Abstract
In They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria Daniel Agbiboa offers an engaging analysis of the political dynamics and everyday experiences of corruption and coercion among informal transport workers in Lagos. The greatest strength of the book is the unique perspective enabled through the mobile ethnographic approach, which draws on Agbiboa’s ability to immerse himself among research subjects as an omo eko (child of Lagos) (p. 42). This approach, which involved Agbiboa working as a danfo conductor for a two-month period and engaging with transport workers in their day-to-day lives, illuminates ‘how corruption is routinely encountered and negotiated’ (p. 13).
This ethnographic approach centres informal workers’ humanity. Agbiboa shows compassion in the face of their daily struggles, which are illustrated particularly well through the heavy informal fiscal burdens and violence they face at the hands of politicized National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) officials, who serve as illegal taxing authorities in collusion with the state. Though there is a need for greater discussion of the ethical and security implications of the research methods, particularly given the violence he documents, he offers a vital corrective to common views of the informal economy as ‘ungoverned and chaotic’ (p. 151) or synonymous with illegality, violence and ‘dirty work’. Instead, Agbiboa draws attention to how informal workers contribute to the essential functioning of the city and its political settlement, while simultaneously being excluded from elite neoliberal imaginings of urban ‘modernization’ and ‘ordering’.
This approach goes beyond giving a human voice to those often made invisible through the lens of ‘modernity’. It adds analytical value by allowing Agbiboa to recognize informal workers’ agency and complicity in the ‘corruption complex’ (Olivier de Sardan, 1999) of Lagos. Critically, this complicity does not equate to acceptance of or support for the system. Instead, it reflects a logic of economic survival in a context of widespread poverty, political instability and the state failing everyday citizens. In this context, not participating in corruption may indeed be ‘illogical or even ridiculous’ (p. 3).
Recognizing that both everyday citizens and public officials are implicated and exercise ‘a degree of power and political expectation’ (p. 1), Agbiboa showcases the inextricable link between the street and state logic of corruption. This is best illustrated by the mutual dependencies between the NURTW unionists and the Lagos state government, who are mutually enmeshed in the practice of corruption, coercion, control and taxation. Using corruption as a lens to understand a model of state-in-society, Agbiboa shows that informality is central to the political economic logic of ‘ordered corruption’ and violence, while participation in everyday corruption reinforces an adverse but durable political settlement. Within this context, the abolition of extralegal revenue extraction is unlikely without deeper structural change, while modernizing urban reforms ‘can reproduce rather than address corruption and precarious existence in everyday life’ (p. 45).
To allow us to come to a deeper understanding of the nature of the political settlement in Lagos and the prospects for reform, the book would benefit from a deeper analysis of the interactions between the transport operators, the NURTW and the state. One wishes for more discussion of the mechanisms through which the NURTW generates revenue, reinforces state authority and influences electoral outcomes. This is particularly relevant given the diversity of actors and logics captured by the label of ‘union-state-police mutualities’ (p. 22) and underscores a broader want for empirical evidence, given Agbiboa’s tendency to overreport the secondary literature rather than centring the evidence from his impressive data collection. At the same time, the tendency to conflate different types of revenue extraction under the umbrella of ‘corruption’ leaves the reader wanting greater discussion of how the different phenomena play out in practice, how their logics differ, how they relate to each other and formal state taxation, and whether they are equally intractable.
Despite these critiques – amounting to a desire to hear more of the author’s own views and expertise – by opening ‘a window onto how the postcolonial state is imagined and experienced in everyday life’ (p. 19), Agbiboa gives us a rich and nuanced understanding of the complex dynamics of corruption and the ways it is experienced, precarious labour and informality, and the everyday struggles for survival in Lagos. This understanding is surely easier to come by through the unique ethnographic perspective and empathy that Agbiboa brings to the analysis, for which he clearly offers a model for researchers in this field.