to court some say they are quitting politics some say they will wait but this conversation will go on so you won't hear the last of it if somebody goes to court because of the nature of their pleadings because of what they are asking for if they court throws away their case for me it is still not the end of the discussion because we will write books on it we will document it we will do seminar on it we will find out what went wrong and historian analyst everybody will come out if you go back to 1979 election it ended up in the supreme court or the definition of 12th to 3rd it's on a very narrow technical but what happened in the entire election was not discussed so I'm looking at it if I wasn't a lawyer I'll probably run to a lawyer and that lawyer might tell me yeah you have a good case let's go okay but because I'm a lawyer I understand the legal conundrum that is there I thought to myself one of the things I can contribute is to if I'm asked to actually tell you what I experience and tell you all those things that are wrong with our electioneering and to give us a clarion call that every election will encounter it because I saw it in equity I saw it in ocean and I was raising alarm in equity if you go back to my previous statement in equity you will see that this equity will be large we will try to follow follow you as you do your advocacy and see what you're doing and see what we can contribute as well because we want a process in this country that will be transparent enough because that is everything if it is transparent and is good enough but we just got information that the prayers of labor party for instance that the bimodal voter be the beva should not be tampered with should not be reconfigured for until all the evidences therein are removed has been thrown away and INEC has been given leave to go and reconfigure days don't you see this as obstruction of no you see I see let's be as brief as possible there is a lot of misunderstanding you know there's too much speculation and the media too I don't know why I keep saying media but media too doesn't have technical people to explain things to them the controversy was many less whether you reconfigure it it will not remove the data that was there before so I I don't know political parties were trained on how the beva should work they were introduced to it and but I don't want to insert myself into it it's not an issue it's not the problem in the sense that configuring the bevas for the next election just like you go on the computer you type a letter you type a letter and post the letter and then you want to type another open on that page you get my point so unless INEC deliberately wants to throw away the evidence but in reality you can do another one without I think when the court made that order the court made the order on the assumption that reconfiguring it will not disturb the data but I don't think so unless they want to deliberately do so okay before the presidential election there was this talk that SDP is an appendage of APC and then people started saying which you roundly refuted anyway that you had given up your seat for the APC you had you had given up your aspirations for the APC candidate you denied that you said it wasn't true and even the labor party also I think came up with that but now after saying that and making everybody believe that okay you are not an appendage of any other party we just got information also that the deputy governorship candidate in Lagos state said she has assessed all the candidates that are standing for election and she has chosen to follow the candidate of the APC she is a deputy candidate deputy governorship candidate and now she is cross-captain and endorsing another one what's your reaction to that act my reaction is the first one that it is true because I've been a victim of all these unfounded information personally so you could see that I was going to quite well on my own the first people to start sending insinuation were the APC you know maybe they were threatened by what we were doing so they started passing rumo about discouraging people so then PDP also pick it up they started doing it I reacted to that then most disappointing of all labor they all waited and timed down on the eve of the election and I said that we have stepped down for them so I think this is these are some of the grievances that I have and these are the current grievances that you find in Nigerian policies if you study the policies of other countries if you are in your party they just leave you alone for example when we were running for president there were people from labor party in kano in midnortis who said they wanted to come and declare I'm not interested if you want to leave your party and come and join a party go to your world and join a party I don't have I don't believe in a system of trying to damage your people's brand why I didn't after some time they went and did it with the APC that's their business I'm not interested so I believe that we should try to do ideological politics here politics of principle but as for the person that you refer to as long as we as a political party we have not been told the person hasn't resigned from our party as he remember what happened to NMPP in kano where shekarao was said to have left left the party and crossed to you could see that eventually INEC announced tekarao as a winner of a senator seat under NMPP so party these rules are there so I don't so I don't want to get into speculation because it may turn out that for example unless you call her into your studio or some studio and she's interviewed and she says this is true otherwise I people were when I on the Friday on the eve of the election I was at an airport in abuja going to hundo to go and vote I saw people who were obedience hugging me oh thank you for stepping down for us sir please don't hugging me I will step down for you so if you have fallen if you have okay let's try to so if you have fallen victim of that you want to be sure that you hear from your husband okay let's let's let's try to wrap it up now we have like a minute what's the future of sdp are you considering majors are you standing alone are you the future of sdp is not as good as the future of Nigeria as long as Nigeria has this kind of problem that it has now they will always need an sdp you always need a party that want to deal with the issue of poverty and insecurity but let's say the government that has just been elected now this within security decisively then it's not like an issue that's why you don't find us saying we want to get independence on Nigeria because before we came some party had done it that's why you don't see us when you first came it was how to get you the military rule now we don't have military rule anymore so if the government that you elect solves this problem that we're concerned about there may be a time when you won't have sdp if for example poverty is educated completely insecurity is gone you may see that there the party will change what he wants to do but it's not about the future of the party it's more about the future of the country and i pray and hope that the government that has just been elected now will solve this problem that sdp is supposed to solve but if they don't solve it and they will rigmaroo for another four years we'll be back to try to solve that problem okay keep us in the know as you go about using the um public forum as you call it to expose the things that you have seen uh things that will be lessons to be learned by inek by the citizens by the politicians themselves and all that so but for now we'd like to thank you for being a part of our program today and we're hoping that this contact will continue thank you very much i appreciate it and i wish nigeria were go bless nigeria yeah so we've been talking with uh the uh presidential candidate for sdp i remember sdp was the first party i voted for anyway in 1993 yes i won't ask you why for the last no no no uh that's a different story all entirely but we've been talking with the presidential candidate adewale adebayo of the sdp and we've been talking about how the election was and the way forward for nigeria we do hope that we'll get to that point where every politicians the interest that will be thinking about is the interest of nigeria so when they say they are different interests it should be different interests that could lead to the gul of nigeria becoming something of anel dorado that we've always thought about thank you so much for being a part of this true it's a pleasure thank you let's do it again tomorrow my name is nyam gul agaji