Omoyele Sowore’s claim that Sunday Igboho’s agitation was quietly bankrolled to rattle Muhammadu Buhari has blown open a fresh political scandal, just as Igboho openly defends his support for Bola Tinubu.
LAGOS, Nigeria — Omoyele Sowore has thrown a political grenade into Nigeria’s already volatile South-West power game, alleging that Sunday Adeyemo, popularly known as Sunday Igboho, was secretly funded by President Bola Tinubu to destabilise the administration of former President Muhammadu Buhari.
The allegation, made on Sowore’s Times podcast, is more than a passing insult. It goes to the heart of one of the most sensitive questions in modern Nigerian politics. Were separatist pressures in the South-West truly organic, or were they quietly used as bargaining chips in the battle for power at the centre?
Sowore says the Yoruba Nation agitation was not as clean or spontaneous as many believed. In his telling, the movement became entangled in elite political calculations at a time when Tinubu was said to be running into resistance from northern power blocs over his presidential ambition.
“The Sunday Igboho struggle you are saying is funded by Tinubu. Because the problem at that time was that Tinubu was having an issue with Buhari up north. They weren’t going to accept him as a candidate,” Sowore said.
That claim, if ever proven, would deepen the suspicion that agitation, activism and ethnic mobilisation in Nigeria are often used as pressure tools by political actors who prefer to fight from the shadows.
Sowore did not stop there. He alleged that Tinubu, feeling shut out by northern interests, backed separatist agitation as a form of retaliation.
“And he looked at it and said, ‘I helped you guys to get to power. You guys don’t want my candidacy. I’m going to tell the Yoruba people to leave.’ He started funding them. They have not denied it,” he alleged.
That is a serious charge. It is also, at this stage, only an allegation. No court has tested it. No public evidence has been laid out to prove it. But in Nigeria, where political loyalty, ethnicity and self-interest often mix in dangerous ways, such claims can shape public perception long before the facts catch up.
The timing of Sowore’s comments is also significant. Igboho is once again at the centre of a public argument, this time over his open support for Tinubu. His spokesman, Olayomi Koiki, recently defended the activist’s stance, insisting that backing Tinubu does not cancel the broader Yoruba Nation agitation.
Koiki’s argument was blunt. Igboho, he said, is not the sole owner of the movement, nor can any one man shut it down.
“Sunday Igboho is not the leader or the only person fighting for the Yoruba Nation agitation. He is just one among many people involved in the struggle,” Koiki said.
He went further.
“No one can stop the emancipation of the Yoruba Nation agitation, not even Sunday Igboho himself.”
That line matters because it exposes the split between political symbolism and movement politics. Igboho may be the most visible face of the agitation in the public imagination, but his recent support for Tinubu has created fresh confusion about where activism ends and partisan loyalty begins.
Sowore, who has long positioned himself as a fierce critic of Nigeria’s political class, is clearly exploiting that confusion to make a broader point. His suggestion is that Igboho’s struggle was never fully detached from national power battles. Instead, it may have been used as a lever to unsettle Buhari’s camp and boost Tinubu’s prospects.
That is the sort of claim that can split a political region in two.
Sowore also revisited the 2021 raid on Igboho’s Ibadan residence, one of the most controversial security operations of the Buhari era. He alleged that the move was an attempted assassination, carried out without the knowledge of Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde.
“So Buhari, being who he is, came and tried to kill Sunday Igboho without informing the governor of Oyo State. They brought special forces from Abuja to come and kill Sunday Igboho,” he claimed.
Again, that is not an established fact. But the raid remains one of the most hotly disputed security incidents in recent years.
What is not in dispute is that the DSS stormed Igboho’s home in July 2021, claiming the operation followed intelligence reports. The raid triggered outrage, fed conspiracy theories and turned Igboho into a martyr figure in some sections of the South-West.
Sowore claims Igboho was lucky to escape with his life.
“Sunday Igboho was in that house that day, but he was hiding. Before they came back, he had jumped the fence. Even when he was in Benin Republic, he had injuries that they were hiding from you. And he left that night,” he said.
He also alleged that the operation was meant as a warning to Tinubu.
“They wanted to kill him so that Tinubu would know that they were not playing. That’s what happened,” Sowore added.
That interpretation pushes the story far beyond Igboho alone. It turns the raid into a political message, a security warning, and an elite power signal all at once.
Sowore further suggested that Buhari’s camp believed Tinubu was behind the separatist pressure and wanted to send a clear message that the state would not blink.
“So Tinubu had to retreat because it was based on their own security intelligence that Buhari knew Tinubu was behind them. But they had already achieved what he wanted to achieve, which was to scare the Buhari people to know that he has the capacity to disrupt the country,” he said.
Whether that was a genuine reading of events or political theatre, it lands in a country already saturated with distrust.
Sowore also made a sweeping remark about northern political thinking, arguing that appeals to unity remain a powerful instrument in the North.
“An average Northerner, with due respect to them, their issue is unity. If you want to appeal to the North, just say that unity, no wahala. Anybody that discusses anything other than unity is the enemy of the North,” he said.
That comment will likely generate as much heat as the Tinubu allegation itself.
At the centre of it all is the awkward new reality that Igboho, once cast by many as a defiant separatist face, is now being defended as a Tinubu supporter. That shift has sharpened the suspicion that the Yoruba Nation campaign may have always had more political layers than many admitted.
The danger for Tinubu is not just the allegation itself. It is the revival of an old question Nigerians never quite stop asking: who really controls the crises that shake the republic?
For now, Sowore has posed the question loudly. He has not proved it. But he has ensured that the controversy will not die quietly.
The Igboho file is open again. And this time, it has dragged Tinubu, Buhari, the DSS, the South-West political class and the wider question of separatist politics right back into the furnace.
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