Dave Umahi says South-East leaders should openly support President Tinubu in 2027, citing federal roads, appointments and future reciprocity
Dave Umahi, Minister of Works, said in Abuja on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, that South-East leaders should speak plainly to their people about backing President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for a second term in 2027.
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Umahi was receiving the report of the north-west leg of a nationwide federal roads tour by the National Association of Nigerian Students.
He repeated his claim that the Tinubu government had done more for the zone in roads and other works than earlier administrations, and that this should shape the region’s political choice.
“It is a strategic decision that we Igbos must make. And I commend the South-East governors and the governor of Anambra State for his bold decision. He is not afraid of telling our people the truth; the truth is that we must support President Bola Ahmed Tinubu,” he said.
The minister said the South-East should weigh both appointments and infrastructure when it talks of marginalisation. On that test, he argued, the present government had broken an old pattern.
He invited critics to debate him with facts. “If you are insulting me, insult me constructively. Do not just empty talk. When I was governor of Ebonyi State for eight years, and now as Minister of Works, what have I done through the support of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu?”
Umahi also put the case in terms of later bargaining. If the South-East stands with Tinubu now, he said, other regions would be more likely to stand with the South-East when it next seeks the presidency.
He praised the student inspectors for asking to see federal project sites in all six zones and for refusing ministry logistics so that the visits would be independent. Civil society groups that want to monitor the same roads were welcome, he said.
On the works themselves, Umahi said four legacy road projects had grown from about 700 kilometres to about 1,150 kilometres on the president’s order.
He cited the Sokoto-Badagry corridor, put at 1,068 kilometres, and the 135-kilometre Akwanga-Jos road now under construction.
Only about 30 per cent of the expanded programme was entirely new, he said, most of that on the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, which in many stretches follows and widens an existing alignment.
Other roads named included the 156-kilometre Gombe-Bauchi road, the 149-kilometre Bauchi-Jos road, a new Ogoja-Calabar link of about 400 kilometres, and the Biu-Maiduguri corridor.
The Bauchi-Gombe road, he said, had been fully rehabilitated. Cut sections in Bauchi and Jigawa were being rebuilt with box culverts, rigid concrete pavement and asphalt.
The federal government, Umahi said, is putting up 30 per cent of the money for the legacy roads.
The other 70 per cent is to come from foreign loans, to be recovered by tolling the finished corridors.
He defended the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway against its critics by placing much of the route in the Niger Delta, through Ondo, Edo, Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers, Akwa Ibom and Cross River. The road, he said, matters to that region and to the national economy.
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The speech joins Umahi’s longer effort to turn federal asphalt into a 2027 argument for the South-East: that visible roads and posts should outweigh older grievances when the zone decides how to vote.
