Dr. Kadri Obafemi Hamzat, Deputy Governor of Lagos State
He has spent about two decades in the service of Lagos, and few officials in the state can claim so long and varied a record. He has held two commissioner portfolios and now serves as Deputy Governor. He is also the ruling party’s candidate for the top office in the 2027 election. His story began, in his own words, in Mushin, and it has moved through the classroom, the trading floor and the Alausa secretariat.
A Career Built on Systems
Dr. Obafemi Hamzat trained as a systems engineer and holds a doctorate from Cranfield University in the United Kingdom. Before entering government he worked in finance abroad, at firms that include Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch. That background shaped his habits in office. He tends to describe a state as a set of connected systems, in which transport, water, revenue and public records must work together or none of them works well.
He entered public service as Commissioner for Science and Technology under Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He later served as Commissioner for Works and Infrastructure under Babatunde Fashola, where he was closely associated with the construction of the Lekki-Ikoyi Link Bridge, the first cable-stayed bridge in Nigeria. Since 2019 he has served as Deputy Governor to Babajide Sanwo-Olu, and the two men have shared responsibility for the administration’s THEMES development agenda.
The Candidate for 2027
Dr. Obafemi Hamzat won the All Progressives Congress governorship primary in Lagos and became the party’s candidate for the 2027 election. The result was announced on 21 May 2026 at the party secretariat in Ogba, Ikeja, and it showed him with 657,917 votes out of 657,974 accredited. His only challenger to reach the ballot, Lanre Jim-Kamal, received a single vote, and another aspirant, Samuel Ajose, withdrew before the exercise. The size of the margin reflects a party that had settled on its choice well before the primary was held. Reports from the state say that the party had already adopted him as a consensus candidate in April 2026.
In his acceptance remarks, Hamzat thanked President Tinubu, Governor Sanwo-Olu and the Governance Advisory Council. He promised to continue the work begun by Tinubu and later APC administrations in the state, and he listed the bus rapid transit system, the Blue and Red rail lines, the Adiyan waterworks and a number of roads and bridges as examples. He called these the arteries of the state’s economy. TheCableTheCable
Infrastructure and Transport
Transport remains the field in which Hamzat is most easily judged, because commuters see it every day. The Lekki-Ikoyi Link Bridge opened during the Fashola years and gave the Lekki peninsula a second major road connection to Ikoyi and Victoria Island. In the present administration, the Blue Line and Red Line rail projects have joined the older bus rapid transit corridors and the state’s ferry services. The aim is a network in which a passenger can change from rail to bus to boat without leaving the public system.
The cost of that ambition is real. Rail, toll roads and bridges on coastal ground are expensive to build and slow to pay back. He has said in public that Lagos needs a much larger budget than it has to meet demand in transport, education and health. Critics of the approach point out that long construction periods mean lower-income commuters wait years for relief, and that public-private financing brings its own burden of fees and contracts.
Technology and Public Administration
The technology portfolio gave him his first public reputation. During his time as Commissioner for Science and Technology, the state introduced an enterprise resource planning platform to manage its personnel and finances. Supporters credit the system with tightening payroll control and limiting leakage of revenue. The claim that Lagos was the first government in Africa to use the platform at that scale has been made in the campaign literature, and it should be checked against an official source before it is repeated in print.
He has carried the same interest into current policy. He has spoken in favour of teaching artificial intelligence literacy in schools, and he argues that Nigerian students should learn to build such tools and not only use those made abroad. Educators who share his aim add a practical warning. Many public primary schools on the outer edges of the state, in areas such as Badagry and Epe, still struggle with unreliable power and poor internet access, and a curriculum cannot run without them.
Education and Health
In education, the administration has worked to upgrade classrooms and reduce crowding in public schools across the five administrative divisions. Programmes such as EkoEXCEL were meant to bring modern teaching methods, including tablets, into primary classes. In health, the emphasis has been on primary health centres and on state-backed insurance under the Ilera Eko scheme, so that ordinary clinics carry more of the load now placed on large hospitals such as LASUTH.
Both sectors face the same difficulty, which is people. Nurses, doctors and teachers continue to leave Nigeria for better pay abroad. Health specialists argue that new clinics will not hold up without better salaries for the staff who work in them, and the same reasoning applies to schools.
The Challenges Ahead
Lagos is a city of millions that keeps growing. Waste collection, land use, housing and traffic all press on the state government, and each solved problem tends to draw more people into the city. A governor will inherit each of these tasks along with the debts and contracts of earlier projects.
Political participation is a further concern, and Hamzat has raised it himself. He noted that about 6.2 million Lagos residents were registered to vote in the last election, yet only about 1.2 million took part. A candidate who wins with such low turnout holds office without the broad mandate the figures might suggest, and Hamzat has urged party members to work harder at getting voters to the polls.
The Case He Makes
He presents himself as a man who knows how the state works. At a church anniversary service in Lagos, he said he was the best candidate because he understands the history and politics of the state, and he advised residents to be careful of politicians who promise everything during campaigns. His record gives him a strong claim to experience. The test for voters will be simpler and harder, namely whether daily life in the city has become cheaper, safer and easier to manage.
In all, Dr. Kadri Obafemi Hamzat, brings an engineer’s training and a long public record to the contest for the Lagos governorship. His supporters point to bridges, rail lines and digital records as proof of method. His critics point to cost, slow delivery and the gap between large projects and household budgets. The 2027 election will decide which of these views carries more weight.
