The Edo State chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) says it needs only about 341,400 additional votes to reach its declared target of 2.5 million votes for President Bola Tinubu in the 2027 presidential election, with the party’s state chairman, Jarrett Tenebe, declaring that he is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to achieve the figure.
Tenebe made the declaration during an interview with TVC News, where he also addressed the controversy surrounding the proposed opposition coalition and clarified that APC state chairmen had neither collectively rejected nor endorsed the arrangement.
The chairman’s 2.5 million-vote target is not new. In July, following the Edo local government election, Tenebe said the APC had secured 2,158,600 votes in the council poll and described the result as evidence that the party could achieve its presidential target in 2027.
But speaking specifically about the presidential election, Tenebe raised the stakes with an unusually dramatic declaration of personal commitment to the target.
“In my state we have promised that we will give 2.5 million votes to Mr. President,” he said.
He added that the party was prepared to pursue any political arrangement within the state that could help it reach the figure.
“Anything humanly possible, we are ready to do it to ensure that we get these votes for Mr. President,” Tenebe said.
Taking his expression of commitment further, the Edo APC chairman said he would even sacrifice his own body if he believed it stood in the way of the target.
“Even if my hand is going to be an impediment for us not getting the 2.5 million votes we promised Mr. President, I will cut off the hand; even if it’s my head, I will cut it off to ensure that we get it,” he said.
The remark came as Tenebe sought to explain the scale of the APC’s ambition in Edo, where the party says it recorded 2,158,600 votes in the recent local government election. That figure leaves a difference of 341,400 votes between the party’s reported council-election tally and its 2027 presidential target.
Tenebe said the issue for the APC was therefore not merely the prospect of victory in 2027, but the size of the vote with which it intends to pursue that objective.
“It is no longer whether the president will win. The president will win definitely but the numbers he’s going to use in winning is what matters,” he said.
On the proposed coalition involving opposition parties and the APC, however, Tenebe struck a more cautious note, distancing the Edo chapter from any suggestion that state party chairmen had collectively taken a position on the matter.
“There was no time the state chairman met at once to condemn the coalition or endorse it,” he said.
According to him, state APC chairmen do not independently determine the party’s position on major political decisions, arguing that governors are the political leaders of the party in their respective states.
“The governors are the leaders of the parties in the various states. And when the governors are on anything, the state chairman does not have the right to also comment on that thing,” he said.
Tenebe also clarified that the APC retreat recently held in Maiduguri was not a meeting convened by state chairmen to take a collective position on the coalition.
“It was a National Working Committee programme, not a state programme. We were only invited as state chairmen and members of the NEC to that retreat and that was what we did,” he said.
He said the chairmen would await decisions from the appropriate party organs before taking action on the coalition question.
“We’re always to watch to see the outcome and whatever outcome, then we’ll carry,” Tenebe said.
While the 2.5 million-vote figure remains an APC target rather than an established electoral outcome, the party has continued to cite its reported performance in the Edo local government election as evidence supporting the ambition. Recent reports also indicate that Governor Monday Okpebholo has publicly reiterated the same 2.5 million-vote objective for Tinubu in 2027.
For Tenebe, therefore, the immediate political calculation in Edo is already moving beyond whether the APC can win and towards how many votes the party can mobilise for Tinubu if the 2027 presidential contest unfolds as currently projected.
