EXCLUSIVE: Funds Released To State Youth Leaders To Hold APC Structure Away From National Youth Leader Dayo Israel, As His War With Seyi Tinubu’s City Boy Movement Tears The Ruling Party’s Youth Wing Apart

The war inside the youth wing of the All Progressives Congress is no longer a rumour whispered at party meetings. It is recorded in the wing’s internal exchanges, where a participant states that money has been moved against the National Youth Leader of the party, Dayo Israel. By that account, senatorial youth leaders signed a message in support of Israel last week, and in response funds were released to all state youth leaders across the country to energize them and to hold meetings aimed at holding the party structure away from the National Youth Leader.

The same exchanges carry the complaint of a youth wing official reduced to nothing inside the structure he was elected to serve. He protests that there is no work for him to do, that he is only a deputy director and that the only assignment within his reach is carried out on WhatsApp. The replies around the complaint are not denials of the structure war. They are mockery and pacification. One participant answers that he is not the president, another throws a single insulting word at the complaint, and another rebukes the official for speaking in that manner at all.

Seyi Tinubu, son of President Bola Tinubu and founder of the City Boy Movement, answers inside the same exchanges. To the charge that funds were released to hold the party structure away from the youth leader, he responds with an insult and then a profession of love, declaring that nothing can separate them. When the funds claim is put to him again in the exchange, his answer is a denial that the release came from him, and nothing more. The exchanges contain no answer from him, or from any other participant, to the substance of the claim that money was released to every state youth leader in the country to energize them against the National Youth Leader.

The money claim lands on a structure that was rearranged over Dayo Israel’s head six days ago. On 20 October 2026, the PBAT/APC 2027 Presidential Campaign Council, in a statement signed by its secretary, Imo State Governor Hope Uzodimma, named the Minister of Youth Development, Ayodele Olawande, as Director of Youth Mobilisation for the president’s re-election campaign, and named Dayo Israel, the sitting National Youth Leader of the party, as his deputy. The man elected by the party to lead its youths was placed under a minister in the campaign’s own youth directorate, and the deputy director title in the internal exchanges is the title the council gave him.

It is the second time the youth portfolio has passed Israel by. The Ministry of Youth Development, the office that carries the federal government’s youth budget and programmes, is held by Olawande, and within the party the account given by Israel’s loyalists is that the National Youth Leader was left to run a wing with no work, no funds and no seat at the table where youth positions are decided, while influence over youth mobilisation gathered around the president’s son, who holds no elected party office and no government appointment.

Two movements now stand where one youth wing stood. The City Boy Movement, founded by Seyi Tinubu, has built a nationwide structure of coordinators and members behind the president’s second term. Against it stands the Mummy’s Men Movement, convened by Dayo Israel and described by him as inspired by the First Lady, Oluremi Tinubu. Within the party, Israel is accused by the president’s son’s camp of envy of the City Boy Movement, and the Mummy’s Men Movement is read in that camp as a parallel structure raised to checkmate the City Boy Movement by drawing the First Lady’s name and weight into the youth contest. Among Seyi Tinubu’s friends and defenders, the National Youth Leader is dismissed with a taunt: they call him Juvenile.

The defence of Seyi Tinubu inside the wing follows the same pattern the exchanges display. Multiple sources within the Seyi Tinubu and Dayo Israel camps have told SecretsReporters that loyalists are being instigated to abandon the National Youth Leader and rally to the president’s son, and the men who defend the president’s son in the open do so, by the account of party members watching the fight, to assert their loyalty to the first family rather than to answer the charges on the table, which are charges about money and structure, not about sentiment. In the exchanges, a written claim that funds were released against an elected party officer is answered with a profession of love, and put a second time, with a denial of one man’s involvement.

While the structure war ran in the exchanges, the National Youth Leader was distributing vehicles. On Sunday 25 October 2026, Dayo Israel announced on his X account that he had presented brand new 2026 Toyota Land Cruiser Prado SUVs to selected youth leaders to aid their election mobilisation activities, and he thanked the First Lady in the same post: “Today, I presented brand new 2026 Prado to my committed selected youth leaders to aid their election mobilisation activities. I am grateful to my Mummy, H.E Mrs Oluremi Tinubu for her continuous support to the party structure under my leadership.” Seven of the vehicles stood in the video he posted. At the market price of about N145 million for one brand new 2026 Prado, seven of them stand at about N1.015 billion.

Israel deleted the post about three hours after it went up, under a wave of public anger at luxury vehicles moving inside a ruling party whose president tells Nigerians to endure economic pain, and the video and screenshots of the post continued to circulate without him. What the post never carried, and what no statement from the youth leader or the party has carried since, is the source of the money that bought the vehicles. The gratitude went to the First Lady by name. The funding did not go anywhere in writing. Opposition parties and the former presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar have demanded an account of how the vehicles were funded, and the demand stands unanswered.

As of the time of this report, the All Progressives Congress has issued no statement on the exchanges. Dayo Israel has not addressed the funds claim in public, and Seyi Tinubu has not spoken on it outside the exchange itself.