In Oyo State, as across Nigeria, women do an enormous share of the work and hold a vanishingly small share of the power. They dominate the markets of Bodija, Oje and Gbagi. They run the farms of Iseyin and Saki alongside their husbands and often without them. They keep the schools staffed, the clinics running and the households intact through every economic shock. And yet when appointments are made, contracts awarded and party tickets shared, they are somehow always at the back of the queue. Oriyomi Hamzat’s decision to place women and the girl-child near the centre of his case for the 2027 governorship is not a token gesture. It is an argument about where Oyo State’s untapped strength actually lies.
A Broadcaster Who Heard the Complaints First
What separates Hamzat from politicians who discover women’s issues in election season is that he has been listening to women on air for years. Anyone familiar with Agidigbo FM knows the pattern: the callers who describe a husband’s death followed immediately by in-laws seizing the property; the widow who cannot access her late husband’s account; the trader whose loan application collapsed because she had no collateral in her own name; the mother pulling a daughter out of school because only one child’s fees could be paid. These are not abstractions to him. They arrived, one call at a time, in his own studio, and he has spent years intervening in them personally.
The Girl-Child and the Cost of Dropping Out
Every girl who leaves school early in Oyo State represents a permanent subtraction from the state’s future. The reasons are usually mundane rather than dramatic: fees, uniforms, distance, an absent sanitary facility, a family that must choose between children. Hamzat’s approach to this has been characteristically practical — remove the small obstacles that cause big outcomes. Keeping girls in school is not achieved by declarations at conferences. It is achieved by making the walk safe, the classroom decent, the toilet functional and the fees survivable for a household living on market income.
Credit That Reaches the Women Who Actually Trade
Oyo’s women traders are among the most disciplined borrowers in the state’s informal economy, sustaining rotating savings schemes and daily contribution systems with a reliability most formal banks would envy. What they lack is access to affordable capital at a scale that lets a business grow rather than merely survive. Hamzat has argued repeatedly that a state government serious about the economy should be underwriting cooperative lending to market associations rather than handing out branded sewing machines for the cameras. The distinction matters: one builds an asset base, the other builds a photograph.
Maternal Health Is a Governance Test
Nigeria’s maternal mortality figures remain among the worst in the world, and rural Oyo carries more than its share of that burden. A woman in labour in a remote community should not be dependent on the condition of a road, the presence of fuel in a generator or the goodwill of a private clinic that demands payment before treatment. Hamzat’s years of organising free medical outreaches have given him an unusually granular picture of where primary health centres exist on paper but not in practice. A governor who already knows which facilities are empty does not need a two-year assessment before acting.
Widows, Inheritance and the Protection That Never Comes
One of the quietest injustices in Oyo communities is what happens to a woman after her husband dies. Property is taken, children are displaced, and the legal remedies that exist on paper are unreachable for anyone without money for a lawyer. Hamzat has raised this issue publicly for years, long before it carried any electoral advantage. State-supported legal aid, faster family courts and public education on inheritance rights are not expensive interventions. They simply require a government that considers the problem worth its attention.
Representation That Goes Beyond the Women’s Wing
Nigerian parties have perfected the art of celebrating women while confining them to the women’s wing. Real inclusion means women in the commissioner’s chair, in the treasury, at the head of agencies with budgets and staff. Hamzat’s argument for a competence-first cabinet naturally opens doors that the current arrangement keeps shut, because Oyo State has no shortage of qualified women professionals — in medicine, in law, in accounting, in education administration — who have simply never been considered. A governor who selects by ability rather than by patronage would find them without difficulty.
The Constituency That Has Waited Longest
Oyo State cannot claim to be building its future while leaving half its population to carry the load without support, capital or protection. What makes Hamzat’s position credible is not the eloquence of his advocacy but its consistency: he was saying these things on air when there was no election at stake and no votes to be gained. In 2027, the women of Oyo will not be asked to trust a promise made at a rally. They will be asked to reward a record they have listened to for years.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
