South-East Belongs to Tinubu, Not OBIdient—Umahi Declares
By: Abudu Olalekan
The political temperature in Nigeria is rising. You can feel it. It’s still a ways off from 2027, but the chess pieces, they’re already moving. Everyone’s trying to figure out where the votes are going to land. And in the South-East, a region that became a hotspot of support for a certain candidate in 2023, things are getting real interesting. The Minister of Works, Dave Umahi, he’s not mincing words. He came out swinging, making a pretty bold claim. A really bold claim. The South-East, he says, is no longer with the so-called OBIdient Movement. Nope. It belongs to President Bola Tinubu now.
This is a huge statement. A lot of people, especially young people, rallied behind Peter Obi last election. His influence grew like crazy. It was a massive thing, something we haven’t really seen before in modern Nigerian politics. So for someone like Umahi, a former governor of Ebonyi State, to just dismiss all that? It’s a shocker.
He made the declaration on Saturday. It was at the Ohanivo 2025 New Yam Festival. The scene was in the Onicha Local Government Area of Ebonyi. This wasn’t some quiet interview. It was a public event, full of people. And he said it plain as day. “We are not OBIdient people. We have been so marginalised that we are no longer OBIdient. No, we are not.”
His reason is simple, at least in his mind. It’s about who has shown them love. “But it is the man that has given us a sense of belonging, President Bola Tinubu.” He even got specific about his own state. “Let it not be that we are from Ebonyi State and they are saying this state belongs to us. There is no OBIdient person in Ebonyi,” he insisted. Just like that. Done deal.
Umahi, he didn’t just make a claim. He explained his reasoning. He said President Tinubu has shown real goodwill toward the South-East. And what happens when someone shows you good faith? You reward them. He’s confident the region will pay him back at the ballot box in 2027. He says the people have gotten smarter, politically wiser. They won’t be “deceived again.” He even went so far as to call the last election a “mistake.”
“What we have to do is to record the good things that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has done for South-East and Ebonyi State when the time comes. We will not be deceived again because the last election was a mistake, but we have come to be wiser. I will not finish naming all that the President is doing for us,” Umahi said. It’s a pretty powerful message. It says, hey, we gave the other guy a chance, and now we’re looking at who is actually doing the work.
This is more than just one man talking. It’s a sign of a much deeper political shift in the region. As Nigeria starts gearing up for the next election cycle, you can see these realignments happening everywhere. This kind of talk sets the stage for a new round of debates. Debates about loyalty, about development, and about how the region is represented in national politics.
Will this change the minds of the people who were so passionate about the OBIdient Movement? Who knows. But it shows that some key players in the South-East are ready to change the narrative. They’re ready to make a stand and declare their allegiance, not to a movement, but to the current president. It’s a bold move, and it’s going to stir up a lot of discussion. The fight for the South-East, it’s just getting started.
