The promise rests on the record: are Lagosians better off than in 2019?

Obafemi Hamzat is asking Lagos for four more years to finish what he helped start. The state he has served is richer and better built than at any time in its history. Whether its people are better off is a harder question, and the answer decides how far to trust 100 new pledges.

By Nkanu Egbe · October 2026

On Friday afternoon at the Wole Soyinka Centre for Culture and Creative Arts in Iganmu, Dr Kadri Obafemi Hamzat stood before a packed hall and told Lagosians what kind of candidate he intended to be. “A promise is a debt,” he said. “A promise has weight.” Near the end of a 55-minute speech launching The Lagos Promise (Ìlérí Èkó), his 2027–2031 manifesto, he lifted the image onto his head: “A promise is a load. I have lifted it onto my head before you. I’m asking you to watch me carry it.”

Earlier, recalling his late father’s unfinished metro line, he had offered a sentence that may turn out to be the most useful thing he said all afternoon: “What you finish is what you leave behind.”

“What you finish is what you leave behind.”

Dr Kadri Obafemi Hamzat, manifesto launch, 30 October 2026

That sentence is the right test for this candidacy, because Hamzat is not a challenger. He has been Deputy Governor of Lagos State since 29 May 2019 — “seven years, five months and one day today,” as he told the hall — and before that a commissioner under two governors. The 88-page manifesto does not present itself as a break with the past. It says plainly that it builds on the THEMES+ agenda of the Sanwo-Olu/Hamzat administration, and its foreword, written by President Bola Tinubu, praises the candidate as an engineer who understands that he will be “judged not by what they announce, but by what they build.”

So the question Lagosians face on 6 February 2027 is not only whether 100 new pledges sound good. It is whether the record of the government that will deliver them gives anyone reason to believe they will be kept — and, more fundamentally, whether the people of Lagos are better off today than when this administration took office.

The honest answer is that there are two ledgers, and they do not agree.

The state’s ledger: a government transformed

Begin with what is not in dispute. The Lagos State Government of 2026 is a far larger, richer and more capable institution than the one Hamzat joined as deputy governor.

In 2019, the state’s approved budget was ₦873.53 billion. The manifesto puts the 2025 budget at about ₦3.37 trillion, and President Tinubu’s foreword notes that the 2026 Appropriation Law commits more than ₦4 trillion. The manifesto says Lagos now raises about ₦1.87 trillion of its own revenue a year, with “more than sixty kobo in every naira we spend” earned by the state itself. For comparison, the National Bureau of Statistics initially reported Lagos’s 2019 internally generated revenue at ₦398.6 billion, later revising the figure to ₦646.61 billion. On either number, the state’s own income has roughly tripled or more in naira terms.

That money has bought things Lagosians can see and use. The Blue Line rail began commercial service from Marina to Mile 2 in September 2023 — the first urban rail in the state after decades of false starts, including the metro line Hamzat’s father helped plan as Commissioner for Transportation under Governor Lateef Jakande. The Red Line from Agbado to Oyingbo followed in October 2024. By the government’s count, the two lines have carried nearly 11 million passengers, and the BRT network has logged more than 700 million journeys since 2008.

The state health insurance scheme, Ilera Eko, has grown from about 100,000 enrollees to more than 1.5 million, according to the Lagos State Health Management Agency (LASHMA). The administration established two new universities in 2022 — the Lagos State University of Science and Technology in Ikorodu and the Lagos State University of Education at Ijanikin. Its Employment Trust Fund, Hamzat told the launch, has put more than ₦15 billion into over 21,000 businesses. In 2025 the state issued what the manifesto describes as the largest bond in the history of any Nigerian state, including the country’s first sub-national green bond.

These are real achievements, and any accounting that ignores them is not an honest one. Measured as an institution, Lagos State is better off than it was in 2019.

The household’s ledger: squeezed on every side

The trouble begins when the measuring moves from Alausa to the household. Hamzat’s own speech pointed the way. He spoke of a mother doing “quick arithmetic in the dark” when her child has a fever, and of a young woman who boards a bus before dawn and travels more than an hour each way to work. Those are the right people to ask. Five household tests tell a different story from the budget figures.

Rent. Lagos’s housing deficit has grown on this administration’s watch, from about 2.95 million units in 2016 to 3.4 million in 2025, according to Professor Timothy Nubi of the University of Lagos Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development. At the same GTI Group forum in August 2026, Ogunniyi, presenting GTI’s research, reported that Lagos rents rose by between 80 and 120 per cent from 2024 to 2026, while wages grew by only 7 to 9 per cent. Findings presented at the forum indicated that some residents now spend 60 to 70 per cent of their income on rent. Demolitions in waterfront and informal communities have pushed more families into an already tight market.

Pay. In April 2019, the national minimum wage rose to ₦30,000. Lagos now pays its workers ₦85,000, approved in October 2024 — higher than the federal ₦70,000, a point Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu made with some pride. He also said at the time that he hoped to raise it to ₦100,000 by January 2025. That has not happened. In May 2026, the Nigeria Labour Congress, Lagos State Council, asked for ₦225,000, arguing that salaries had lost significant value since the last adjustment.

Its argument is supported by the arithmetic. According to a Comercio Partners analysis reported by Nairametrics, cumulative inflation in Nigeria between 2020 and 2025 alone reached 152.7 per cent. Add the inflation of 2019 and 2026, and on rough arithmetic the ₦30,000 of mid-2019 would need to be somewhere above ₦80,000 today merely to buy the same things. In other words, the Lagos minimum wage of 2026 is worth roughly what the national minimum wage was worth when this administration began — and it was set nearly two years ago. Headline inflation has eased, to 14.63 per cent in September 2026 according to the NBS, but slower price rises are not falling prices.

Water. In 2019, Lagos was already a city in which most residents bought water from boreholes, tankers and sachet sellers. In 2026, the Lagos Water Corporation told the News Agency of Nigeria that its network serves 34,424 registered households — an estimated 1.03 per cent of the state’s 20 million residents. The state’s environment ministry says 44 per cent of residents have physical access to the network, though not all are connected to household taps. The single project meant to change that picture, the 70-million-gallon-a-day Adiyan Phase II waterworks, remains unfinished — of which more below.

The commute. Here the record is at its most mixed. The rail lines are real and they work. Yet in 2025, the 2025 Mid-Year Traffic Index by City report ranked Lagos the world’s most congested city, with commuters spending an average of 70 minutes on a one-way journey. The Danne Institute for Research estimates that congestion costs Lagos about ₦4 trillion a year. The manifesto itself concedes that the time Lagosians spend travelling is “well over an hour”, against a 30-year Development Plan target of 20 minutes.

Poverty. In 2019, the NBS’s consumption-based survey put Lagos’s poverty rate at 4.5 per cent, the lowest in Nigeria. In 2022, the NBS’s first Multidimensional Poverty Index found 29.4 per cent of Lagosians multidimensionally poor — still the second-lowest in the country. The two surveys use different methods and cannot be read as a trend. But even on the most favourable measure available, nearly three in ten Lagos residents are poor.

What Lagos can and cannot control

Fairness requires a caveat. Much of the squeeze on the Lagos household was not made in Alausa. The removal of the petrol subsidy in May 2023, the unification of the exchange rate and the naira’s fall, and the inflation that followed were federal decisions. No state government sets the price of a dollar or a litre of petrol.

But two things follow. First, the parts of the household ledger that are within the state’s power — water supply, housing, the cost and reliability of moving around, and the levies charged to traders — are exactly where progress has been slowest. Second, Hamzat has chosen not to separate himself from federal policy. He closed his speech by asking Lagosians to vote APC for President on 16 January, for the National Assembly the same day, and for governor and House of Assembly on 6 February: “One ballot all the way down.” A candidate who asks to be judged as part of a team cannot easily disown the team’s record.

The verdict on 2019: a richer state, a poorer household

Put the two ledgers side by side and the answer to the question in our headline is uncomfortable for everyone. Lagos State is unmistakably better off than in 2019: richer, better financed, with rail lines, hospitals and universities that did not exist then. The typical Lagos household, measured by what it pays for shelter, what its wages buy, whether water comes from a tap and how long the journey to work takes, is not — and on several measures it is worse off.

When this newspaper audited the Sanwo-Olu/Hamzat administration against its own THEMES+ agenda in September, in The Inheritance, we scored it at 2.8 out of 5 overall: strong on fiscal management and transport infrastructure, weak on housing, water and accountability. Nothing in the intervening weeks changes that picture.

That gap between the state and the household is the real context for The Lagos Promise. The question is whether the new pledges are aimed at closing it — and whether this government’s record suggests it will.

Kept, slipped, still on paper: the record behind the pledges

Hamzat’s manifesto is, by its own account, largely a programme of completion. Many of its headline projects are not new. They are old promises with new dates — or, increasingly, with no dates at all. Their history is the best available guide to how the new ones may fare.

Kept. The Red Line and the first phase of the Blue Line were delivered, years later than first planned but delivered. Ilera Eko has grown roughly fifteen-fold. The Maternal and Child Centre network, the BRT system and the Employment Trust Fund are functioning institutions.

Slipped. When Governor Sanwo-Olu signed the contract for Blue Line Phase 2 from Mile 2 to Okokomaiko in November 2023, he said construction would be completed in three years — that is, by now. In October 2026, the state announced that the first three new stations, at FESTAC, Alakija and Trade Fair, would open by the end of February 2027, three weeks after the governorship election. The remaining stations to Okokomaiko have no published date.

The Adiyan Phase II waterworks has a longer history. According to the state, the project was initiated in 2012 and planned for completion by 2016. An earlier BusinessDay report put completion at 2018. In December 2025, Governor Sanwo-Olu said it would be completed before the end of 2026. The manifesto now promises to “complete Adiyan Phase II and bring it into service” — with no date attached. At the launch, Hamzat said: “It is under construction. It is being funded. I will finish it.”

Still on paper. The Fourth Mainland Bridge was first proposed in 2006, slated for construction in 2017 and completion in 2019. A preferred bidder, the CCECC-CRCCIG Consortium, was announced in December 2022 with a completion date of 2027. The Guardian reported in January 2026 that work had yet to start on site, and that financiers were asking for a sovereign guarantee. The manifesto’s commitment is now, in its own words, to “start strategic projects, such as the Fourth Mainland Bridge, in partnership with existing institutions.”

Not delivered. The ₦100,000 minimum wage the governor hoped to pay from January 2025.

The pattern is clear enough. Large transport projects arrive, late. Promises that touch the household directly — water at the tap, affordable housing, wages — lag furthest behind. That pattern matters, because it is precisely the household promises that The Lagos Promise now asks voters to trust.

Will the new pledges move the household ledger?

Set the manifesto’s pledges against the five household tests, and a second pattern emerges. The manifesto divides its 100 pledges into firm “commitments”, which Hamzat says are within the state’s power and will be measured on a public scorecard, and “aspirations”, whose timing he says depends on others. The hardest household outcomes are disproportionately in the second group.

On rent, the manifesto’s headline is a mortgage benchmark of “10 per cent down and single-digit interest”, classed as a firm commitment. The current LagosHOMS scheme, according to the Lagos Economic Development Update 2025, requires applicants to contribute up to 30 per cent equity. The manifesto also acknowledges that its benchmark depends on two federal bodies, the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria and the Nigerian Mortgage Refinance Company, “because that is where the 10 per cent deposit and the single digit rate are won or lost.” It names completed estates — Egan-Igando Clusters II and III, LagosHOMS Sangotedo Phase II, Ibeshe Phase II, the Workers’ Village at Ipaja and the Epe (Ita-Marun) scheme — but sets no target for the number of homes. Its “Pledge of the Fair Rent” is a commitment to “collaborate with private developers and LSDPC to increase housing stock at affordable prices”; there is no rent policy behind it. For a renter facing an 80 per cent increase, the manifesto offers a path to ownership that most cannot reach, and little for the years in between.

On water, the commitments are to complete Adiyan II, rehabilitate waterworks and extend the network, financed in part through a proposed water bond. They are the right things to do. They are also, almost word for word, what has been promised since 2012.

On the commute, the manifesto’s commitments include restoring traffic signals statewide within the first year, fixing ten named junctions, and integrating rail, bus and ferry on the Cowry card. These are modest, practical and checkable. The bigger promises are less firm. Completing the Blue Line to Okokomaiko appears in the manifesto twice — once as a commitment and once, in the mobility chapter, as an aspiration, tied to “actively pursuing the funding required to deliver the Green Line.” At the launch, Hamzat promised to grow the public bus fleet from 1,000 to 4,000 buses carrying a million passengers a day; the manifesto’s bus pledge commits only to “expand and reform” the network, with no figure.

On incomes, the manifesto’s two broadest pledges — to “lift the income-side capacity of every working household” and to scale up formal small businesses from about 120,000 — are both classed as aspirations. So are the targets to raise grid power to households from 1,000 to about 3,500 megawatts by 2031, to grow annual investment from about ₦1 trillion toward ₦5 trillion, and to reduce out-of-school numbers “significantly”.

There is genuine substance here for the household too. The pledge to harmonise the levies, taxes and fees paid by small businesses — “Tell me what I have to pay. Once I pay it, leave me alone,” as one trader put it to Hamzat — is a firm commitment. So is the plan for the state to pay 40 per cent of apprentices’ stipends with real employers, and to certify artisans’ skills free of charge. In the manifesto’s security chapter, Hamzat names street-level harassment by touts and illegal levies at junctions as “the first thing I plan to change.” If delivered, those measures would be felt directly in the pockets of traders, artisans and motorists.

But the overall shape is hard to miss. The pledges most likely to change a household’s month — rent, power, wages, incomes — are either dependent on federal partners or classed as aspirations without deadlines. The pledges classed as firm commitments are, more often, about the machinery of government: service charters, performance councils, town halls and audits.

A promise you can check — so we checked

Hamzat’s central claim for The Lagos Promise is that it is accountable. “Every page of it is checkable,” he told the launch. The manifesto describes itself as “the reference text” from which the speech and other materials are prepared and “must be checked against”. Checking the speech against it produces some discrepancies Lagosians should know about.

None of these is a scandal. Some of the speech’s additions may be improvements on the document. But a manifesto that asks to be judged on its checkability should be internally consistent, and its costings should be published.

The woman on the bus

Twice in his speech, Hamzat returned to the young woman who boards a bus before dawn. He said she is asking three quiet questions: Will the bus come on time? Will the fare leave her something to take home? And will this state, which she helps to build every day, build something back for her in return? “Everything in this document,” he said, “is my answer to those three questions.”

The record offers a partial reply. The buses and trains are more numerous and more reliable than in 2019; for her first question, there is evidence of progress. For the second, the evidence runs the other way: the fare, the rent and the price of food have outrun her wages, and the manifesto’s answers on income are aspirations. For the third — whether Lagos will build something back for her — the state’s record on water and housing, the two things most likely to be built back into her own home, is the weakest part of the inheritance.

Hamzat ended his speech by asking Lagosians to “bring it back to me” in four years: “Show me what I delivered. Show me what is left to do. Hold me accountable for both.” On that, at least, the candidate and this newspaper agree. The ledger opens today.