Joe Igbokwe, a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), has called on activist and Sahara Reporters publisher, Omoyele Sowore, to retract and apologise for remarks he made describing President Bola Ahmed Tinubu as a criminal.
In an opinion piece titled “My 10 Kobo Advice to Sowore,” Igbokwe recounted his long-standing acquaintance with Sowore through a mutual friend, Peter Claver, and said he was taken aback by the activist’s recent comments directed at the President.
“I was stunned into disbelief and in total shock when he called a sitting President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria a criminal. I advised him to withdraw the shameful, scurrilous drivels and apologise to the President. Up till now, he has not found the need to apologise to the President and Nigerians who elected him as president,” Igbokwe wrote.
He defended President Tinubu’s record, describing him as “an international Chartered Accountant, international scholar in the best tradition, former Senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, former Governor of Nigeria’s economic nerve centre called Lagos State for eight years, and now the President of Nigeria.”
Igbokwe argued that attacking Tinubu’s integrity amounted to insulting the electorate. “When you call a President we all elected a criminal, it is at once telling us that more than 200 million Nigerians are criminals. This is unacceptable,” he said.
The APC stalwart criticised Sowore’s career path since his student activism days, noting that apart from being President of the University of Lagos Students’ Union, his impact had been minimal. “These activities are getting diminished every day and do not make sense to people like us anymore,” Igbokwe stated.
He insisted that an apology was the “irreducible minimum demand,” stressing that Sowore should publicly retract his comments. “I have asked you as a friend to retract these nonsensical effusions and openly apologise to the President and Nigeria. This is our irredeemable minimum demand. Let the world know I have advised Sowore as a friend,” he concluded.
The comments come amid a broader controversy between Sowore and the State Security Services (SSS), which recently asked X (formerly Twitter) to delete one of his posts about President Tinubu, a request Sowore’s legal team has rejected as unconstitutional.
