Social Democratic Party (SDP) presidential candidate, Prince Adewole Adebayo, has said the party will rescue Nigeria from poverty and insecurity while transforming the country’s future.
Adebayo stated this at the party’s September National Convention, themed “Consolidating the blueprint for a new Nigeria to secure our homeland and defeat poverty”, held on Wednesday in Abuja.
He maintained that Nigeria’s vast natural resources were divinely provided to guarantee prosperity for the country.
On the SDP’s core mission, Adebayo said the party stood apart from other political platforms because its members were driven by collective nation-building rather than personal self-glorification.
He drew a historical parallel with the aborted 1993 presidential election, widely believed to have been won by the late Chief MKO Abiola, noting that the poverty the party fought to defeat decades ago had since grown and continued to affect Nigerians.
“The poverty that SDP fought with Nigerians’ mandate to defeat and eradicate in 1993, that poverty has grown up and has consumed babies,” he stated, stressing the urgent need for a unified national rescue mission.
Addressing the country’s current economic challenges, the presidential candidate argued that Nigeria’s underdevelopment was not caused by a lack of natural wealth but by a failure of visionary governance.
According to him, Nigeria possesses enough oil, gas and other mineral deposits to rival and surpass major global economies.
“If God wanted us to be poor, he would not deposit under us sufficient minerals that no civilisation in human history had got before,” Adebayo asserted.
He outlined a grassroots strategy focused on door-to-door mobilisation to win the support of ordinary Nigerians ahead of the upcoming elections.
The SDP presidential candidate urged party members to reject politics driven by personal enrichment and instead focus on uniting the country and presenting an alternative to Nigerians.
“Our intention is known to God, and it’s simply that we will get Nigerians to accept that we don’t desire to be poor, and we don’t desire to die of insecurity. Everything we need to succeed is already here,” he said.
The Vice-Presidential candidate of the party, Prof. Usman Bugaje, reinforced the SDP’s reformist position.
Bugaje warned that the country could face critical threats if citizens continued to prioritise transactional “big man” politics over genuine structural change.
He said the party’s framework required individuals committed to national transformation rather than financial gains or superficial measures of party size.
“People should be here not because they want money; people should be here because they want this ten-page change,” Bugaje stated, challenging the conventional Nigerian political obsession with labelling parties as “big” or “small.”
He called for absolute integrity, sacrifice and ideological clarity among party members to steer the country away from its current challenges.
Source: SDP
