Let me begin with a story. Most of you know it. None of you have heard it from me. In September 2018, Femi Hamzat wanted to be governor of Lagos State. He had earned the right to want it. He had been in public service for thirteen years by then, under Asiwaju and under Fashola, and he had the record, the mind and the support to make his case. He was in the race, and he was in it to win.
Then the leaders of our party asked him to step aside or me. I have thought about that day many times in the eight years since. I have thought about what it costs a man to put down the thing he wants most, in public, at the request of people he respects, for the benefit of someone else. Many men would have done it and nursed the wound. Some would have done it and plotted. Femi Hamzat did it, shook my hand, and five weeks later agreed to run beside me. I have never forgotten that. It is why I asked for more than a goodwill message today. I did not come here to be polite. I came here to testify. Because there is something only I can tell you. Anyone can read his CV. Anyone can list his ministries. But the only person who can tell you what a man is like when the doors are closed and the cameras have gone home is the person who was in the room with him. For two thousand, seven hundred and eleven days, I have been in that room. And so has he.
When the first case of COVID-19 in Nigeria arrived in this city, and we had to shut down the largest city in Africa with no manual and no warning. He was in the room. In October 2020, in the hardest week this administration has ever known, he was in the room. When the Blue Line ran its first train, when the Red Line opened, when the first ship came into the Lekki Deep Sea Port, he was in the room. And before every one of those ribbons was cut, he was in the earlier room: the one with the drawings on the table and the contractors across it, asking the questions an engineer asks and a politician forgets. When I travelled to bring investors to Lagos, he was in the room I had left, and Lagos did not notice that I had gone. That is the highest compliment a governor can pay his deputy. I pay it gladly.
In many states in this country, a deputy governor is given an office, an official car and very little to do. He is kept in reserve, and everyone hopes he will never be needed. In his first days in office, Femi Hamzat told the staff of his office that he intended to be the best deputy governor in the history of Lagos State. I am here to report that he kept his word. And I am here to tell you this. In seven years, there has not been one day, not one, when I had to wonder whose side my deputy was on. You know how rare that is. Governors and their deputies have torn states apart in this country. Courts have been filled with their quarrels. Parties have been split in two. In Lagos, there has been one government, one direction and one voice. That did not happen by accident. It happened because of who he is. He does not perform. He prepares. That is the man.
Now let me tell you why that matters more in Lagos than anywhere else in Nigeria.Lagos runs on a system. Many people have tried to describe it. Let me describe it the simplest way I know. Think of a relay race. In a relay, the baton is never handed to a man standing still. The next runner starts running before the baton reaches him. He runs beside the first runner, inside the exchange zone, both of them at full speed, and only then is the baton placed in his hand. If the next runner is standing still, the race is lost. If the baton is dropped, the race is lost. And if the two runners have never run together, the baton is dropped. That is how Lagos has been governed for twenty-seven years.
Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu ran the first leg. When he passed the baton in 2007, he passed it to Babatunde Raji Fashola,who had been running beside him as his Chief of Staff. When Fashola passed it in 2015, he passed it to Akinwunmi Ambode, who had run beside three governors as a civil servant and as the Accountant-General of this state. When the baton came to me in 2019, I had been running since 2003: a commissioner under Asiwaju, a commissioner under Fashola, the head of a quasi-government agency under Ambode. I did not come to Alausa to learn where the offices were. And Femi Hamzat? Commissioner under Asiwaju. Commissioner under Fashola. Deputy Governor beside me for seven years. No deputy governor in the history of this state has ever been handed the baton. Lagosians have never before been offered a man who ran this long, this close, beside the governor he hopes to succeed. Lagos does not hand the baton to a man standing still.
And look at what he did while he ran! In 2005, Asiwaju gave him the Ministry of Science and Technology and told him to put the government of Lagos on computers. He did. He cleaned the ghost workers off our payroll. He laid the groundwork for the registration of Lagos residents that we still use today. In 2007, the first decision Governor Fashola took about Femi Hamzat was to keep him. In 2011, Fashola gave him Works and Infrastructure, and in four years he built roads across all five divisions of this state and delivered the Lekki-Ikoyi Link Bridge, the first bridge of its kind in Nigeria. When Fashola went to Abuja as Minister of Works, he took Hamzat with him. So, this man has built roads for Lagos and he has built roads for Nigeria, and he knows exactly where the two meet. He is an engineer with a doctorate. He grew up in a house where Lagos was being built at the dining table. His father, Oba Mufutau Olatunji Hamzat served Alhaji Lateef Jakande as Commissioner for Transportation. Jakande gave Lagos its first great plan. The son of the man who helped him carry it is standing here in this hall today. Twenty-one years. Three governors. Two ministries. The second-highest office in the state. He has been in the room for more of the planning of modern Lagos than almost anyone can imagine.
I know what the critics will say. They will say Lagos keeps choosing from the same people. I say Lagos trains its people. There is a difference. This system has produced accountants, a lawyer, a banker and now an engineer, and it made every one of them serve this state for years, in full view of the public, before it asked Lagosians to trust them with the whole of it. A city of more than twenty-three million people is not a place for a first job. Lagos does not hand the baton to a man standing still.
So here is where we are. Lagos today has its largest projects in the middle of delivery. The second phases of the Blue and Red Lines. The Fourth Mainland Bridge. The Lekki-Epe International Airport. The Omu Creek project.
The food hubs and logistics parks that will feed this city. And behind all of them, a plan written out to 2052, so that no government after mine ever has to begin from a blank page. These are not four-year projects. They are projects that cross governments, and they survive only when the baton is not dropped.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are sitting in a building that Nigeria finished in 1976 and then left to decay for decades. It stands again today only because someone finally decided to finish what had been started. Lagos cannot afford lost decades. Lagos has been spared them for twenty-seven years, and I will not be the governor on whose watch that changes. So, let me say it as plainly as I can. This is not the time to experiment with Lagos. This is the time to consolidate. And consolidation is not standing still. I have heard that word used as if it means slowing down. It does not. Continuity does not mean repeating ourselves. It means finishing what was started, fixing what is not working, and starting what comes next, in that order, with a plan. The runner who receives the baton does not run the same leg again. He runs the next one. Faster. What he presents today is not a new Lagos invented on a campaign bus. It is the next leg of a race this state has been running since 1999, written by a man who has run it himself. He has said that he will put people at the centre of every decision. That he will stand with the small businesses that employ most Lagosians. That no one who calls this state home will be left behind because of their religion, their tribe, their gender or where they came from, and that the heritage of the indigenous people of Lagos will be respected and protected. It will be in writing. It will be published. You can hold him to every line.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I have seven months left in this office. A governor learns, in his last months, what he actually built. I have built rail lines and bridges, schools, hospitals and a rice mill, and I am proud of every one of them. But I want to tell you the thing I am proudest of, and it is not made of concrete. It is this. Lagos is going to change governors without a quarrel. Think about how rare that is. Across this country, successions have ended in courtrooms, in broken parties, in deputies at war with the men who chose them. In Lagos, the governor and his deputy walked into this hall together. They will walk out of it together. And in May, one of them will hand the other a state that is whole. There is no greater gift a governor can leave his people than a handover that does not break the house.
Femi, my brother and my friend. In a few months, Lagosians will hand you the heaviest baton in this country. I ask three things of you.
Keep listening. The people who elected us did not elect us to stop hearing them.
Finish the work. Every line, every bridge, every hub. Let no Lagosian ever say that what we started together was abandoned.
And when your own time comes, hand over the way you were handed over to: to someone who has run a similar race, and who understands the journey of Lagos. Keep the system that made you. It made all of us.
Princess Damilola Sonayon-James: you bring the entire Lagos-West, and especially Badagry to the top of this government for the first time.You bring the young people and the women of this state into the front row. The partnership you are about to enter is the one I have had for seven years. Protect it, and it will protect Lagos.
To our party: on the 21st of May 2026, six hundred and fifty-seven thousand, nine hundred and seventeen of you voted for this man, in every ward of this state. That was the party speaking. Now go and speak to the people – from Ikeja to Ikorodu, from Badagry to Epe, to Lagos Island where this state began. Street by street, until the last vote is counted.
To the people of Lagos: read this manifesto. Argue with it. Test it against your own street, your own market, your own child’s school. Then ask yourself one question. Who is more likely to deliver it: the man who has run beside the governor for seven years, or someone who would be touching the baton for the first time? I have done my part. I have governed with him. I have watched him. I have told you the truth about him. The rest is in your hands. Lagos does not hand the baton to a man standing still. Today, Lagos, you have seen the man who is already running. Lagos, let us move forward together.