Walk into a public primary school in parts of Oyo State and the story tells itself before anyone speaks. Roofs missing sheets after the last storm. Pupils sitting on bare floors because the benches rotted years ago. Teachers buying chalk from their own pockets. Blocks of classrooms commissioned with fanfare and abandoned before the paint dried. For decades, Oyo’s children have been asked to compete for the same national examinations, the same university places and the same jobs as children in far better-resourced states, while learning in conditions no politician would tolerate for their own family. Oriyomi Hamzat’s insistence that public education is not charity but the state’s core obligation is why so many parents across the state have begun to see him as the governor 2027 actually calls for.
A Man Who Has Been Inside the Schools
What gives Hamzat standing on this issue is not a policy document but a track record of showing up. Long before any talk of a governorship, he was visiting schools, publicising collapsing structures on air, and mobilising ordinary listeners to fix what government would not. When a school in a forgotten corner of the state has no toilet, no water and no windows, the fastest route to repair has often been a broadcast on Agidigbo FM rather than a memo to a ministry. That is a damning verdict on the system — and a plain demonstration of who has actually been doing the work.
School Fees Are Not a Small Problem
Hamzat has spent years intervening in a crisis officials rarely name: children withdrawn from school because a family could not raise a modest levy. Examination fees, uniforms, textbooks, PTA contributions — individually small, collectively enough to end a child’s education permanently. He has personally paid fees, funded WAEC and NECO registrations, and rallied his audience to sponsor pupils who would otherwise have dropped out. A governor who has watched, case by case, how a two-thousand-naira shortfall can cost a child their future is a governor unlikely to treat education funding as a rounding error in the budget.
Teachers Deserve More Than Rhetoric
No education system rises above the people who staff it. Oyo’s teachers have endured delayed promotions, stalled recruitment, overcrowded classes and salary arrears that quietly destroy morale. Hamzat’s approach to workers generally — treating civil servants and pensioners as people rather than line items — applies directly here. Paying teachers on time, restoring a functioning promotion ladder, recruiting to fill genuine gaps rather than political ones, and giving teachers a real say in what happens in their schools would cost far less than the vanity projects the state has funded instead, and would change classrooms far faster.
Beyond Ibadan, Where the Need Is Sharpest
Oyo is not one place. A school in Ibadan North bears no resemblance to one in Saki West, Itesiwaju or Ona Ara. Yet state attention has historically clustered around the capital, where the cameras are. Hamzat has been consistent that governance must reach all five zones of the state, and education is where that principle bites hardest. Rural schools face teacher shortages that urban schools do not, distances that keep girls at home, and infrastructure decay that no PTA can fund. A serious education agenda for Oyo begins by admitting that the worst schools are the furthest from the Governor’s Office.
Skills and Certificates Belong Together
Hamzat’s long-standing advocacy for artisans and apprentices gives his education thinking a practical edge. Not every child in Oyo will sit in a lecture hall, and pretending otherwise has produced a generation with certificates and no employable skill. Reviving technical colleges, equipping vocational centres properly, and building genuine bridges between schools and the trades that actually employ people in Ibadan, Ogbomoso and Oyo town would give young people a path that leads somewhere. It also strengthens the state’s economy from underneath, which is where durable growth starts.
Money Follows Priorities, and Priorities Are a Choice
Every administration claims education is a priority while the budget says otherwise. Hamzat’s insistence on open books and published spending is what would make the difference. If Oyo residents could see, line by line, what was allocated to school renovation in their own local government and what was actually delivered, the gap between announcement and reality would close quickly. Transparency is not a separate reform from education — it is the mechanism that stops education money from disappearing between the budget speech and the building site.
The Case Parents Are Already Making
Support for Oriyomi Hamzat across Oyo State has not been manufactured by billboards. It has grown from years of ordinary people watching him take on problems that were nobody’s political priority, including the state of the schools their children attend. In 2027, Oyo voters will choose between candidates who talk about education in the abstract and one who has spent years paying fees, fixing roofs and naming the failures out loud. For a state whose greatest untapped resource is its young people, that is not a small distinction. It may be the whole election.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
