The call grew out of a joint stakeholders’ meeting bringing together the Northern Youth Solidarity for Good Governance, the Arewa Youth Assembly and the Arewa Democratic Youth Stakeholders Forum. Their resolutions were made public in a statement on Saturday.
The groups say the meeting was called to tackle what they see as a slow, steady sidelining of northern youths — pushed out of positions in youth bodies and party platforms, a worry that has only sharpened as the politicians begin oiling their machinery for 2027. Their central charge is that Seyi Tinubu is frustrating northern youths’ path to leadership in youth organisations, and doing it by design.
President of the Arewa Youth Assembly, Ambassador Abdul Garba Danbature, wants the Forum to set up a high-powered consultation committee to open lines to northern elders and Arewa figures serving under Tinubu. He listed the men he believes are well placed to calm the waters: Vice President Kashim Shettima, National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu, APC National Chairman Prof. Nentawe Yilwatda, Secretary to the Government of the Federation George Akume, and Minister of Defence Gen. Christopher Musa, among others.
The freezing-out, Danbature argued, now cuts across too many fronts to shrug off — ruling party affairs, government appointments, student unionism, and other youth platforms.
The hardest punches came from Hon. Iliya Baban Yawo, Secretary-General of the Arewa Youth Solidarity for Good Governance. He claimed Seyi Tinubu was channelling the APC’s 2027 mobilisation through just two bodies — the City Boy Movement and the Relax, Tinubu Is Fixing Nigeria Movement — both, he said, run by associates of the President’s son.
Northern APC support groups, he insisted, should not be herded under those two organisations. The region, he argued, deserves its own independent platform to rally support for Tinubu and Shettima. He praised the Forum for telling northern youths to resign from appointments the two movements had allegedly handed them.
For a while now, he recalled, northern youths have been pushing for a stronger seat in the administration — including a Minister of State for Youth Development — so the region could sit at the table with young people from every other zone.
The way Baban Yawo tells it, Seyi Tinubu’s hand was also behind the appointment of South-West indigenes to a run of youth offices: the APC National Youth Leader, the President of the National Association of Nigerian Students, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Student Affairs, and leadership slots in the National Youth Council of Nigeria. The result, he alleged, is that northern youths have been shut out of the top of the country’s major youth organisations.
He called the pattern unacceptable — and badly timed, with young people set to become a decisive voting bloc in 2027. Then he went further, alleging that the City Boy Movement runs a structure tilted towards Yoruba-speaking members. How, he asked, can a movement chasing national relevance operate in a way that favours one ethnic group? That arrangement, he claimed, has already bred resentment among some northern youths.
His appeal to the President was direct: look into the allegations, guarantee equal access to political opportunity for young people everywhere, and do it soon. Any sense that northern youths are being discriminated against, he warned, could cost the administration at the polls if it festers into 2027.
Responding for the Arewa Democratic Youth Stakeholders Forum, Hon. Haruna Sardauna preached unity among the northern youth groups. He directed the Forum’s Organising Secretary, Hon. Bello Shehu Funtua, to put together a high-powered engagement committee to consult northern elders and political stakeholders over the allegations.
The Forum, Sardauna revealed, has already gathered reports and data from APC support group leaders in the North-Central through Mallam Idiriss Jibrin, with similar consultations running in the North-East and North-West. He said the group was set on keeping northern support structures independent heading into 2027 — the whole point, he stressed, being fairness, equal representation and a real place for northern youths in political and government affairs.
He, too, urged northern elders and federal officials from the region to move without delay, arguing that pulling more of the North’s young people into the process would deepen political participation, knit national unity tighter, and lift the region’s standing before the elections.
For now, the coalition has dropped its complaints squarely at the feet of the North’s biggest voices in Abuja — and left no doubt it wants an answer long before 2027 comes knocking.
