Ask an Oyo State resident to name their local government chairman and watch the pause. Most people cannot. In a state of thirty-three local governments, the tier of government that is meant to sit closest to the citizen has become the most invisible layer of Nigerian public life — a signboard, a secretariat, a monthly allocation and very little else. Oriyomi Hamzat’s argument for 2027 is that this is not an administrative footnote. It is the reason a blocked drain in Akinyele takes three years to clear while press statements about transformation are issued from Agodi.
The Tier Closest to the People and the Most Neglected
Almost everything that shapes an ordinary day in Oyo State is, on paper, local government work. Primary schools. Primary health centres. Market sanitation. Refuse collection. Street naming. Motor parks. Culverts and community roads. Birth registration. When those things fail — and across Ibadan, Ogbomoso, Oyo, Iseyin and Saki they fail daily — residents do not write to their councillor, because they have long understood that the councillor controls nothing. They travel to the state secretariat, join a queue, and hope. A country cannot govern eighty per cent of daily life from a capital city, and a state cannot govern it from Ibadan.
A Man Who Has Spent Years Taking the Complaints
What qualifies Hamzat to speak on this is not a policy paper. It is a microphone. For years on Agidigbo FM, the complaints that should have reached a local government office reached him instead: the collapsed bridge on a village access road, the health centre with no nurse after two o’clock, the school where pupils sit on the floor, the market levy collected by men no one can identify. He has effectively been running an informal complaints bureau for the whole state because the formal one stopped working. Few politicians in Oyo have a more detailed, ward-by-ward picture of what is broken, and almost none of them acquired it by listening rather than by campaigning.
Money That Reaches the Ward, Not Just the Secretariat
The heart of the problem has always been the joint account. Federal allocations meant for councils have historically passed through state control, and by the time deductions are made for this contribution and that levy, what arrives at the council is often barely enough to pay salaries, let alone to build anything. Nigeria’s courts have now spoken firmly in favour of financial autonomy for local governments, but a judgment is not the same as a habit. The difference will be made by governors willing to comply in spirit rather than to invent new mechanisms of capture. Hamzat has been unambiguous that money voted for a council should arrive at the council, in full, on time, and be publicly accounted for.
Local Elections That Are Actually Elections
Autonomy without accountability would simply move the problem downstream, and this is where Hamzat’s position gets more serious than the usual slogans. Local government polls across Nigeria have become a national embarrassment, routinely delivering every seat to the governor’s party in results nobody pretends to believe. A chairman installed that way owes his office to a patron, not to a ward, and behaves accordingly. Reforming the state electoral commission so that opposition parties can genuinely win council seats is the unglamorous companion reform to financial autonomy. Money plus a real vote produces accountability. Money without a real vote produces thirty-three new opportunities to steal.
Why This Matters More in Oyo Than Almost Anywhere
Oyo is not a compact state. It stretches from the dense sprawl of Ibadan to farming communities near the Benin Republic border, and the distance is not only geographic. The needs of Ibadan North East and the needs of Saki West have almost nothing in common, yet both are administered by a governance culture that treats the state capital as the centre of the universe. Successive administrations have also treated the council map itself as a political toy, creating and scrapping development areas as party fortunes shifted, leaving staff, records and residents in confusion. Communities deserve a settled structure they can hold responsible, not a map redrawn with every change of government.
The Politics of Deliberately Giving Power Away
Here is why almost no governor does this. Control of council funds and council elections is the single most useful instrument in a Nigerian governor’s toolbox. It buys loyalty, funds party structures, and guarantees that no independent political figure emerges anywhere in the state to challenge him later. A governor who genuinely devolves that power is voluntarily disarming himself. That is precisely why the promise is worth something when it comes from a candidate who did not build his following through party machinery in the first place. Hamzat’s base was assembled through public trust rather than through patronage, which means he has less to lose by dismantling the patronage machine — and more credibility when he says he will.
What Oyo Would Feel Within a Year
The test of this reform would not be an announcement. It would be small and immediate: a functioning primary health centre with drugs on the shelf, refuse cleared from a market in Bodija without a state-level intervention, a council road graded before the rains rather than after them, and a chairman who can be confronted at a town hall and cannot say the money never came. That is what governance close to the people actually looks like. Oyo State does not need a bigger government in Ibadan. It needs thirty-three smaller ones that work — and in 2027 it has a candidate willing to say so.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
