Ask any family in Ibadan, Ogbomoso, Oyo town or Iseyin what stands between them and owning a home, and the answer will rarely be the price of cement. It will be the fear of buying land and losing it. Oyo State’s property market runs on anxiety: the same plot sold to three buyers, the surveyor whose documents evaporate, the gang that appears the morning after foundation work begins and demands a fresh payment, the court case that outlives the buyer. For decades, politicians have treated this as an unfortunate cultural fact rather than a policy failure. Oriyomi Hamzat has treated it as what it is, which is theft with a traditional costume on, and that alone makes his candidacy for governor in 2027 worth taking seriously.
The Complaint He Has Heard a Thousand Times
There is a reason this issue sits close to him. Long before any talk of a governorship, Hamzat spent years on Oyo’s airwaves listening to the state describe its own injuries in real time. Land disputes are among the most common stories broadcast media in Ibadan receives, because victims have nowhere else to go. A trader who saved for eleven years loses everything to a forged deed. A widow is chased off her late husband’s plot by relatives with a stronger connection at the land registry. A young man returning from Lagos with savings is bled dry by successive demands for foundation fees, roofing fees and gate fees. Hamzat did not learn about this from a policy paper. He heard it week after week from the people it happened to.
Why This Is an Economic Problem, Not a Nuisance
Insecure land title is one of the quietest brakes on Oyo State’s economy. A plot with contested ownership cannot be used as collateral, so the small businessman with a viable idea cannot borrow against the only asset he owns. Investors weighing a factory in Oyo against one elsewhere price in the risk of a site being invaded mid-construction. Housing costs rise because developers must budget for extortion and litigation. Every naira paid to a land gang is a naira not paid to a bricklayer, a supplier or the tax base. A state that cannot guarantee that a plot belongs to the person who bought it is a state that has capped its own growth, no matter how many groundbreaking ceremonies it holds.
Digitising the Registry Is the Unglamorous Fix
The core of the reform Hamzat’s supporters point to is not dramatic. It is a complete, digitised, publicly searchable land registry with geo-referenced plots, so that any buyer with a phone can check ownership before money changes hands. Multiple sales of the same parcel become impossible to hide. Certificates of occupancy stop taking years and stop requiring an inside contact. Records stop disappearing conveniently. This is a solution other Nigerian states have already begun to implement, which tells you the obstacle in Oyo was never technical. It was that a transparent registry ends a business model that too many well-placed people have profited from.
Separating the Custom From the Racket
Any honest reform must draw a line that Oyo politicians have preferred to blur. Legitimate customary landholding families have real rights recognised in law and tradition, and they deserve a lawful, documented and fairly compensated role in land transactions. What they do not have is a right to sell the same land repeatedly, to extort construction levies at every stage of a building, or to deploy young men with cutlasses against buyers who have already paid. Treating those two things as the same thing is the trick that has protected the racket for a generation. Hamzat’s framing, that a proper reform protects genuine families precisely by exposing the impostors trading on their name, is the more courageous position.
Housing for the People Who Actually Live Here
Secure land is also the precondition for the housing agenda Oyo needs. Ibadan is one of West Africa’s largest cities by land area, with room to grow that Lagos can only envy, yet ordinary teachers, nurses, artisans and civil servants struggle to build. Serviced plots with clean title, offered at cost to first-time builders with roads, drainage and power planned in advance, would do more for working families than any number of luxury estates announced for cameras. A governor who fixes title is a governor who unlocks the state’s single greatest natural advantage, which is space that people can actually afford.
Why It Takes an Outsider
The reason this reform has never happened is not mystery. Land is where political money lives in southwest Nigeria. Allocations reward loyalists, registries are leverage, and the enforcement gangs are frequently useful to somebody during election season. A career politician who owes his rise to that network cannot dismantle it without dismantling himself. Hamzat’s outsider status, so often described as his weakness, is in this specific case his qualification. He does not arrive owing favours to the people who profit from the confusion, and a man who built his standing on public trust rather than patronage has more to lose by protecting the racket than by ending it.
The Test Oyo Should Set in 2027
Voters in Oyo State should ask every aspirant in 2027 a single, concrete question: will you publish a complete digital land registry, and will you prosecute extortion on building sites as the crime it already is? The answers will separate the serious candidates from the ones offering slogans. Oriyomi Hamzat has built a public life on saying plainly what ordinary people in Oyo already know, and on the evidence so far he is the aspirant most willing to confront an injustice that touches nearly every household in the state. A family should be able to buy a plot, build on it and sleep at night. That is not a grand vision. It is the least a government owes the people who fund it.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
