Nigeria’s First Lady, Oluremi Tinubu, has urged wives of State Governors to take bold, independent action in tackling social vices and economic challenges confronting the country.
She was speaking at the first quarterly meeting of Wives of State Governors for year 2026.
Mrs Tinubu urged them to prioritise youth empowerment, women’s skills, and grassroots interventions tailored to their regions.
Drawing from her tenure as Lagos State’s First Lady years back, she shared how initiatives like Spelling Bee competition kept children to stay in public schools, complementing government efforts.
Mrs Tinubu noted that her past projects—Musical Fiesta, Leadership Academy for girls starting with 20 participants—served as models, with a push for similar self-reliance drives despite national support.
She said, “It’s like giving birth to a baby, the teething stage and learning how to walk. After a while, the baby is supposed to walk unaided, and that is what I want to see. I expect them (wives of state governors) to do what they are supposed to do.”
She praised state-specific efforts, such as Ekiti’s adire fabric hub and calls for large-scale cassava production or smoked fish processing in riverine areas, while encouraging boy child mentoring programmes like Lagos’ ongoing initiative to reshape mindsets.
“Encouraging women to produce cassava on a large scale, those in the Riverine area, we want to see them doing smoked fish,” she added.
The meeting featured progress updates from Wives of State Governors and mapped out 2026 programmes, including a National Community Food Bank launch in April across six geopolitical zones.
Linked to Primary Health Care centers, the food bank will supply nutritional supplements for malnourished children aged 0-6 and pregnant women, backed by a new trust fund.
Mrs Tinubu stressed child nutrition as non-negotiable,
“We are going to start on child nutrition. We are going to go at it aggressively… It is sad for a nation like ours to still be talking about child malnutrition at this level.”
Environmental action also drew attention at the meeting, with the First Lady of Nigeria appealing to the Governors’ Wives to immediately launch state environment clubs and urging youth groups to plant trees and combat plastic waste by July 15, 2026.
She applauded the robust response she got for the National Library Fund, driven by the wives of Governors, describing it as a generational legacy that every Nigerian should take pride in contributing to.
The First Lady also touched on the Renewed Hope Initiative’s National Scholarship Programme coming up in September, requiring early result submissions; the Elderly Support Scheme in December, challenging states to surpass the target of 250 beneficiaries per State with N100,000, among others.