Adewole Adebayo: Not All My Agents Worked for Me on Election Day
The Social Democratic Party’s candidate in the February 25 Presidential election, Adewole Adebayo, says among other issues, why Nigeria isn’t moving, and what the Nigerians must do especially in the next election cycle if they truly desired change even as he criticized the hypocritical nature of both the leadership and the people.
Adebayo who was a guest on an online discussion programme, says many of the people in politics are merely agents, not principals. The reason why Buhari and Tinubu could form a coalition is because Buhari isn’t anybody’s boy. He was the leader of his own team. Tinubu isn’t a follower of anybody. He is not anybody’s boy. But some of these people you may be forming alliances with them while in actual fact they are working for some people. And once they call them into the room and tell them what to do that’s exactly what they will do.
Adebayo who was speaking on the 2023 presidential campaign and funding said “90 per cent of the budget campaign came from my pocket. There is a former head of state who wants to remain anonymous he gave me some money. I am not anonymous about it but he wants to be anonymous about it”.
“Towards the end of the campaign, he called me and he said he liked what I was doing and he said take. There are many people who paid for posters and billboards on their own for me. I don’t know how much such would cost. We are well below the amount they said we should spend. Directly from me, we didn’t spend more than N1.5 billion. So, we are still within the limits” he added.
when asked whether some of his party agents worked for him or not on election day, Adebayo answered that “Not all my agents worked for me. Some may look at my picture and say this didn’t have money and went to collect from other parties. In a particular state, our agents said INEC didn’t give them accreditation cards. We asked why. They said they didn’t know. We went to INEC. It said the state chairman of our party came together with PDP. Each of the chairmen collected for their parties, and then the SDP chairman gave the tags to the PDP chairman, shook hands, and drove away. On that election day, you would see someone wearing an SDP tag, but he is definitely working for Atiku. Some of them helped APC. Some worked for labour, I think in Delta Anambra and some parts of the South-east.
