Youths of the Igbo ethnic group, under the banner of the All Igbo Youth Forum, have warned President Bola Tinubu and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), insisting that governors and political leaders from the South-East are misleading the presidency about the region’s political mood.
Speaking during a press conference held to mark the recent legal victory of Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, in Kenya, the group’s President-General, Chinedum Obilor, declared that the fate of Tinubu’s 2027 re-election bid in the South-East would not be determined by elected officials but by the youth population.
Obilor, a former Deputy Chairman of Umuahia North Local Government Area, stated that Kanu’s release or continued detention would directly shape the electoral decisions of Igbo youths.
“Our governors are deceiving you. Our senators and House of Representatives members are deceiving you. They claim to be in charge, but they are not. We, the youths are the ones in charge of Igbo land,” Obilor said.
He further warned Tinubu against relying on assurances from South-East political leaders, stressing that only genuine engagement with the youths would change the political dynamics heading into the next presidential election.
“Come and work with the youths. But if you fail, what happened in the last election will happen again,” he added.
The warning appears to reference the APC’s poor showing in the South-East during the 2023 presidential election.
In that poll, Tinubu and the APC struggled to gain traction across the region’s five states—Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu, and Imo—where the Labour Party’s Peter Obi emerged dominant.
Obi, the first major Igbo presidential candidate in decades, won a landslide in the South-East, sweeping all five states with wide margins. The APC came a distant third in several polling units, finishing behind both the Labour Party and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in most areas.
