The 2023 presidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Prince Adewole Adebayo, has said that President Bola Tinubu has disappointed him in his first year in office.
Adebayo in a statement issued on Tuesday said Tinubu has not deviated much from what he said he was going to do.
He said: “I’m one of the few Nigerians who are not disappointed and I’m one of the few Nigerians who are not surprised. So, when we were running for president, we did not only talk about ourselves, what we would do as the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and what I would do as president.
“I also compared what the alternatives would be if you voted for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) or the All Progressives Congress (APC) what the country will look like?
“If you voted for the Labour Party, which I saw as a branch of PDP at that time, is what you will get ideologically. So, to be honest, I am personally not disappointed and I’m not agitated at all.
“I’m rather surprised that the country is not worse than this. So, I am not joining in wailing and complaining and also because I studied the nitty-gritty of what it will mean to be president, Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief, I knew the kind of decisions that will have to be taken and the consequences of these decisions.
“So far so good, President Tinubu has not disappointed me at all and maybe the voters will have to convince me if they can say he has disappointed them because he hasn’t deviated much from what he said he was going to do.
“He’s doing them almost like somebody following a playbook of how he’s going to do it, so I cannot say I’m disappointed. He’s a politician who keeps his word and he’s been keeping his word.
“So it’s not like he promised something else and when he came in he is doing something else. He’s doing exactly what he said he would do.
“And if you also follow his governance record the way he was doing in Lagos those eight years, that’s exactly how he’s doing now.
“Secondly, the policies that he’s adopting, the consequences of these policies are not even as severe as they would have been if someone else was doing them.
“So, the drastic policies that they adopted and the drastic and desperate consequences of them are consistent with anywhere such decisions have been taken before.”
Adebayo expressed concern that there is no pushback from the National Assembly, the judiciary and the civil society on some of the critical decisions the Preside t has taken so far.
“So, it looks to me that his decisions are popular even though they are inconvenient. In terms of lost opportunities, yes, of course, they were well understood that when you make a decision, there are opportunity costs.
“The decision President Tinubu is taking follows decisions that were taken earlier by the electorate one way or the other, that we have become what we call opportunity cost in democracy,” he said.