FEMI GBAJABIAMILA LIFTS THOUSANDS FROM POVERTY IN SURULERE
The morning sun rose over Surulere like a blessing. By nine o’clock the National Stadium was already a sea of colour and hope. Market women in gele, young men in matching aso-ebi, mothers with children on their hips, artisans, drivers, teachers — thousands of them — had come not just to receive, but to witness.
This was the 2026 Gbaja Mega Empowerment.
Femi Gbajabiamila, Chief of Staff to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, walked onto the field beside Lagos Deputy Governor Dr Obafemi Hamzat. The roar that greeted them was not the usual political noise. It was the sound of people who have known this man for more than twenty years. They called him “Gbaja.” They remembered the roads he facilitated, the schools he renovated, the ICT centres, the solar lights, the free school buses that still ferry children across Surulere every morning. They remembered that even after he left the House of Representatives for Aso Rock, he never left them.
Hamzat, representing Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, stood beside him and told the crowd the simple truth: leadership that forgets the people is not leadership. “What we are doing here today,” the Deputy Governor said, “is what our party understands — that our service is to serve and empower our citizens.”
Then Gbajabiamila spoke.
He did not dwell long on the storms of recent months. He simply said he had never betrayed the trust President Tinubu placed in him, that loyalty was the currency he had spent his entire political life, and that no amount of blackmail or falsehood would distract him from his duty. The stadium answered with applause that rolled like thunder. Then he turned to the reason they had gathered.
About five thousand residents of Surulere I, Surulere II and the surrounding communities would go home changed.
₦1.15 billion in cash grants moved that day. Over three thousand nine hundred people received ₦250,000 each. Another 348 received ₦500,000. The money was not charity. It was seed — for kiosks, for tailoring shops, for pepper-grinding businesses, for the small dreams that keep a neighbourhood alive.
Then the vehicles rolled out.
Sixty-one electric cars for e-hailing. Fifty electric tricycles. Dozens of mini-buses. Four gleaming Toyota Hiace 18-seaters. Two security patrol vehicles. A fully equipped medical ambulance. A special T2 Jeep. In all, two hundred and seventy-nine vehicles. One hundred laptops. Electric bikes and bicycles. Charging stations would follow, he promised, because the future of transport in Lagos must be cleaner and cheaper.
Keys changed hands. Tears fell. A young man who had been driving a rented keke for years climbed into his own electric tricycle and sat there for a long minute, both hands on the wheel, as if he could not believe it was real. A woman who sells provisions received her cash grant and immediately began calculating how many extra bags of rice she could stock. An elderly beneficiary of the Gbaja Ride scheme — the free and discounted buses that still move students and the aged across the constituency — stood and blessed “our son who never forgot home.”
This is the man they praise.
Not because he is Chief of Staff. Because for two decades, through the House, through Speakership, through the corridors of power in Abuja, Femi Gbajabiamila has treated Surulere as unfinished business. He built roads. He rebuilt schools. He put ambulances on the streets and laptops in classrooms. He created the Gbaja Ride so children would not miss school for lack of transport fare. And every year he returns with more — not as a politician performing for cameras, but as a son of the soil who still answers when his people call.
Hamzat stood with him that Saturday because the partnership between the Centre and the State is not abstract. It is this: a Deputy Governor on the podium, a Chief of Staff handing over keys, and five thousand lives given a new beginning on the same field.
As the last beneficiaries collected their items and the sun began to lean west, Gbajabiamila looked across the stadium and made a quiet promise. As long as he remains in public service — and even after he leaves it — Surulere will not be forgotten. The people already knew. They have known for twenty years.
That is why they came. That is why they cheered. That is why, when they speak of Femi Gbajabiamila, they do not speak only of titles. They speak of a man who remembered the way home.
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