Lagos does not choose governors the way the rest of Nigeria imagines it does. There is no open field where any ambitious candidate simply outworks the competition and wins the crowd. There is a room. A small one. And before any campaign poster goes up, the room has usually already decided.
That room has a name. The Governance Advisory Council, GAC for short, was built in 1999 by Bola Tinubu when he first ran Lagos as governor. Insiders call it the Oyomesi of Lagos, a nod to the old Oyo Empire council that could make or unmake a king. The comparison isn’t flattering, but it’s accurate. The GAC doesn’t just advise. It has quietly ended governorship ambitions, removed a sitting speaker, and shaped every APC ticket in the state for almost two decades.
Underneath the GAC sit two rival blocs that do the real street-level fighting: the Mandate Movement and the Justice Forum. Mandate was built by Rauf Aregbesola and carries Tinubu’s earliest political loyalists. Justice Forum, led by Prince Tajudeen Olusi, has spent recent cycles pulling ahead, especially after the 2025 Assembly crisis that saw former Speaker Mudashiru Obasa briefly ousted, a fight insiders say was really about who controls Lagos after Tinubu.
Hamzat’s candidacy sits right in the middle of that marriage. He carries Justice Forum’s backing. He also picked up a faction of Mandate loyal to Abdullahi Enilolobo. Add quiet GAC endorsement, and you get a candidate who didn’t need to fight for the ticket so much as absorb it. When the primary came in May, the numbers made the point without needing commentary: 657,917 votes for Hamzat against one vote for his only challenger. That is not a contest. That is a coronation dressed up as democracy.
This is where the “imposition” argument comes from, and it isn’t manufactured by critics alone. When a deputy governor wins a primary by that margin, with the GAC, Justice Forum, and a chunk of Mandate all lined up behind him before voting even started, ordinary party members start asking whether their ballot mattered at all. Some Lagosians see a competent technocrat who earned his shot. Others see a man handed the keys by godfathers who never bothered asking the street.
Both things can be true at once. That’s Lagos politics.
What Hamzat has done since securing the ticket is where his campaign gets interesting. He hasn’t hidden behind the primary win. He’s been moving, physically, into mosques with the Chief Imam, into churches, into youth gatherings, into local government wards most politicians only remember exist every four years. He’s talking about decentralising Lagos governance across its five divisions, Ikeja, Badagry, Ikorodu, Lagos Island, and Epe, the IBILE structure that Lagosians have complained about for decades without a candidate actually addressing it directly.
That’s the part opposition candidates seem to be missing entirely.
Politics in 2026 Lagos is not rewarding the candidate with the strongest ideological pitch. It is rewarding the candidate who shows up. Who sits with market women. Who listens to okada riders complain about the economy before promising anything. Nigerians, especially Lagosians, have grown allergic to grand manifestos delivered from a podium once every four years. They want to see effort, not hear promises.
Right now, the opposition isn’t offering either.
Where is the PDP candidate’s youth engagement strategy? Where is the Labour Party’s ward-by-ward outreach that mirrors what carried Peter Obi’s momentum in 2023? Silence. And silence, in a state of over 24 million people hungry for someone who acknowledges their daily pain, isn’t neutral. It’s a forfeiture.
None of this guarantees Hamzat an easy walk to Alausa. Lagos has punished overconfidence before. Akinwunmi Ambode learned that the hard way when the same GAC machine that could build a candidate also tore one down mid-tenure. Power in Lagos is loaned, never owned, and the moment Hamzat forgets that, the same forces currently applauding him could just as easily turn.
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But if the election were held today, on visibility alone, Hamzat is playing a different game than everyone else on the board. He has structure. He has godfather backing without appearing to be a puppet. He has boots on ground in constituencies most Lagosians assumed the APC had grown lazy in.
The opposition’s path back into this race isn’t complicated, it’s just uncomfortable. Stop waiting for anti-incumbency sentiment to do the work alone. Nigerians are angry about the economy, yes, but anger without an alternative doesn’t translate into votes. It curdles into apathy instead. PDP and Labour Party candidates need visible, sustained ward-level presence starting now, not three months before the 2027 ballot. They need a message that isn’t just “APC has failed” but a competing vision for Lagos that Hamzat hasn’t already claimed.
Because right now, one side is folding its sleeves and getting to work.
The other side is nowhere to be found.
