In Oyo State politics, where political pedigrees, party structures and the weight of established interests often determine who gets a seat at the table, Bolanle Aminat Sarumi-Aliyu also called BASA has chosen a different route.
Known popularly by her initials, BASA, she has spent years navigating a political landscape that has rarely been generous to women seeking the highest elective offices. Her political journey has taken her from an unprecedented governorship bid to government office, party politics, resignation, and now a new political platform from which she is once again looking towards the Oyo State Government House.
But BASA’s story is not simply about ambition. It is also about the changing nature of political participation, the place of women in Nigerian politics and her argument that politics should be driven by ideas, competence and public service rather than the size of an aspirant’s war chest.
BASA first captured significant attention during the 2019 elections when she contested the Oyo State governorship under the National Interest Party.
Her candidacy was historic. She became the first woman to contest for the governorship of Oyo State, breaking into a political space traditionally dominated by men.
For a woman with an academic background in social policy and experience in social development, the decision to enter the rough-and-tumble of Nigerian politics was more than a personal ambition. It represented an attempt to bring questions of social welfare, inclusion and human development into a political conversation often dominated by power and patronage.
Her academic background reflects that orientation.
She studied Social Policy at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, United Kingdom, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree, after earlier obtaining diplomas in Social Work and Welfare, Psychology and Sociology.
Those disciplines would later become part of the identity she projected in public life: a politician interested not only in who occupies office, but in what government does with the power entrusted to it.
After her 2019 governorship campaign, BASA’s political journey took another turn.
She joined the Peoples Democratic Party and was subsequently appointed Senior Special Assistant on Diaspora Matters to Governor Seyi Makinde. The appointment gave her a position inside the machinery of government and an opportunity to work within an administration whose political structure she had previously stood outside.
But the relationship would eventually become complicated.
BASA later resigned her position as she sought to contest for a seat in the Federal House of Representatives. She has since spoken publicly about what she describes as disappointment over political support she expected but did not receive from the governor.
That episode appears to have become an important chapter in her political evolution: the point at which proximity to political power collided with her own expectations about political partnership and advancement.
Then came June 12, 2025. On Democracy Day, BASA announced her resignation from the PDP, bringing an end to another chapter of her political journey.
Her reasons were blunt. She pointed to internal leadership problems within the party, what she regarded as its failure to adequately recover from the setbacks of the 2023 elections, and, perhaps most significantly, the growing influence of money politics.
For BASA, the issue goes beyond the familiar complaint that Nigerian politics is expensive.
She has challenged a system in which aspirants are expected to make substantial financial payments to party delegates and stakeholders before securing political tickets.
Her position places her within a growing political argument in Nigeria: whether democratic competition can genuinely produce leaders on the strength of ideas and competence when financial inducements increasingly determine access to party structures.
For a politician seeking to return to the electoral battlefield, rejecting that system is both a statement of principle and a formidable political challenge.
Today, BASA is a leading member of the African Democratic Congress. The move places her within a broader political realignment ahead of the 2027 elections, as opposition figures and political actors search for platforms capable of challenging the established order and BASA is not hiding her ambition. She has declared her intention to seek the governorship of Oyo State in 2027.
This time, however, the political environment is different from 2019. She is no longer simply the woman who made history by becoming the first female governorship candidate in the state. She has government experience, a longer political record and a clearly articulated critique of the political system she wants to change.
Her emergence also comes at a time when questions about women and political representation remain central to Nigeria’s democratic conversation.
It would be tempting to reduce BASA’s political journey to the story of a woman attempting to break a political glass ceiling.
That would, however, leave out a significant part of her message. Her argument is increasingly about the quality of leadership itself.
She advocates a politics that gives greater room to competence, ideas, social responsibility and accountability. Her political philosophy, as publicly expressed, challenges the assumption that political influence must necessarily be purchased.
That position could resonate with younger voters and professionals who are increasingly frustrated with the traditional pathways into Nigerian politics.
