Minister of Works, David Umahi, has predicted that the All Progressives Congress will make significant gains in the South-East in the 2027 presidential election, arguing that President Bola Tinubu will secure far more support in the region than the party managed in 2023.
Advertisements
Umahi made the comments during an interview on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, where he discussed the APC’s prospects in the region and its chances of improving on its previous electoral performance there.
Advertisements
While stopping short of guaranteeing a sweep of the region’s five states, Umahi said the president would draw substantially more support there than before, insisting the outcome could not mirror the party’s past performance in the South-East. Pressed on how many of the five states he believed the APC could realistically win, he said his expectation was that the party would take all of them, describing this confidence as a matter of personal conviction rather than one grounded in polling or electoral data.
The minister also rejected the suggestion that Labour Party candidate Peter Obi poses any serious threat to Tinubu or the APC heading into 2027. He argued that Obi was not the only South-East-origin candidate in the race, pointing to other declared contenders, including one from the Labour Party and others he said numbered two or three more, among them a female candidate, as evidence that Obi’s regional appeal would be diluted by a more crowded field rather than consolidated behind him alone.
Umahi’s comments represent his own political prediction and confidence as a serving minister and senior APC figure, rather than an independently verified electoral forecast, and he explicitly described his expectation of a five-state sweep as a matter of personal faith rather than data-backed projection. His dismissal of Obi’s threat also rests on an assumption that a divided opposition field will necessarily work in the APC’s favour, which remains untested until the election itself. As political parties intensify preparations ahead of 2027, with the South-East expected to remain a key battleground, similar predictions and counter-claims from rival camps are likely to continue surfacing.
Advertisements
