By the time she walked to the podium on New Year’s Day to declare her bid for the Lagos State House of Assembly, Barakat Olawunmi Odunuga-Bakare was not introducing herself to Surulere. She was simply giving the constituency a name to place on a ballot it had already known for nearly a decade.
In a Lagos political ecosystem where flag-bearers are too often parachuted into wards they have never walked, Surulere Constituency I appears set to do something rarer in the lead-up to 2027: nominate one of its own. Odunuga-Bakare’s January 1, 2026, declaration was less a launch than a confirmation — the formalisation of a candidacy that had been quietly assembling itself through council chambers, campaign war rooms, and, most recently, the Lagos State Executive Council.
Her movement carries the imprimatur of one of Surulere’s most powerful political figures. As TGSEE Campaign Secretary during the 2023 general elections, Odunuga-Bakare helped coordinate the ground operation that returned President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, then-Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila, Wasiu Eshilokun and Desmond Elliot to office. She also chaired the Logistics Committee for the Wasiu Eshilokun Campaign Council. In Surulere politics, where loyalties are long and receipts longer, that résumé is its own form of currency — and it explains why her candidacy is being read across APC structures as the Gbajabiamila-backed ticket for the constituency.
That structural backing has since hardened into formal endorsement. APC stakeholders across Surulere have publicly thrown their weight behind her bid, led by Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila — now Chief of Staff to the President — and joined by a coalition of women’s groups organised across the constituency.
But the endorsement, weighty as it is, is not the most interesting line on her file.
A Surulere story, start to finish
Born on March 10, 1986, Odunuga-Bakare is a daughter of the Oshodi, Olorogun Adodo and Onisemo royal families of Isale Eko — Lagos lineage of the kind that does not need to be performed. Her schooling tracks the same map as her politics: Mainland Preparatory in Bank-Olemoh, Anglican Secondary School in Akinhanmi, and Lagos State Model College, Kankon. She crossed over to the College of North East London for A-Levels in Law, History, Politics and Psychology before reading for an LL.B at the University of Bedfordshire and returning to the same institution for an LL.M in International Commercial Law. The Nigerian Law School completed the qualification.
It is a profile that reads, in the language of Lagos politics, as both grassroots and global — and her career has tried to honour both halves.
From Ward E1 to the Executive Council
Odunuga-Bakare’s elective career began in 2017, when she emerged as the APC flag-bearer for Akinhanmi-Cole Ward (E1) and won the councillorship. By 2018, she had been elected Leader of the Surulere Legislative Assembly, a position she retained after re-election in 2021. She doubled as Vice Chairman of the Lagos State Councillors’ Forum and Legal Adviser to the Female Councillors’ Forum.
Her legislative output during that period is unusual for a council tier whose record-keeping is famously thin: she sponsored and facilitated the passage of more than 27 bylaws, focused on resident welfare and on shoring up the local government’s internally generated revenue. She contested for the State Assembly in 2022 but stepped down in compliance with party directives — a pragmatism the party would later reward.
On September 13, 2023, she was sworn in as Special Adviser to Governor Sanwo-Olu on Housing, joining the Lagos State Executive Council. She has since resigned the appointment, a near-mandatory step for any aspirant entering an electoral cycle.
A housing portfolio in a housing-starved city
The Special Adviser role placed her at the centre of Lagos’s most politically sensitive sector. With oversight of the Lagos State Real Estate Regulatory Authority (LASRERA), Odunuga-Bakare became a public face for the state’s push to discipline a property market that has long resisted regulation.
Her brief was wide: advising the Governor on housing policy, strengthening regulatory systems, deepening Public-Private Partnerships, and pressing for digital land administration to ease the bureaucratic chokehold on titling. She has been vocal about Lagos’s housing deficit, arguing publicly that the state must deliver hundreds of thousands of units annually if it is to keep pace with demand, and pushing for harmonised taxes and charges to bring construction costs down.
Under her watch, LASRERA expanded its prosecution of land scams in collaboration with the EFCC, ramped up mandatory registration of real estate practitioners, and processed thousands of complaints from defrauded buyers. She also took a public position against arbitrary rent hikes — a stance that earned her airtime in a city where the tenancy conversation rarely cools.
The constituency case
Strip away the titles, and her pitch to Surulere voters rests on a list of small, specific things: street lighting projects executed; over 27 by-laws passed; JAMB forms and learning materials distributed to students; start-up support extended to women entrepreneurs; food palliatives circulated during COVID-19 and Ramadan; an intervention that halted demolitions in Olode-Okuta; drainage clearance along Alhaji Masha Road; and a LASRERA satellite office secured for Surulere itself.
These are the kinds of interventions that decide ward-level elections, and her camp is not shy about reciting them.
Her stated platform for the Assembly extends the same logic upward — stronger legislation on housing and urban development, broader access to education, youth empowerment, economic inclusion, community security, and sustainable growth. None of it is novel language in Lagos politics. What may be novel, if her record is any guide, is the insistence on tying each plank to a measurable deliverable.
The road to 2027
The path between declaration and the green chamber on Alausa runs first through an APC primary expected to conclude by May 20, where Odunuga-Bakare will face Elliot, the long-serving incumbent and Nollywood-actor-turned-legislator now bidding to extend his tenure. The contest sets up one of the most closely watched intra-party showdowns in Lagos — and one with an unmistakable subplot: as TGSEE Campaign Secretary in 2023, Odunuga-Bakare was part of the very apparatus that delivered Elliot’s last re-election. That she is now running against him, with the structural goodwill of the same political bloc tilting her way, suggests a recalibration of allegiances inside Surulere APC that observers in the constituency had long anticipated.
The contrast on offer is generational. Elliot is making the case for continuity, leaning on the visibility of a long incumbency. Odunuga-Bakare is making the case for a representative who has spent the same years building from the ward up — councillor, council leader, state-level executive, aspirant — and who can speak to Surulere’s housing, drainage, education and tenancy questions in the operational language of someone who has actually written law on them.
She enters the primary with three assets that aspirants in her bracket rarely combine: an elected legislative record at the council tier, executive experience at the state tier, and the backing of the political bloc that has dominated Surulere for a generation. If she finishes the race, she will arrive at Alausa not as a freshman, but as a legislator who has already written, passed, and lived under her own laws.
For Surulere Constituency I, that may turn out to be the offer that matters.
The Guardian
