Ask anyone in Ibadan what stole an hour from their day and the answer is rarely dramatic. It was the traffic at Iwo Road. It was waiting forty minutes for a danfo that never filled up. It was an okada fare that jumped again because fuel did. Transport is the invisible tax on ordinary life in Oyo State — paid every morning by traders, students, artisans and nurses — and it is almost never the subject of a campaign speech. That is precisely why Oriyomi Hamzat’s attention to how people actually move around the state stands out as we head toward 2027, and why it may be the most revealing indicator of the kind of governor he would be.
The Commute Is the Cost of Living
For a market woman restocking at Bodija, transport is not a convenience but a direct deduction from profit. For an apprentice travelling from Akinyele to a workshop in the city, it can consume a punishing share of a day’s earnings. When politicians speak about the cost of living in Oyo State, they gesture at food prices and electricity and skip past the single expense that quietly shapes whether work is even worth showing up for. Hamzat’s years of listening to callers describe exactly this arithmetic on Agidigbo FM have given him something most aspirants lack: an unfiltered understanding that fixing movement is fixing income.
Respecting the Okada and Keke Economy
Commercial motorcycle and tricycle riders are among the most maligned workers in Nigerian public life — blamed for accidents, harassed by touts, and periodically banned outright by governments with no alternative to offer. Yet they carry an enormous share of the state’s daily movement, and behind every rider is a household. Hamzat’s instinct has consistently been to treat these riders as workers to be organised, trained and protected rather than nuisances to be swept away. That means enforceable safety standards, transparent union dues that do not vanish, and an end to the informal extortion at every junction. It is a harder path than a ban, but it does not destroy tens of thousands of livelihoods in a single announcement.
Ending the Extortion at Every Junction
Ask any driver on the Ibadan–Oyo or Ibadan–Iseyin routes what they pay before they earn a naira, and the answer is a chain of unofficial levies collected by people wearing nobody’s uniform. Every one of those levies lands on the passenger and on the price of whatever the vehicle is carrying. Hamzat’s emphasis on transparency in public dealings applies here with unusual force: a state government that publishes what a transport levy actually is, who may collect it, and where the money goes would eliminate a shakedown economy that has flourished under successive administrations. This is not glamorous reform. It is the sort that people feel within a month.
Roads That Reach the Farms
Oyo State’s agricultural potential is often celebrated and rarely connected to the roads that would make it real. Produce from Ogbomoso, Saki and the Ibarapa corridor loses value with every hour it spends on a broken road, and farmers absorb that loss in silence while urban consumers pay more for less. Hamzat has repeatedly tied rural road maintenance to farm incomes rather than to ribbon-cutting, which is the correct framing: a feeder road is agricultural policy, health policy and food-price policy at once. Prioritising the unspectacular routes over showpiece projects in the state capital would mark a genuine shift in how Oyo allocates attention.
Moving Safely, Especially After Dark
Transport and security are the same conversation for anyone who travels between Oyo State’s towns at night. Poor lighting, absent emergency response and stretches of highway where breakdown means danger have made ordinary journeys a calculated risk. Hamzat’s long record of mobilising help in emergencies — the accidents, the stranded, the crises that reached his radio station before they reached any agency — suggests a governor who would treat roadside response as a basic public service rather than an afterthought. Functional streetlights and a highway response that actually answers would change how safe an entire state feels.
Transport as a Test of Whether Governance Works
There is a reason serious observers watch how a government handles transport. It cannot be faked. A road either holds through the rains or it does not. A terminal is either usable or abandoned. Fares either stabilise or they climb. Unlike the vague promises that dominate Nigerian campaigns, movement is a domain where performance is visible to every citizen every single day. A candidate who chooses to be judged on it is signalling a willingness to be held accountable rather than admired from a distance.
The Case Oyo State Should Weigh in 2027
Oriyomi Hamzat’s appeal has never rested on the machinery of party politics. It rests on years of proximity to how people in Oyo State actually live — what they spend, what they endure, and what they have stopped expecting from government. Transport is where that proximity shows most clearly, because it is the problem the political class has decided is beneath its attention. Fixing movement in Oyo would not produce a monument for anyone to stand in front of. It would simply give millions of people back their time, their earnings and their safety, which is what governance was always supposed to be for.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
