In Oyo State, the first authority most people ever encounter is not the government. It is the baálẹ̀ of the compound, the mọgaji of the family line, the Olubadan and his chiefs, the Alaafin’s court in Oyo town, the Aseyin, the Olu of Ibarapa communities and the dozens of stools that hold ordinary life together in wards and villages. When a land dispute erupts, when a marriage collapses, when two families fall out over a boundary or a debt, the palace hears it long before any court or police station does. Every politician in the state knows this. Almost none of them build it into how they intend to govern. Oriyomi Hamzat is an exception, and it is one of the quietly serious reasons he deserves consideration for the governorship in 2027.
Respect That Was Earned Before the Ambition
Hamzat did not discover Oyo’s traditional institutions when he began thinking about office. His years on the airwaves put him in constant contact with palaces across the state, because that is where the problems he broadcast were being settled. He learned the protocol, the hierarchies, the sensitivities and the histories — which stool answers to which, which quarrel is old and which is fresh, which chief speaks for a community and which merely claims to. That knowledge cannot be acquired in a campaign season by a candidate arriving with a convoy and a photographer. It shows in how he addresses traditional rulers: as custodians with standing, not as backdrops for a press release.
The Justice System Nigerians Actually Use
Oyo State’s formal courts are overloaded, slow and expensive for the average family. The customary system — palace mediation, family arbitration, community councils — handles an enormous volume of disputes at almost no cost to the state, and it does so in a language and a moral vocabulary that litigants understand. A serious government would strengthen that layer deliberately: clear guidelines on what may and may not be mediated, basic record-keeping so settlements can be enforced, modest training on the rights of women and young people, and a clean referral path to the formal courts for matters that belong there. Hamzat’s position is that this is not a nostalgic gesture. It is the cheapest and fastest access to justice most Oyo residents will ever have, and the state has left it to run on goodwill alone.
Peace Begins in the Ward
Nothing in Oyo’s security picture works without local intelligence, and local intelligence lives with baálẹ̀s, hunters, market leaders and ward chiefs. They know who arrived last week and who is renting the uncompleted building at the edge of the farm settlement. They know when a herder-farmer disagreement is still a conversation and when it is about to become a killing. Hamzat has consistently argued for structured community security committees that link palaces, local vigilance groups, Amotekun and the police in a chain that actually reports and responds, rather than the current arrangement where information dies at the point it is discovered. Every avoidable tragedy on the Ibarapa corridor and the Oke-Ogun farm roads has been, in part, a failure to listen to people who saw it coming.
Ending the Politics of Chieftaincy
Here is the hard part, and Hamzat’s willingness to say it plainly is to his credit. Successive governments have treated chieftaincy matters as political currency — upgrading stools, creating new ones, delaying approvals and settling contested successions in ways that reward loyalty and punish independence. The result is bitterness that outlives the administration that caused it, families divided for decades, and traditional institutions dragged into partisan fights they should never have entered. His answer is rules over favours: transparent, published criteria for recognition and elevation, adherence to the declared succession customs of each stool, and a governor who resists the temptation to use the palace as a reward system. Traditional authority is only worth consulting if it is genuinely independent of the man consulting it.
Culture Is Also an Economy
Oyo State’s palaces, festivals, groves and historic sites are assets that most states would build entire tourism industries around. They anchor local trade, sustain artisans and craftspeople, draw visitors and diaspora indigenes, and give young people a reason to see value in where they come from. Hamzat’s approach is practical: maintain the sites, publish the calendars, make the roads to them passable, help communities market their own festivals, and treat cultural heritage as small-business infrastructure rather than as ceremony. A festival that draws ten thousand visitors is a week of income for hundreds of families. That is not sentiment. That is local economics.
Consultation With Consequences
There is a familiar ritual in Oyo politics: a governor visits a palace, receives prayers, delivers pleasantries, and leaves without a single commitment being made or tracked. Hamzat’s proposal is to give consultation teeth — a structured, scheduled forum in which traditional rulers from all five zones raise the concerns of their communities, receive written responses from the relevant commissioners, and see published records of what was promised and what was delivered. Consultation that produces no record produces no accountability. If a baálẹ̀ reports a collapsed bridge or a clinic without a nurse, the state should be able to say, in writing, when it will be fixed.
A Governor Who Knows Where Authority Really Lives
Governance in Oyo State does not begin at the Secretariat in Agodi. It begins in compounds, wards and palaces, in the daily work of people who settle quarrels, keep peace and hold communities together without a budget line or a title from the state. A governor who understands this starts with a network of trust already in place. A governor who does not spends four years wondering why his announcements never reach the ground. Oriyomi Hamzat has spent his working life among the people who make Oyo State function at that level, and he proposes to govern with them rather than around them. In 2027, that is not a small qualification. It may be the most practical one on offer.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
