How Oba Olatunji Hamzat Helped Build Tinubu’s Lagos Power

He never wore the Lagos political crown, never fronted the cameras, and never claimed the spotlight. But in the brutal contest for Lagos, Oba Mufutau Olatunji Hamzat was one of the men who helped build the machine that made the current president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Chief Bola Ahmed Tinubu, politically untouchable, especially in Lagos State.

There are politicians who rule from the podium, and there are politicians who rule from the room behind the podium.

The first kind is photographed, quoted, celebrated and attacked in equal measure. The second kind is often less visible, but no less powerful. These are the men who broker peace after midnight, decide who enters the room, settle rival camps, move party structures and make sure victory hardens into control.

The current president of Nigeria, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has become the unmistakable face of Lagos power. Still, Oba Mufutau Olatunji Hamzat was one of the quieter men who helped construct the order that made Tinubu’s dominance possible.

That is the part of the Lagos story too often buried beneath political myth.

The easy version of history says Tinubu rose by sheer force of personal genius, as though Lagos simply yielded to him because he was bold enough to seize it. The lazy counter-story says Oba Mufutau Olatunji Hamzat was the hidden puppeteer who single-handedly made Tinubu and handed him the keys to the state. Both stories are neat. Both are incomplete. The more compelling truth is harder, subtler and far more revealing: Oba Olatunji Hamzat was one of the foundational brokers in the coalition that brought Tinubu to power, and one of the internal stabilisers who helped that power survive long enough to become a political empire.

Before President Bola Ahmed Tinubu became “Tinubu of Lagos,” Oba Olatunji Hamzat already had standing, memory and influence of his own. He was not some ceremonial elder suddenly rediscovered after history had been made. He belonged to the older progressive tradition in Lagos politics. He had moved through the structures of public life, built relationships across political generations and carried the kind of credibility that cannot be manufactured overnight.

That mattered because politics in Lagos has never been only about ambition. It is about acceptability. It is about whether elders trust you, whether grassroots actors will move for you, whether local power brokers see you as one of theirs or merely as a passing contender. Tinubu had money, brains, dare and strategy. Hamzat brought something different but equally vital: access, legitimacy and rootedness within the political ecosystem Tinubu needed to master.

And then came the battle that changed the history of Lagos.

The transition from military rule to the Fourth Republic, orchestrated by the Abdulsalami Abubakar-led Junta regime, is now often retold as though President Tinubu’s emergence in 1999 was destiny. It was not. It was a war by political means. The Alliance for Democracy in Lagos was not some quiet platform waiting to acclaim a hero. It was a battleground of camps, grievances, ambitions and fierce internal rivalry. The struggle that eventually produced the now President Tinubu as governor was not a coronation. It was a contest.

This is where sanitised political history begins to crack.

President Tinubu’s rise was contested from within the progressive family itself. There were rival loyalties, rival claims and rival visions of who should carry the party’s mandate. In that struggle, Hamzat was not a bystander watching events from a polite distance. He was one of the political actors inside the formation that helped President Tinubu cross from contender to candidate, and from candidate to governor.

That makes Oba Olatunji Hamzat more than a footnote. It places him near one of the great hinges of modern Lagos history.

In Nigerian politics, the men who control the gate often matter as much as the men who pass through it. Gatekeeping is power. It means helping transform ambition into viability, private influence into party structure, and political desire into an actual pathway to office. That was part of Oba Olatunji Hazmat’s value. He was one of those figures who could move across the layers that matter most in politics: the old guard, the grassroots, the caucus system and the tense internal negotiations that decide who rises and who falls.

Yet even that does not fully capture his importance.

The more explosive truth is that Oba Olatunji Hamzat’s significance may have been greater after Tinubu won than before he did.

Winning a political office is one thing. Turning the office into lasting control is something else entirely. Nigerian politics is crowded with governors who reached power only to discover that victory solves nothing if the coalition beneath it begins to fracture. They centralised too aggressively, alienated the men who made them, mishandled ambition and watched their structures rot from within.

Lagos did not rot.

Tinubu’s order endured. It survived succession contests. It was adapted from AD to AC to ACN to APC. It outlived rivalries that should have destroyed weaker machines. It did not merely win power; it institutionalised power.

That kind of durability does not come from harmony. It comes from managed conflict.

Oba Olatunji Hamzat helped build that management system.

The key to understanding this lies in the rivalry between the Justice Forum and the Mandate Group. To outsiders, those camps might look like mere party factions. But in truth, they were part of the internal architecture that kept Lagos power from imploding. Hamzat emerged as a central figure in Justice Forum, while President Tinubu’s camp drove the Mandate Group. The genius of the Lagos machine was not that it eliminated all internal competition. It was that it learned to contain competition without letting it destroy the whole structure.

That is where Oba Olatunji Hamzat’s role becomes historically weighty.

He was not merely a loyalist inside Tinubu’s machine. He was also one of the men who helped create the internal balance that made the machine durable. Justice Forum gave alternative power centres somewhere to breathe, bargain, regroup and resist without necessarily detonating the house. It created room for grievance without immediate rebellion. It gave the system internal shock absorbers.

In plain language: Oba Olatunji Hamzat helped build the pressure valves that kept Tinubu’s Lagos from blowing apart.

That is not small politics. That is political engineering.

It also explains why Oba Olatunji Hamzat remained relevant long after the original 1999 battles had faded into legend. Men who are merely symbolic do not retain real influence deep into the life of a machine. Men who embody blocs do. Men who can still move actors, calm factions and shape succession do. Oba Olatunji Hamzat belonged to that class. He was not simply remembered. He was still reckoned with.

Even after his death, his political imprint did not vanish. In Lagos, power is rarely just personal. It is networked, inherited and reproduced through factions, protégés and family lines. That is part of why Oba Olatunji Hamzat’s legacy remained embedded in the political bloodstream of the state. His influence was not a one-season intervention. It became part of the wider grammar of how power in Lagos was organised, balanced and transmitted.

So, let us be clear.

Oba Olatunji Hamzat was not President Tinubu’s sole political maker. The evidence does not support that folklore. President Tinubu was too strategic, too relentless and too formidable to be reduced to anyone’s mere creation, but it is equally false to pretend Oba Olatunji Hamzat was just another elder standing respectfully at the edge of history.

• He was one of the foundational brokers of the Lagos order.
• He helped anchor President Tinubu in a contested political environment.
• He helped shape the coalition that carried him to office.
• He helped build the factional structure that stopped the machine from collapsing under the weight of its own feuds, and
• He helped preserve the internal balance that allowed Tinubu’s power to move from momentary victory to lasting dominance.

That is not a supporting role.

That is one of the roles by which political ages are made.

President Tinubu became the public sovereign of Lagos politics. Oba Olatunji Hamzat was one of the men who helped build the palace, arrange the alliances, manage the feuds and keep the walls standing.

History usually remembers the man in the middle of the frame.

A good newspaper like Morganable would always do things better: step back, widen the lens and show the hands that held the frame in place.

Oba Olatunji Hamzat was one of those hands, and Lagos, in ways both visible and hidden, still bears his fingerprints.