An unorthodox union and an unregulated transport system leave many Nigerian bus drivers vulnerable to poverty and abuse.

Buses queue by the side of the road to pick up passengers in Oshodi, one of the largest motor parks in Lagos [Anthony Obayomi/Al Jazeera]
Buses queue by the side of the road to pick up passengers in Oshodi, one of the largest motor parks in Lagos [Anthony Obayomi/Al Jazeera]
By Ope Adetayo

14 Oct 2020

Lagos, Nigeria – It is 7pm on a Wednesday in late September. Afeez* has just left a bus park at Iyana Isolo, a small busy road near the popular Ojuwoye street market in the district of Mushin.

In a leased danfo – the privately run yellow and white minibuses that serve as unofficial public transport in Nigerian cities – the 32-year-old plies through the busy streets, breaking off before traffic signals, in a rush to get his passengers to the nearby suburb of Oyingbo.

“I am in a hurry to return to the park and do more trips,” the driver explained. His conversations with passengers are terse; he has no time to listen to their complaints. “I have to deliver [the rental fee] to the owner of the bus tonight.”

The only thing momentarily slowing him down along his route are the agberos – the motor park touts he hands 100 naira ($0.27) bills to every time he passes their junctions. Some run after the bus, demanding their due.

In Yoruba, agbero means “to carry passengers”, but this does not connote what the agberos do. These men, mostly clad in white and green uniforms but sometimes in plain clothes and carrying sticks or canes, collect dues from motorcycle, tricycle, and danfo bus drivers on behalf of the drivers’ union – a toll that allows them to pick up passengers.

The cost of dues can vary. But drivers say they generally pay three types: “booking” is paid so they can start work at the motor parks every morning; before each trip, they pay a “loading” fee, which is usually a sum equal to the fare of two passengers; and “tickets” are undefined charges which are paid once or twice a day depending on the parks they use.

Some drivers told Al Jazeera they hand over about half their daily earnings to the agberos, and altercations sometimes occur if dues are not paid.

A bus conductor and an agbero engaged in an aggressive tussle over payments, in Sabo [Anthony Obayomi/Al Jazeera]
“I have had countless fights with them, we fight often,” Afeez said. “It is trouble if you don’t give them money.”
Early in August, he was involved in a brawl with some agberos at Fadeyi, a bus stop along the route he was taking to Oyingbo.

“It was close to noon that day and the particular agbero was asking for afternoon due,” he recalled. “My conductor said it was not afternoon yet … and that we needed to work more before paying.

“I was at the steering wheel and I heard their argument. I told him when we go on one more trip, we would pay. The argument continued and all of a sudden he stabbed my conductor in the face with a key. He wounded him and I could not take it; I came down from the driver’s seat and we fought each other.”

The agbero was joined by his friends and a big fight broke out until they were all separated by other drivers, Afeez explained. “In the end, nothing happened because the chairman … did not get involved, it was just me and their boys,” he added, expressing relief that he did not encounter a union boss at the bus park.

The union
The National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) is an independent union that oversees all danfo bus drivers, commercial motorcycle drivers, and tricycle drivers.

In its own words, it “serves the interests of transport workers in the road transport sector”. But according to many drivers, the union only serves itself.

Unlike regular unions, NURTW is amorphous and without a defined and transparent structure. Its membership mainly comprises people who are not drivers, but rather motor park attendants. They started off as touts, canvassing passengers onto buses and maintaining order at motor parks. But over the years they have assumed total control of Nigeria’s informal transport sector.

The union has now become exclusively for “outsiders who have no business in driving”, drivers told Al Jazeera, at least in part because of what some say is a troubling alliance between union leaders and state officials. One driver who identified himself as only Tunde said the top echelons of the union are people who are rewarded by politicians for their service.

The problems with the union have long been a point of national discussion. In Oyo, another state in southwest Nigeria, Governor Seyi Makinde banned NURTW “to maintain peace and tranquillity in the state in order to engender commercial and human development” following “alleged security breaches and factional clashes of the union member in some areas of Ibadan, the state capital”. Since then, the state government has taken control of the bus parks in Oyo.

Some analysts say the challenges in the transport industry are rooted in the evolution of Nigeria’s socioeconomic landscape, and that the steady rise in unemployment after the country’s gradual economic downturn in the 1980s led to the birth of the agbero phenomenon.

Agbero originally grew out of “area boys”, a slang term usually used to refer to loosely organised groups of teen street gangs. These young male residents of a particular area would casually lay claim to “ownership” of that location, extorting money from passersby and serving as informal security in the hope of some compensation. In later years, the area boys, who were already mostly unemployed, found refuge within the largely unregulated transports system, economists and public policy analysts have said. They have grown into the more sophisticated association known as agbero today.

Nigeria as a whole has no policy that guides the transport sector and in high population density cities like Lagos, with a rising scourge of unemployment and consistent migration from other states, the transport system has become a mine of quick, daily cash for young people without work.

According to Professor Gbadebo Odewumi, the dean of the school of transport at Lagos State University, the public transport system in Lagos has been infiltrated by unskilled, illiterate youths ready to do the bidding of well-known thugs at the helm of the union because the state government has refused to implement standard policy guides that have been drafted by various commissions.

“First of all, there is no policy framework. Sanity can only begin with policies. Without policies, nothing can work,” Odewumi told Al Jazeera. “That is why there is this level of extortion and violence. Do you know how much the government makes per day? There is serious money in transportation. I mean billions.”

Although not formally connected with the government, the union has become one of Lagos’s – and much of the southwest’s – social mainstays as they are a visible presence in the daily experience of millions of commuters.
A Premium Times report in 2019 said that most of the money being generated on the street is disbursed into the pockets of union leaders owing to the informal structure of the financial relations between the union and the government.

Al Jazeera approached some of the union leaders at Oshodi, a transport hub in the state, for their response to these and other claims, but they refused to comment.

“The union leaders just reap from the chaos of the system and enrich themselves,” Odewumi said.

“The relationship is parasitic; each component is taking advantage of the other with the drivers at the base. The government takes advantage of the union and uses them for what they want, like using them to challenge political opponents during elections; the union takes advantage of the drivers.”

‘You are at their mercy’
“As a driver, I am in the union because the union is for those who are transport workers like me,” said Muyideen*, a danfo driver and father-of-three who ferries passengers from motor parks in Mushin and Oshodi every day.

“What is sad is what the union has become.”

The 61-year-old has a diploma in business administration but began working as a driver in 2001 after he could not find a job in his field. Now he is on the road from 5.30am to 9pm every day. But his income, he said, averages just 5,000 nairas ($13) a day.

“I am a father of three grown children and I need to struggle to make sure they don’t end up with this kind of job,” Muyideen said. “They need to go to school and be well-off; this is not what I want for them. Not all drivers are illiterates as people think, I am a graduate but due to unemployment, I found myself in this job.”

He has grown weary of the shady, unaccounted charges he pays the union for every trip he makes. The charges are not official and could be invented at any time, he lamented. And his inability to challenge the exorbitant levies, he said, lies in the free rein the government has given the union leadership to operate public transport in Lagos state.

“The union is mainly for thugs and the government is not doing anything about it. Nothing is being done with the dues we pay, we just pay,” he said.

Muyideen starts out every morning paying a 1,700 nairas ($4.59) booking fee at the motor park, and the dues pile up from there. Although he can make about 700 nairas ($1.89) from a single trip at full capacity, before he is able to pocket the cash, between 200 and 300 nairas ($0.54-0.81) – almost half – go to the agberos.
“Once you are driving [in public transport] in Lagos, you are at their mercy. Drivers are silently suffering because most of the reward of our labour goes to them,” he said, pointing to a union official lounging on a bench on the other side of the road.

“And you cannot do anything. They can do whatever they want at any time,” he said, dejectedly, before looking around to see if it was his turn in the queue. “If you fight them, you will suffer for it. You will either be beaten or be sent away from the park.”

To be continued...

E ku aroye

Hand work of Bobo Chicago.