They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Survival in Urban Nigeria

Salimah Samji Welcome to the Building State Capability Seminar series. This is our first one for this calendar year, and we’re really excited to have Daniel Agbiboa here with us. He is the assistant professor of African and American Studies at Harvard University. He earned a Ph.D. in international development from the University of Oxford and an MPhil in development studies from the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on how state and non-state forms of order and authority enter, penetrates and shape each other and the relationship between mobility, power and politics in urban Africa. He is the author of this wonderful book called They Eat Our Sweat, Transport, Labor, Corruption and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria. We are really excited to have Daniel here. Welcome, Daniel.  

Daniel Agbiboa Thank you. Thank you to all of you.  

Salimah Samji And welcome to all of our audience who is here on Zoom. We’re excited to have you. The order of this session is we are going to do this, the conversation style. And after that we will take Q&A. So if you have questions, you can post them in the chat. For the audience here, we will take live questions at the end and then Daniel will answer your questions. Great. Thank you very much. There’s also some information about Building State Capability. For those of you who are on Zoom, we’ll be sharing that with you. For those of you in the room, there is stuff on the pillars, etc. to learn more about who we are and what we do. Okay. Without further ado, Daniel, what inspired you to write this book?  

Daniel Agbiboa Great question. Great place to start. First, let me thank you all for coming to this during this launch period. And I’m excited to obviously talk about the book that has been a while in the making. The starting point, what inspired me to write this book is in many ways very personal. I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, which is Nigeria’s commercial capital, but also Africa’s largest metropolis. And my parents were civil servants who from about the mid 1990s dabbled into the informal transport sector, the informal transport sector, the popular transport sector, the sector that is not unique to Nigeria but is actually quite dominant in the global South. You know, they call it dallas, dallas in Dar es Salaam, trotros in Ghana, matatus in Nairobi, espirit de corps in DRC or the spirit of the dead because of their propensity for accidents. So they are quite familiar to anyone who has navigated the African city. So they dabbled into it as a form of supplementing their income. This was the period on the back of the Structural adjustment program in Nigeria, which was implemented in 1986 on the back of the oil bust when Nigeria went and experienced an oil boom and then due to some external shocks had oil bust and needed rescue package which came in the form of the IMF World Bank reform package, which was really about removing bureaucrats from business in order to strengthen Nigeria’s economy. But unfortunately it did not work for a host of reasons, and the removal of the state from social provisioning plunged many households into severe poverty, and many had to adopt multiple modes of survival to sort of get by and make do, something that is not at all, again unique to Nigeria at that period. Many people work multiple jobs today to complement their wages in order to get by. My parents, being civil servants, decided to pool resources together and buy a minibus taxi, which they believed would do two things: Would take us to school, bring us back, and in between sort of make money. So that was the whole idea to blur this sort of public private responsibility. But it ended up to be a huge disappointment for them, something that they have not forgotten and certainly not forgiven the drivers who were implicated in it. From their point of view, it was a case of dishonesty. Even though this driver that they employed to run this business came through trusted networks like the Nigerian pastor. But these, in their view, the driver was dishonest, formed all sort of collusion with other extortionist on the road including mechanics, street level bureaucrats like police officers. Motorpark touts who to work for the National Union of Road Transport Workers or in some sort of network to extort money from them. So every day was so I recall I recall fondly the joy of having someone drive you to school. In Nigeria, owning a car is a status thing, no matter how old or rickety the vehicle is, it was always something to be proud of. So we grew up with that sort of pride of owning a minibus taxi, but at the same time it was not lost on me that there were constant arguments and fighting back and forth between my parents and the driver and the conductor. It was always over money issues. It was one money today, one money tomorrow. The car was broken, the car was working. Sometimes my parents had to leave work to sort of monitor this guy and see what he was doing. But anyway, they went into debt because of essentially this business, which is supposed to supplement them. But I always felt many years later when the opportunity came to do a Ph.D. at Oxford, that I was always going to do something around corruption because it was so ingrained in everyday life. It was something that I observed cumulatively. So I wanted to understand the system because at the same time, the anti-corruption campaign in Nigeria and much of Africa was really designed to put the bad guys behind bars. And I always felt that it did not really plug into the kind of corruption that I experienced on a daily basis, the social dynamics of corruption, the corruption that was there, and not there, sort of a spectral phenomenon. So that was always something I was interested in. But then, it was too broad and I needed to ground it. And for me, the first sort of place to start was the place of transport, because it was something that I experienced. And I always wanted to see the story, not from my parents point of view, which was a dishonest sector or a sector that was not trustworthy, but also from the point of view of the anonymous, even nameless driver who was stigmatized as a con doctor. And I never really got to hear their own point of view. So this was very important for me because informal transport workers across Africa, South South Asia, they have an identity of being what a sociologist Goffman calls data workers. They are seen as violent, in fact, they are the occupation that you don’t want your child to grow up to become. So I wanted to understand beyond this stereotype, beyond this sort of facade. What is the sort of plight of these workers? What is their own story? It was important to plug into the feelings of my parent because it allowed me to understand sort of the precarity of ownership. Sometimes precariousness is always sort of seen as the preserve of workers alone. But I was able to understand that you can own something and also be in a very precarious position. So that was important. But I wanted to understand the mutuality of precarity, that it wasn’t just one against the other, that there was this sort of speculation that happened. And so I wanted to understand from the driver’s point of view and more broadly, from the point of view of informal transport workers. So this was the inspiration to go back and try to understand what was going on at the time.  

Salimah Samji Great. So you get to Lagos, you’ve got a plan, you’ve got a methodology, you’re going to interview a lot of people. And then that’s not what you did.  

Daniel Agbiboa Yes, I tore up the paper, the whole formal ethics, approval. Everything was done to go and study corruption in the informal transport sector. Being a social scientist, it was about interviews, semi-structured interviews, in-depth interviews. It was about talking with the stakeholders that were involved. It was all very straightforward. And hence it was approved. But I go on the ground, and two weeks, a few days into my fieldwork, I have this sort of chance encounter with a former schoolmate and he happened to be a minibus taxi driver, danfo as they are called, hurry up. And we get talking and I tell him about my research and he tells me you won’t get much with the kind of approach that you want to take. If you want to understand really the mutuality of corruption, what happens from within, then you have to be a driver or at least be a conductor. So driver just seemed too daunting for me, so I left it for him and I said okay, I would work as a conductor. My supervisor, luckily the late Abdul Rauf Mustapha, as radical as it gets, was open and walked with me through the ethics process to ensure that I was able to to carry out this kind of research, this kind of learning by doing research. So this is what happened. I became a conductor running one of the most difficult routes, so between Alimosho local governments, which is the largest local government area in Lagos and Oshodi, which is the central hub in Lagos. Everywhere you want to go to, if you get to Oshodi, you will be able to find a connection to that point. So it was as easy as it gets. And I navigated several checkpoints, dangerous checkpoints, but also checkpoints of conviviality and sociality. So it was this mixture of danger, but also a sort of affect friendliness, a sort of performance of violence that I navigated on a daily basis. So there was a real embodied knowledge, things I had to learn by just doing. And it was then that I began to experience what it felt like to be an informal transport worker. This sort of distrust. You were the, you embodied as a conductor all that was wrong with the with the city. You were sort of the punching bag of the passengers who were frustrated with the dysfunctionality of the context and would often displace their aggression towards you. You were, in a sense, never really seen as a person. You were part of what is called the non incorporated, those who are not part of the realm of humanity. You existed outside of humanity, so to speak. So I had that embodied experience of what it means, and I think it it really informed the kind of research that I wrote in a way that is filled with empathy, that really understands positionality. And I’ll say more a little bit later on about the need to reflect on one’s own positionality within the sector. But I was an outsider within. So even though I was part of the sector, I was not permanently part of the sector. There was always an escape route for me. You know, and there was the whole aspect of my family being scandalized that I would even be part of this sector. And I remember when I even broached the idea, my mum wanted to follow me to the motor parks. I said you’ve done your own share back in the 1990s, let me do this one. But, but this was how it happened. It was a chance encounter. I went on, went to the field with a very clear idea of what I wanted to do, and it was blown in my face with this, with this encounter. And that’s what the city does to you. It’s a space that is both strange and familiar. It’s unpredictable, and you have to be open to the unpredictability because that in itself is a resource.  

Salimah Samji And how long did you do this for?  

Daniel Agbiboa So this was for a year. I did the transport, the conductor work for two months. It was impossible for me to continue beyond that. Just the wear and tear that it has on your body, the insults, the the psychological impact it has on you just meant that I could not continue. Which made me realize that for many who are sort of trapped in the system, there’s nowhere to go to. You have to navigate the system you have to face the system squarely. And so sometimes we look at these people as the tough guys of the city, the rugged guys of the city, but the toll that it takes on them, the work, it’s synonymous to what you may call a slow violence or a slow kind of death. It just a systematic exhaustion to the body of having to navigate this many, this violent and unpredictable system. I think more than the actual violence, it was the fact that fear was a way of life in this space, the fact that there was always the possibility of violence, not so much the enactment of the violence itself, was something that was just exhausting. So this was what happened. I just could not endure or sustain the energy with which I came.  

Salimah Samji Two months is a long time. I’m not sure many in this room would actually have lasted two months. Can you give some color, you know, you’ve talked about navigating this. It’s a really difficult job. What does a day in the life of a conductor look like? For those of you who’ve never had that experience, like, what does that look like?  

Daniel Agbiboa Yeah, that’s a great question. A day in the life of a conductor. I think to understand that question, we have to begin by saying that one of my favorite minibus slogans, and you know, again, if you know the informal transport sector, you know there are sort of mobile bodies of meaning. On their bodies are always all these graffiti and different slogans that is the way in which they as marginal actors are able to enact their voice in a city that often looks beyond them, in a city that renders them anonymous and surplus. One of my favorite slogan is “Life is war”. And underneath that slogan is “24 hours on the road”. Another a slogan says “Ghetto boy”. “No time to check time”. So all of this sort of this is a space that is conceived as is. So when you wake up in the morning and you go to work, you’re going to battle. You’re going to battle with forces, not just physical forces, but also forces that are beyond, that are more than the eyes can meet. So this is how they conceive of their work. And so you don’t go into battle unprepared. So therefore, to prepare themselves for battle, you do various things. First, it’s early too, it’s making hay not while the sun shines but before the sun shines. You have to wake up early because you have to avoid all the extortionist on the road. So. So waking up around 4, 3 sometimes in the morning. And there are a range of things that you would do as a conductor in conjunction with the driver. You would pray. And some would make sacrifices, talking sacrifices to their deities, which is often at intersections which are seen as that potent place where most of the corruption and violence happens to sort of protect them through this sort of treacherous business. Some would hit the drinking, the beer palace, as they are called, to sort of immune themselves to the various insults and risks that abide in this sector. So those are those are sort of the range of things that you do as a conductor to prepare yourself. But it was always this sense that this is a space of war and you had to be prepared for it. And so that’s how you went through life.  

Salimah Samji It’s interesting that you call it “Prepare for war”. What does that mean? Can you unpack, like, what does war on the street look like? What are things that could happen to you?  

Daniel Agbiboa Yes. Let me let me let me let me turn it around and say earlier when I said, or rather, when when when the language of corruption is used in Africa and more broadly, the global south, it’s always the language of militarization. People come into power and say they want to wage war on corruption. We say the war on corruption, and it’s almost like the war on terrorism. What I experienced was a cold kind of war. It was a war that was a mixture of the spectacular, which is that you could be literally shot dead for refusing to pay bribes to a police officer. But it was also spectral. It was not there most of the time when you go to these places, people are cracking jokes, people are eating together. So you feel, well, where is the violence? But it’s always there. It’s in the possibility that things can suddenly change in your face. So there was that war. So in two months, for example, I witnessed the death of about four conductors. Now, these are violent deaths that were just literally these guys were just pulled down from from from minibus taxis in motion. Why? Because they refused to pay bribes to motorpark touts who work for the National Union of Road Transport Workers, which is the most politicized and violent union in Nigeria. And some of those deaths occurred in full view of the traffic police officer who simply looked the other way because they’re sort of in on the game. These transport workers work with them collect money from them. In fact, literally one of the money they collect is owo olopa, which is money for the police. So in a sense, this is a certain mutuality in this regard in such a way then, that I wouldn’t say the transport operators are entirely passive without agents, but there is a sense in which you give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar so you can go on your way. So that’s the kind of what we’re talking about. But you’re also dealing with an infrastructure that swallows people in form of the road, the potholes, the accidents, just the traffic congestion that means that you are just slowly dying in traffic and the pollution that is in that space as well. So so that is also a form of death as well that you have to, a form of war, that you have to endure and you have to pray to avert. And this is not unique to the transport drivers. It’s also to transport, the passengers as well. And, you know, there’s always a play on the slogans on the body of these minibus taxis, for example. This taxi, this taxi slogans, they speak, they have this double meaning where they tell you what is going to happen, but at the same time they reassure you. So it’s this danger and comfort. For example, they could say experience is the best teacher. So you are looking at this minibus taxi that is just like on its last leg, and it says “experience is the best teacher”. It says “all that glitters is not gold”. It’s telling you don’t just go with these young guys driving the flashy ones and playing blaring these 2Pac music. Trust that, as one slogan puts it, “it still moves”. So this thing is old, but it will get you where you want to be. Some would say “come in to carry you home”, which is almost a subtle way of telling you that this is a fly in a coffin. And you could be. And one other slogan says “six feet”, which is just essentially reminding people of the fact of the proximity of life to death and both the biopolitics and the necropolitics of making die and letting die. That is part of this space called the transport sector. So the slogans themselves, if you read them carefully, you can understand the kind of space that you are in. But it’s also a case that these slogans were a form of competition where people could gain a competitive advantage. Nigeria was ranked, I think, in 2000, says one of the most religious space in the world. And people really, so many of the slogans were religiously embedded. So people really trust when they say “the blood of Jesus” or when they say “fear not” or “anointed”. People feel a certain comfort in going with these these drivers because they feel there’s a sort of a divine intervention that is in this space. So this is sort of the broader picture that you can read from the city itself rather than from outside the city.  

Salimah Samji Thank you so much. Now, you started because you wanted to learn more about corruption, right? What did you learn about corruption?  

Daniel Agbiboa Excellent question. What is corruption?  

Salimah Samji That’s right. Exactly. Let’s start with what is corruption?  

Daniel Agbiboa What is corruption? That’s the question that sort of throngs the gateway of my senses when I went to the field. You know, Nigeria has at least 500 languages. And one of the first things I realized was that there was no direct translation for the meaning of corruption in any of these languages. Joseph Nye, who is the former director of the Harvard Kennedy School, famously defined corruption as the use of public office for private gain. You know, when I went to the field, it was hard for me to see what the public was and what the private was. In fact, in many ways, not using public office for private gain was to be perceived as corrupt because there was a commonality around food and eating that blurred the boundaries between the public and the private. So in a sense, then, one of the first things that I encountered was that there was no direct translation for the word corruption. Corruption. In fact, the closest I got was the [unknown], which means oppression. So corruption, people instead would use idioms of eating and not eating well enough or eating too much to to describe corruption, which tells me that there was an intimacy at the heart of corruption. And eating together, there’s an intimacy around that as well in these spaces. So there was a mutuality and intimacy, an aspect that characterized corruption that made it not there, but here. And so that was the first lesson that I learned. The second thing was that many of you have probably experienced one email or another telling you that they are the lawyer to the late Nigerian president and telling you that they have a lot of money in the bank. They just need your bank account to be able to sort of get hold of this money and distribute and pay your school fees and give you some stipends. So there’s a lot of these sort of and images of the Nigerian prince is very, you know, widespread. So there’s a culture of corruption that is often dominant in popular media. But one thing I discovered from being a conductor and talking and being in that social space of the motoparks and the bus terminal was that it was as much a culture of corruption as it was against corruption. People would often condemn corruption. People would always agonize over the corruption that they experience on a daily basis. And so there was a paradox there in which people at the same time gave in to corruption and reproduced that corruption. So I wanted to understand why do people sort of denounce the very practice that they reproduce in their daily lives? And, you know, probing that you realize that there was the corruption was people worked, as one minibus taxi driver puts it, when you fail to engage with corruption, you die, you cease to exist, you become anonymous. So people were compelled to reproduce this corruption that did damage to them. It almost reminds me of the political theorist Lauren Berlant’s work on what she calls cruel optimism in which people get attached to the very thing that hurts them and reproduce that very thing, maintain relationships that ultimately is not good for them. So I think this was a certain cruel optimism around corruption in Nigeria, in which one could be mistaken to say that Nigeria’s fantastically corrupt, as the former British prime minister noted. But what is missing is the fact that they feel trapped into a system that they have to engage with, they have to negotiate with through various tactics and strategies in order to survive. So that was another key understanding of corruption, that corruption was was was something that was closely related to survival, the struggle for survival and people. And so when we talk about a culture of corruption, there’s nothing inherently flawed about people, feckless about people that made them sort of embrace corruption. In fact, I have struggled to find a country that is as critical of corruption as Nigeria is. And the elections are coming yet again. And Nigerians are very concerned about corruption. And we know on the back of what happened with George Floyd in the fall of 2020, Nigerian youth went in social protest through what is called the EndSARS movement against police brutality and extortion, rejecting corruption yet again. But these were not the misbehaving youth that the president made them out to be. These were patriotic youth, they were holding their national flags that were dancing to the national anthem in what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls the Festival of the Oppressed. And yet they were shot dead in cold blood. So so again, this was something that was very it was important for me to set the record straight that this was not a culture of corruption, but it was a cultural against corruption and that we need to move beyond this, this sense that certain countries are fantastically corrupt. Or that they are inherently feckless or inherently give in to corruption, which sometimes is how narrative is put out there.  

Salimah Samji Yeah, I really like this blur that you have. It’s not black and white, right? You started off by saying the corrupt guys go to jail. There’s only those corrupt guys? It’s like it’s a whole culture. It’s a whole system. There is different levels. There is no us versus them.  

Daniel Agbiboa Yeah, no us versus them. You know, you have to think about corruption in terms of you have to push and blame. It’s not a case of Nigeria’s problems simply being the problem of leaders. Right. The ordinary citizen is implicated in the very, you know, discourse and practice of corruption in such a way then, that this us versus them thing will not get us anywhere. In fact, most anti-corruption campaigns has always been designed around a state logic of trying to catch these guys who loot billions, billions of dollars. What the point that is missing is the social dynamics of corruption, the fact that the everyday and the political are intimately related. The fact that the the street logic and the state logic are closely intertwined. And so this was something that was very a key point in this book to try to show the mutuality of corruption, the ways in which these logics are overlapping so that the division between the public and the private, the state and the society, the elites under subaltern politics, needs to move beyond those sort of bifurcated lens to begin to look at how things interact. And only then can we even get close to dealing with corruption. Which, by the way, I don’t believe that the language of war tells us that corruption can be eliminated. Do not believe. I think it’s nonsense. I don’t think it can be eliminated. I think corruption is something that people have to learn to live with rather than try to completely win the war over it. Actually during field work, many transport operators went on strike not because they were not against the corrupt system, but because there was no form of regulation. They wanted to know that, okay, there’s a defined place where we pay the price. There is a certain amount of money that we pay. There are actors that we know that are paid. So there was in regulation within the system. And so what happened then was that there was a felt marker that these motorpark touts in conjunction with the police officers, would have where if you pay, then they would put a mark there. And then there was a form of regulation. Sometimes they were ticketed for what was going on. So there was a certain regulation in this sector that made it functional.  

Salimah Samji Understanding what the lay of the land looks like as opposed to, like you mentioned in your book, new checkpoints coming up. So you have no idea just how much you’re going to have to pay in bribes because it could change from day to day. How are you supposed to then survive? We can all accept that, fine, I have to beat bribes, but let’s at least figure out how much that has to be. And we can all work together so that it’s a win win for everybody.  

Daniel Agbiboa And you touch on an uncertainty there that governs life in most cities anyway. Where people have to live in a state of almost changing gears, driving just in a state of preparedness. And this was also important from the passenger’s point of view because as a conductor and a driver, there was no set rules. Even though we ran from Alimosho  to Oshodi, we always knew that based on information we get from the drivers coming in the opposite direction, that you know what, there’s so many checkpoints and because the checkpoints as well are not static, they are shifting checkpoints, there are so many checkpoints, and even the sort of the alternate routes are sort of blocked by bribe demanding officers, you could easily just decide that, you know what, it’s not worth my while, I’m going to run a different route, which means that a passenger gets into the bus not really knowing if they will arrive at point B. So as soon as we feel that it doesn’t, it’s not worthwhile we could just offload the passengers, give them what we think, if they’ve paid $20 for the trip, we think we’ve taken them $10 it, give them $10, and said, good. We’re just going to give you $20 and marry two passengers together and we are off on our way. We’re making a U-turn and we’re going somewhere else. And so people have to find alternative routes. So there was that fit in, that uncertainty there, that sort of filtered through from the drivers to the passengers themselves. So it was a logic. It was the logic that governed this space.  

Salimah Samji Great. Now we’re at the Kennedy School. These are students who are studying about how to be good policymakers. What’s your advice to students like these on how should they address these kinds of things? What did they learn from your research?  

Daniel Agbiboa Great question. So the first thing I would say is that is from my own experience, right. You have an approach right here, designed here from the library, from the warmth of your room, safety of this place about how you’re going to approach these subjects. Right. But there is a certain, you have to respect the uncertainty of the space you’re going into and be flexible enough to change, to be open to learning from the locals and to recognize that there is a certain agency, a certain capacity for action. So the space you’re going to is not tabula rasa, it’s not a blank space that you’re coming in to impose a certain theory or a certain approach. But rather think about it with the same logic of that particular space, the logic of mutuality, of conviviality, of complementarity. So in that sense, then you have something that you want to come and do. You have something you want to bring to this context? But this context also has a lot to bring to you. And how are you flexible enough to see the agency of that particular space, to understand, to be humble enough to know? I think that flexibility is very important. As my professor used to say, don’t be wooden. Don’t be reluctant to change. I think in that way we do write pieces you really want to write in a way that is also very respectful of the space that you’re going into. So there is certainly that flexibility that I would say is very, very important. I think another thing that I benefited a lot from was the language of the space, knowing to speak the language, not just the formal language but also the informal language, unofficial language. The code of the street. And knowing even if you study and care for minds and study in the state, that state is not immune or disconnected from the everyday. In a way, some people in our social science research would like to say we do elite interviews, we do interviews with the people who know. They are not disconnected. And that’s one of the points that I drive home with this. You have to engage with both because they are constantly in interaction. Nigeria is preparing for elections now and most of the money we use to fund the election will come on the back of motorpark touts and on the back of informal transport workers, because the level of extortion on the road is escalated hugely in order to sort of, you know, find the money that is needed for these political parties to sort of have their way at the elections. So there’s a certain connection, certain speculation and mutuality that if you don’t take anything away from this talk, please take this: That there is a conviviality, mutuality of corruption that one has to understand, and then that the public and the private is not always as clear as you might believe in the policy world. And that policy, the best policies are policies that allow the local to inform what you have. Not doing away with what you bring into the context. but being open to compliment that, to expand and compliment.  

Salimah Samji Great. Thank you. I really like how you talk about flexibility, adaptability and humility. Humility is just so important in this. We are not the expert with the answers, but we’re going to come and we’re going to learn with that. We’re going to open up for questions. We’ll take questions in the room. If you have a question, if you could raise your hand. Katelyn has a microphone that we’ll be passing around. For those of you on Zoom, if you can put your questions in the chat, Daniel here will be asking the questions on your behalf. When you ask your question, please, we’ll take three questions at a at a time, please tell us your name, the program, and then you can ask your question. Thank you.  

Attendee 1 Thank you very much, Daniel. My name is Valeria. I’m an Italian researcher. I come from African studies, and then I shifted into development activism. I’m here at CID as a research fellow, and your research really reminds me the research of a dear friend of mine, an Italian researcher who did a PhD in Oxford, Matteo Rizzo, who did research on the Dala Dala system in Tanzania. So and more or less the same methodology also engaged themselves directly, became a conductor. And so my question to you is, could you please comment with the comparative respective the systems that you are experiencing in Nigeria and the system in Tanzania or the matatu system, which I experienced, I lived for years in Nairobi. So I mean, I use the matatu everyday. So what is the difference between these three contexts and systems of informal transportation? Thank you very much.  

Salimah Samji Thank you.  

Attendee 2 How are you doing? Yeah so it’s great hearing your insights because I grew up in a family of, you know, transporters. My dad was a transporter. And, you know, his slogan was gotten from [inaudible] you know so I definitely understand where you’re coming from. And I, myself, you know, I’ve been into the transport sector where I’ve served as a driver and as a conductor. And, you know, I’ve also had the privilege of, you know, working directly with the driver, you know, for a couple of weeks because I was working and understanding the dynamics that happened. You know, I could give you lots of interesting stories, but, you know, if I’m just to go straight to one question, it’s going to be like if you are to set just one policy, you know, around the whole transport sector, what will you do?  

Attendee 3 Hi, Daniel, thank you for your work. My name is Miguel. I’m from the Philippines. I am in the MPAID or International Development Program. I find your story of throwing off the official research plan very intriguing. I am just wondering how broadly transport advocates or activists in general and young researchers will be able to engage with policymakers or, you know, hierarchical state institutions, especially when trying to explain the context that we are navigating in these spaces, especially like with the emphasis on legibility, quantitative data, versus the approach of being able to understand these contexts, being able to understand how the liminality of these spaces can’t just, you can’t just have one linear cause of corruption however you define it.  

Salimah Samji Thank you. We’ll come back for another round.  

Daniel Agbiboa Wonderful, Valeria. Excellent question. Matteo Rizzo. Very familiar with this work, of the work on the dala dala system in Tanzania, which is also fascinating as a policy space. And I’ll come to that with the second question. But what’s the difference? Let me say the first difference is that, so, Matteo Rizzo is an Italian working in Tanzania, and I’m not sure if he was a conductor. But if he was, I’m sure our experiences were substantially different for the very reason that he would stand out. As in, what is this a word for the white man? Whereas I would become anonymous within that sense, which meant that. We had differential experience with how the stigma and the violence occurred. So I think that’s just, and which which, there’s a space for both, right? In anthropology, you have the etic and the emic, the outside and inside a perspective. So we come in complementing each other in terms of the way in which we approach. But that’s sort of would be a difference in the sense that I blended in in a way enough to feel that my life was constantly being threatened and I didn’t really stand out. But, you know, there’s a lot one can talk about the geography of informal transports. You know, people who are in Nairobi, Kenya, in Dar es Salaam, in Kinshasa, they can share a general understanding of corruption as being of informal transport workers, as being just there to work as these workers who are stigmatized. So there’s across the board that aspect. In terms of difference, there’s sense in which Lagosians always like to feel that they are exceptional. Nigerians always like to feel like this is one of the toughest places, if not the toughest place in that sense, in addition to the sense that they are also the giant, they see themselves as the giant of Africa, albeit a crippled giant. So they set that difference in terms of the broader sort of scope, in terms of comparing Tanzania with Nigeria, then Nigeria actually has this inflated sense of being the country. But at the same time, they would defend fiercely their country, especially when they are having a soccer match. But at the same time, they are also very critical of themselves, highly critical of themselves, maybe in a way that you will not find in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. But I think there’s more that connects our research than separates us. For example, Matteo Rizzo would find similar kinds of slogans like life is war in Tanzania, as I would have found in Lagos. The Bus Rapid Transit system, which was introduced by the World Bank to sort of clean up these undesirable spaces, was also introduced in Tanzania. The difference being that in Tanzania they learned to work with them. Initially implemented without much participation from the the informal sector, but over time has been, indeed it will be regarded as one of the slight success stories in the sense of which you were able to work with informal transport workers to create sort of complementary lanes in the city in the way in which I don’t think Lagos has been successful at doing. So I think those would be the slight difference. But in all honesty there is a certain language of informal transport that cuts across, I would say not even Africa. I think if you speak to people from Afghanistan, you speak with people from Iraq, from India, they will tell you that this is also a similar kind of reality in such a way that we can speak about a global perception of informal transport workers, sometimes also called paratransit workers. In fact, people are moving away from paratransit and informal to popular transport, sort of move away from this sort of illegal space within which they are planted. So that’s sort of my my perception of the work. And to come to the second question, which is really interesting you talk about “Enemies label in vain” which tells you that there’s a battle that they are going into and there’s this sense in which there are a lot of enemies of progress on the road, both physical and metaphysical enemies and so words themselves the Yoruba believe have power. So people speak. Those words are not just for display, for reading the African city, but they are also sort of an amulet, something that protects them, something that speaks power to their lives. So. So in that sense, then you can already tell that this is a space that is filled with a lot of bad spirits, bad energies as well as good energies, and they have to compliment you. But going back to the area of policy, I would say policy, one policy that I would propose a policy that works with not against the flows of the city. So in that sense, then let me give you a concrete example. Implementing the Bus Rapid Transit system initially in Lagos, Lagos branded itself as a world class city, as Africa’s Big Apple. And so they felt that this informal transport had no place in Africa. Had no place settling in a city that aspires to become a center of excellence. This was the same thing in Tanzania. This was the same thing in Nairobi, in Addis Ababa, in South Africa. There was a sense in which this is not something that we want to be associated with. A lot of the governors from Lagos, Nairobi and the rest, they come to MIT, in the walls of Harvard trying to impose order on the chaos of their city. They are trying to make it planable and readable. But this is a fundamental policy flaw because in South Africa, for example, this fear of informal transport was sort of the first place where black capitalism emerged. The was fear of black agency, the Kombes, as they are called in South Africa, was this fear in which black people could first become economically empowered and assert their agency within this dominant apartheid hegemonic system. So in that sense, then I think when you do away with, when you come in, they are trying to replace and you are not flexible enough to learn from the local, what you do is that you reproduce an image of Africa that comes to study it from what it is not rather than what it is. Via negative. And so from that, via negative sort of approach, Africa would always be something that emerges in the popular imaginary as a problem to be fixed. But we have to think beyond that as this as a space of fantasy, of desire, of imagination, as scholars have reminded us. Right. And so when we come at it from that angle, then a bus rapid transit project can look at the ways in which you could integrate these transport workers to routes that you are most efficient at running, and then use the bus rapid transit to run the other routes. You wouldn’t come in and completely do away with these forms of transport and create it dedicatedly, which is what happened in many of these African cities and say this is the Bus Rapid Transit lane. So then there was protests, there was stoning of these bus rapid transit systems in Lagos when I was doing field work because they said they want a city that looks green, that is beautiful, technologically advanced, that is modern, but there is no room for multiple forms of modernity. There is no room for us, the poor in this city. So this is what has happened and this is a kind of policy that fails to be flexible, to see things in mutuality, see things in mutuality rather than in separation. And those kind of policies will effectively fail. They always fail. The bus rapid transit now look like the informal transport workers because they have been run ragged. So essentially then it’s working with the flow of the city rather than against it and seeing this not as what it’s not, but what it is. And building from there. I think that’s what I would say. And then the other question about how, as young scholars, how do you weave these spaces of illegibility into this legible space that we know? A classic example is the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, which goes on ranking countries and obviously African countries most of the time will find themselves at the bottom of the ranking. But this is based on perceptions that are always removed from the everyday. And so in that sense, then you wonder if something so ingrained in society can be reduced to a single number and used to rank, which is just ridiculous. So in that sense, then you can ask them how far they have. You can look at the countries that have been ranked in the bottom since it started ranking and see if there has been any change. If there has not been any change, just like they are no change between development, developing and developed country. How many Africans since we started having development, developing and developed, how many African countries have made away from developing to developed? No, because these systems are seen as a child that will never grow up. We are stunted. So they are, woven into them is a rigidity. And so they need to be flexible, not because I say, because it’s not working for them and they are not respecting the changeability, the variability that is part of the everyday experience from a lived perspective. So this is very important and these are the ways in which we can we can use that argument to sort of compel public policy option to not do away with their own approach, which I think is important, I’m not saying Transparency International Corruption Perception Index is not important. It puts pressure on and leads. And to that extent, you know, they want to do better. But I think ultimately it misses the point of the social engineering and social dynamics that is at the heart of corruption. And that’s what I would say.  

Salimah Samji Great. We’re going to take another round of questions. We’re going to start on Zoom this time. So, Danny, if you can. Those of you in the room, if you could just raise your hands and then I can at least assign where. You don’t want to ask anymore? One, two, three. And then we’ll come back to you guys.  

Daniel Barjum All right. We have two questions on zoom.  

Salimah Samji Great.  

Daniel Barjum First. Did you find a difference in the experience of transport operators from different ethnic groups or religious groups? And then. I find you’re interesting. Well, the first one was Faisal Hamid. The second one from Monticello says, I find your research interesting and your journey to document your experience a very brave undertaking. How do you think the role of unions like NURTW and RTEAN has contributed to a transmit of corruption in that sector.  

Salimah Samji Surely we have got Nigerians on Zoom who are asking very detailed questions. Thank you for your questions on Zoom. We’ll go to in the room. Microphones coming.  

Attendee 4 Thank you, Daniel. I love original research and this is an example of one. So congratulations for this. My name is Jamil and I am a mid-career student from the Harvard Kennedy School here, and I’m the editor in chief of the Africa Policy Journal. I hope that we can publish something out of your work. I did my NYC, the National Youth Service in Ogun State. I’m from Kano. So and I pass by Lagos sometimes and I’ve seen how difficult it is navigating the transport system. Which made your research even more interesting to me. Equally also, I did my research on corruption and, you know, and I’m quite interested in the cultural context of corruption because I have heard you make a reference to Joseph Nye about, you know, the use of corruption, you know, the use of public office, you know, for private gain. So how do we create or how do we use a culturally, you know, defined notion of corruption within the Nigerian context or within an African context or within the developing countries context to understand corruption? And isn’t the lack of that understanding an impediment to the way, you know, we approach corruption?  

Salimah Samji Thank you. 

Attendee 5 Hi, I’m Kruti. I’m from the Education School, and I’m learning more about policy right now, but at heart will always be an educator. I’m also from India, so no stranger to corruption. What I’ve experienced and what I heard you say as well was that we have this dialog about how corruption is bad, but we go on perpetuating it by being part of it right in various ways. And that’s what we do in India as well. We keep telling our kids that all corruption is awful. You should be honest. We have this moral dialog with them, but we also show them that this is how you get work done by bribing a government official to get things done. What I was wondering about was that, how do we change that conversation about corruption, similar to what he was also talking about? How do we change that conversation about corruption? And how do we talk to kids about it being a real issue. And because I think that changing the narrative for the next generation is really important to help them combat this problem. So what do you think about that?  

Salimah Samji Thank you. And our final question.  

Attendee 6 Thanks, David. Sorry, Daniel. I am Shruti, am from the MPID program here at the Kennedy School. And I just wanted to take you back to the point that you made when you said that you’ve got to make, you know, you’ve got to learn to live with corruption. So I’m curious to know, when you went into the process, were you like a staunch optimist? You said, you know, waging war against corruption. And what was it that made you make peace with the fact that you got to live with it? And how did it, like, did it come about from your, must have come about from your research but also from your experience is one of them. So I’m just curious to know the turning point there. I’m sorry for the name goof up.  

Salimah Samji Thank you so much for the excellent questions. Daniel?  

Daniel Agbiboa These are great questions. Where to start from? The first one on the ethnic sort of reading of city, the religious dimension. The ethno religious register is something that registers quite powerfully in Nigeria. But in Lagos, what’s interesting is that it’s almost like a struggle between the Yoruba as well as seen as the original owners of that land and Lagos being such a melting pot for people from different parts of Nigeria and more broadly West Africa and Central Africa, that it’s often called no man’s land. So there’s that tension between that. But I think in the transport sector was where I saw sort of that nepotism, that favoritism even among transport operators that the motorpark touts, would have to collect more money from people who were seen as outsiders than they would from the bureaucrats who sort of spoke their language and were seen as children of the land, omonile, people of the land. So they would have that sort of favoritism or the level of conviviality would be a little bit more warm and then they would identify people like Igbos, as we are called [unknown], which is almost derogatory, people that are not from here. So there was that that aspect. But I think more broadly, there was a mutuality around the frustration with corruption that cuts across ethnic identity in such a way then that for a change, this was not a space that ethnicity and religiousness were dominant, even though people would appeal individual slogans to, I think that was where you saw sort of the non homogeneous nature of religion. So people would talk about Christianity, people would appeal to Islam, their own traditional religion, for protection. But I think in terms of the the feeling around corruption and its impact on them, there was a shared nature that cuts across ethnicity in Nigeria. So that wasn’t prominent, perhaps because Lagos has been sort of normalized and popular imaginary as being this no man’s land, in this place where it doesn’t really. And that’s perhaps a very, that’s a problem because being historicized and hence there’s need for more scholars who historicize this is space and ensure that this is not just something that is rendered anonymous. We always have a history and this is partly what you’re advised to try to do. The whole aspect of the the union? The role of the union. It’s really it’s funny because there’s barely any book about the National Union of Road Transport, which is shocking because it’s a union that dominates everyday life so much and you don’t have anything, perhaps because we’ve been socialized to think that this is a no go area, you don’t deal with the union. It’s almost like a mafia like space where people, you know, life itself is very, very short. So you don’t want to dabble into this space. So there’s this sense in which, and the union is not just a puppet of the states co-opted by the state to co-opt the state. In many ways they are the own agents. Nobody co-ops the union. So in that sense that the relationship between the union and the states is that of cooperation and conflict. That has always sort of this shifting mutuality that has always and it’s that creative tension that has always kept them going. They have managed to avoid any kind of reform. Even when Lagos was praised for being one of the most progressive cities in Africa in the early 2000s, you know, doing away with all sort of informal sector, the transport sector managed to evade that kind of reform. And they knew it because I was talking to them, say, nobody is taking us away from anywhere. In fact, there they are names [unknown], which is children of the government. So they they are regarded, they are owners of their land. And they said nobody is holding us here. And there’s sort of the performance rhetoric where the state puts out the rhetoric of reform or they tell us that actually they will be here long after that reform has expired. So so they they states. And so if you want to call it an entrenchment of corruption, that’s one way to put it. Or you can just say it’s the way in which fear, the fear imposed by union now governs everyday life. So fear has become a way of life in that in that sector, in such a way then that when you’re an outsider coming in, when I initially came in, you know, I did not understand the language of that space, and I had become removed from the language of that space that, you know, after a while I started to understand what was going on here, that there was a certain mutuality and you knew there was a mutuality from looking at the money. Like, where does this money go to? Right? The money is distributed in a sort of a trickle up mentality that goes to the local government, goes to the police officer, goes to the party officials. You know, there’s this circulation. There’s a whole distribution of what Nigerians call the national cake. It’s for sharing, it is for distributing among all the party holders. In that sense, then that’s both the party holders, both the police officers, both the union officials, they are all in a precarious position. They need each other in this sort of partnership that is essential to survival in that particular space. So there’s that sense in which entrenchment can figure in the relationship between the union and the states. And there’s the whole aspect of the culturally defined notion of understanding corruption and how it can maybe inform policy. I think, as I answered earlier, I think there’s is a sense in which even policymakers are beginning to recognize that for all the anti corruption movement that has happened in Nigeria, you cannot meet any Nigerian who would say we are less corrupt now than we were before, which says that there’s something not quite right about it. And culturally, and I like to say critically cultural, because there’s a sense in which elites sometimes abuse the notion of cultural to be primordial and say, well, gift giving, bribe, what you call bribe is gift giving, this is how we do things here. I think that is not at all how I’m using it. And I spend a lot of pages trying to deconstruct the notions of culture and how it is used and abused in that sense. That’s not what I mean. I mean, corruption is a global phenomenon that has to be understood in its local context. So there’s a sense in which we can speak of corruption, but there’s also a sense in which we have to understand the language of corruption. And it’s not just a language of stateness, it’s also a language of societies, a language of a dance between state and society. And I think the societal element, street logic is something that’s not always been there, because anthropologists come and study this street level, political scientists come and study the politics at the state level. And perhaps maybe you need development scholars to look at how the street and the state combines and circulates and not demarcates petty corruption from grand corruption and political. It doesn’t make sense. Because actually the corruption that people feel most aggrieved about is not the one that is noted by leaders with somewhat abstract. It is the one that they experience right after they leave their door and their house is on the queue in the checkpoint. Those are the ones that they feel particularly angry about. So one has to bring that in. So there’s also the whole aspect of the paradox of corruption, which was raised using India. And India, the literature in India is one that I have found a kindred spirit in. I’m thinking about the work of Akhil Gupta on the blurred boundaries of the state. And he says not just in India, but on the post-colonial societies, the fact that a formal state, street level bureaucrats like the police, often are not found in their offices. They are found, you know, in the informal spaces in such a way, then that completely blows that. And the question, I guess, that I always ask and this also goes into this the other question is what is the incentive of political leaders to change a system that benefits them? Why would they want to change it? And I’ve never really found a convincing answer for it, because this is a system that that benefits the people in positions of power and a sense almost like a deliberate sense in which police officers, for example, they see a whole literature that they are underpaid. But it’s also a sense in which they they lobby to find themselves in lucrative spaces where they can exploit money from these these offices. And it reminds me of the work by one of the Indian scholars, Anand, who talks about a hydraulics city in India, where he talks about how water pipes are deliberately left to leak because people, because in a way, the leaky water pipes become tap water and not protest against the states. And so they see sort of a leakyness around the whole idea of the state itself. So I think that’s that’s the paradox at the heart of corruption, about the question of political will and public choice and why people want to change a system that actually they get so much from. And I think this is a challenge that I still try to figure out. But I think the staunch optimist, I went into the field being a staunch optimist. Yes. I left feeling like I was a cruel optimist, knowing that I was wedded to a system that ultimately hurts the people I know and hurts the people that I don’t know. But I think that the movement, the EndSARS movement against police brutality tells us that there’s a new generation that is rejecting this normality of corruption, this fact that we should live with it as a way of life. This fact that this is how it is. Something that we are critiquing past generations for doing. And I think that comes with a lot of hope that is not maybe cruel optimist but maybe informed optimists. Optimists that want, are pushing their government to be more accountable and more responsive. And I’ll give you an example quickly from the field that when I was in the field, transport operators who had been removed from the center of the city to the margins to make way for the bus rapid transit systems, which are supposed to be icons of the modern, took the state to court. They took the state to court because they were angry that, they were trying to assert their right to the city, which essentially is the right to be part of decision making processes that affect their lives. And initially won the case in court. So we see ways in which the informal is appealing to the law to sort of reclaim their rights and not always true forms that are seen as non-conventional, violence and the like. So there are all these spaces there. But I think before we can even answer that problem, we need to understand what the problem is. And we need to, so before we can move to this space of fixing this issue, we need to avoid just seeing it as a problem from the understanding. Let’s understand what this problem is and what is happening here, because as I argue, there’s a vulnerability at the heart of corruption, because all these actors, if you look at it, starting with my parents, if you just look at it from the point of view of the workers, then you miss the precariousness that is part of the ownership dimension. If you just look at corruption for the part of the state, you miss the local dimension of it. So if we understand that aspect, then maybe we can build policies that are not just inclusive because there’s a division between inclusion and exclusion. And sometimes it’s not a matter of black or white or inclusion exclusion. It’s the terms under which people are included, because you can be included in policies in the way that do damage to you. What some scholars called adverse incorporation. So we need to look at attempts on which this transport operators are allowed to work in the city, but they don’t make their way in any sort of formal constitutional document in many African countries. So in a sense then they are part of this space, this necropolitical space where they are allowed to die. They could be exploited, their lives are disposable, but at the same time the government has not properly recognized them as right-bearing persons. They are not incorporated. They are mere danglers in this space, as the African philosopher Feynman puts it. So it’s a case of trying first to understand this phenomenon called corruption, and to understand that to move beyond this as a single phenomenon, because we’re using the English language here to try to see what is the language of corruption in this local context. I said there are 520 something languages in Lagos and I would like to know which one defines corruption single with one line or two lines. I don’t see it. So. So if that is the case, then why are we talking about the same thing when we talk about corruption? And if we’re not sure we’re talking about the same thing, where does our ranking come from and who is doing these rankings. And you can ask the same questions and to scale it up to developments, developing, public, private, and you can find a whole lot of modern, pre-modern, a whole lot of problems, a whole lot of leaky concept that we need to deconstruct. Not throw away the baby with the bathwater, but deconstruct and make sure that we are we’re dealing with it from a flexible sort of approach.  

Salimah Samji Wonderful. Thank you very much. With that, I think we’re going to end this talk. For those of you would like to stay back and have a conversation, we can do that. But thank you very much, Daniel. I think particularly I really liked this unpacking corruption because it is often thought of as a black and white thing, which it is not. Right. Petty versus grand versus public versus private. These are all in the classroom, things that are easy to teach. And then you go live your real life where everything is blurred. And I think your book really is a contribution in helping you understand the life in the blur of all of these phases. So thank you very much for being with us. We can give him a round of applause. Thank you.