They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria Daniel E. Agbiboa

Introduction
Rethinking Corruption
Scholarly works on corruption in postcolonial Africa harp excessively on thefailure of leadership. is bad leadership argument maps well onto muckrakingnarratives of powerful political patrons and so-called “big men” in postcolonialAfrica gorging on state resources at the expense of the multitude who are gener-ally assumed to be innocent victims of corruption. In
e Trouble with Nigeria
,acclaimed author Chinua Achebe places the blame squarely on the failure of lead-ership, maintaining that “(c)orruption goes with power, and whatever the averageman may have it is not power. erefore, to hold any useful discussion of corrup-tionwemustrstlocateitwhereitproperlybelongs—intheranksofthepowerful”(1983:1). While Achebe’s work emphasizes the mutual intertwining of corruptionand elite power in Nigeria, it nonetheless robs non-elite groups of political agency or the capacity for action (Mustapha 2002). e banality of power, as African-ist scholars Achille Mbembe (1992), Jean-François Bayart (1993), and CélestineMonga (1996)tellus,dwellspreciselyin theconviviality oftherulerandtheruled.Rather than dening power in terms of narrow materialist rational choices of Africanelites(aviewoeredbyBooth&Cammack2013),thelogicofconviviality reclaims Michel Foucault’s non-elitist notion of power as emanating everywhere(1978:93).e clichéd image of the dysfunctional African state as the root of all evil pre-cludes a complex understanding of corruption as a transgressive category thatimplicates citizens as well as public ocials, both of whom exercise a degree of power and political expectation. As the Nigerian sociologist Ebenezer Obadarepoints out, it would be disingenuous to limit corruption to the politics and busi-ness of elite alone since, as he argues, corruption is the key thread that bindselites and commoners in Nigeria’s political economy (Obadare 2019: 165). issalient point is taken further by the economist Mushtaq Khan (1996a, 1996b,2000),whoarguesthatinmanydevelopingcountriesthestateisweakrelativetoitsclients and hence it lacks the capacity to maintain autonomy from powerful busi-ness interests, professionals, and other rent-seekers, giving rise to unproductive
 e “good governance” agenda in Africa is based upon the idea of the dysfunctionality of Africanstates. is agenda rests simply upon an imagined disconnect between modern institutions and tradi-tionalAfricansociety,withthelatterseenasprecludingecientandsustainableAfricanbureaucracies(Anders 2009: 3).
They Eat Our Sweat
. Daniel E. Agbiboa, Oxford University Press.© Daniel E. Agbiboa (2022). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861546.003.0001
D ownl o a d e d f r om h t t p s : / / a c a d emi c . o u p. c om / b o ok / 4 1 4 0 7 / c h a p t er / 3 5 2 7 2 0 9 2 6 b y Uni v er s i t y of E d i n b ur gh u s er on 0 2 D e c em b er 2 0 2 3

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rent-seeking activities. Khan (1996a, 2000) calls this the “clientelist patron-clientnetworks” in contradistinction to “patrimonial patron-client networks,” charac-terized by strong states able to maintain control over the management of rents.Using the example of India, Khan shows how a range of intermediate classes havecome to occupy powerful positions in civil society and have mastered the art of exertingpoliticalpressuresonthestate.eseintermediateclasseshavethepowerto inuence the process of rents disbursement by the state (in the form of subsi-dies,taxbreaks,andlicenses)andpreventthestatefromeliminatingunproductiverents (Jeery 2002: 22).In Africa, clientelist patron-client networks and intermediate classes areexemplied by powerful and politicized transport unions (e.g. Nigeria’s Union of Road Transport Workers [NURTW] and Uganda’s Taxi Operators and DriversAssociation [UTODA]), which have come to wield disproportional power andinuence over the central state, according to a bidirectional logic described as“doublecapture”(Goodfellow2017).atconceptofdoublecapturerunsathwarttheprevailingconceptionofinterestgroupsandprofessionalassociationsinAfricaas poorly organized and comparatively weak. As Nicholas van de Walle claims,most African states are largely autonomous from social pressures because they have managed to outlaw, emasculate, or co-opt economic interest groups such asunions, business, and farmers associations (2001: 95). For van de Walle, the “ab-senceofmassorganizationsinAfricaweakensthepoliticalinuenceoflower-classgroups who have little leverage over the ‘patrons”’ (2001: 72). e idea of dou-ble capture reinforces Erik Ba¨hre’s empirical analysis of the violent and shiingmutualities at the core of state-civil society relations, specically the relationshipbetween Cape Town’s maa-like taxi unions and state agencies (Ba¨hre 2014). Farfromredistributive,theclientelistpatron-clientnetworksthatarisesfromsuchpo-litical settlements and elite bargains produce a “trickle-up” economy that largely benets only a select few.From Africa to South Asia and the Baltic, ethnographies of corruption haveshown that corruption is simultaneously banalized and denounced in daily life.Anthropologist Daniel Jordan Smith argues that many average Nigerians whocondemn corruption also participate in its social reproduction, and that too withease (2007: 55). Comparing corruption in Ghana to the bodily function of coitus,Jennifer Hasty (2005a: 360) describes how the act of corruption is simultaneously decried and desired, hidden and exposed. In India, the same people who criticizethe nation’s weakened moral fabric are also open about the contradictions thatsurrounds their own discourses of corruption (Das 2015: 323, 340). is paradoxof complicity is evident in Klavs Sedlenieks’ ethnographic study of corruption inLatvia, where his informants expressed a disgust for corrupt activities alongside a
 is concept moves us beyond a one-sided view of state capture, that is, African leaders using stateresources to co-opt dierent civil societies to maintain political stability (van de Walle, 2007: 50).
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3readiness to participate in them if the opportunity were to arise (2004: 120). esimultaneous criticism and complicity of corruption articulates with a growingcorpus of works that have conceptualized corruption as a “collective action-socialtrap” problem (Mungiu-Pippidi 2006; Persson, Rothstein, & Teorell 2013), whereanyself-interestedsocialactorwillreason,“Well,ifeverybodyseemscorrupt,why shouldn’t I be?” (Myrdal 1968: 409).eories of collective action postulate that when the dominant perception inany society is that public ocials are hopelessly corrupt, this generally creates asocial expectation that everybody pays a bribe, and therefore behavioral normstend to override any ethical objections that individuals may have. e direct out-come is a “low-level equilibrium trap” (Rose & Peier 2014), in which people whoresent corruption are resigned to accept it since the decision not to engage in cor-ruption is considered to be “illogical or even ridiculous” (Marquette 2012: 22).e cost of not falling in line with the status quo is too high, as people risk beingtreated as outsiders (Kuran 1997) or punished (Wade 1985: 483). When a soci-ety is systemically corrupt, it becomes optimal to participate in corruption despitethe presence of anti-corruption policies and legislation. is way corrupt behav-ior becomes the pragmatic norm (Mishra 2005: 30; cf. Booth & Commack 2013).So entrenched is the social norm of corruption in many developing countries thatstreet-level bureaucrats (e.g. police) oen nd it dicult to resist the “erotics of corruption” (Miller 2008). Of the characteristic policeman on the streets of India,it is observed that his work puts him in constant interaction with people con-sidered to be immoral. In a context where corruption is not only widespread,but deeply enmeshed with the practice of everyday life, “the policeman neednot make opportunities; they are constantly being proered to him routinely…”(Bayley 1974: 88).e collective action-social trap framework constitutes a compelling critiqueand an alternative to the conventional “principle-agent” theory (seen in Klitgaard1988; Rose-Ackerman 1978), which generally assumes the presence of “principledprincipals” in civil society and in positions of power who, by their very nature, areinterested in holding agents to account and combating corruption (Marquette & Peier 2015: 2). Yet, in many developing countries where corruption is systemicand social and political trust are low, the absence of “principled principals” is con-spicuous (Booth & Commack 2013; Booth 2012). Far from being a problem of individual deviation from the system, corruption becomes the system and virtu-ally everyone is implicated in corruption (Prasad et al. 2019: 99). As Anna Perssonetal.(2013:457)explain,inasocietyinwhichcorruptionistheequilibriumnorm,wecanexpectanti-corruptionlawstobelargelyineectivesincethereislittletonoincentive to hold corrupt actors responsible. Across Africa, principals and agentsare bound by a conceptualization of public oce and state resources in terms of food (e.g. “national cake”), exemplied by the crudely avaricious mentalities of “It’s our time to eat” (Kenya) and “
I chop you chop”
(I eat and let others eat also)(Nigeria).
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In a thoroughly corrupted Nigerian society where nine out of ten people say public ocials are corrupt and most people fear retaliation if they report cor-ruption to local authorities (Afrobarometer 2018), the very instrumentalities of survival by average citizens tend to mirror the ones adopted by leaders to accu-mulate wealth and power. e vivid and visceral display of power and predationin contemporary Nigerian politics incorporates the dominant and the dominated,the elite and the subaltern, in an “intimate tyranny [that] links them in the de-sires that are shared across all its disparate groups” (Rowlands 1995: 38). In thislight, then, any serious study of corruption in Africa must go beyond written rulesand formal positions of power to examine how the practices of governments andpublics are interwoven and mutually reinforcing (Mbembe 2001a: 133).
e Social Norms and Moral Economies of Corruption
To curtail corruption, we have to reorder the mindset of all[Nigerians]… those who are critics today are most times not betterthan those they criticize. When they are availed the same or similaropportunities,theyactlikewise.Inotherwords,thosewhodidn’thavethe opportunity criticize and blow whistle but when they get into of-ce;theybecomevictimsofthesamethingtheycriticize…ispointsto the fact that curtailing corruption might require a more broadenedsocial engineering.—President Muhammadu Buhari (
Leadership
2015)Buhari’s statement underlines the o-neglected social element of corruption,which is neither new nor specic to Nigeria. In fact, according to the World De- velopmentReport(2015:60),thereisasharedbeliefinmanycountriesthat“usingpublic oce to benet oneself and one’s family and friends is widespread, ex-pected, and tolerated. In other words, corruption can be a social norm.” Normsrepresent the standards of appropriate behavior in any society and have beendened as patterns of behavior which people conform to on the condition thatthey expect that most people in their reference network will conform to it also(Bicchieri & Mercier 2014). Social norms dictate the extent to which individualsengage and expect others to partake in corruption. In Nigeria, social norms havecultivatedafertilegroundforthebreedingofcorruption(Ocheje2018);thispartly explains why corruption has deed post-1999 institutionalist anticorruption cam-paigns,mostprominentlytheIndependentCorruptPracticesCommission(ICPC)and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). In as much as so-cial normsin thewidersociety continueto favororeven rewardcorrupt practices,
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5anti-corruption institutions and campaigns, though well-intentioned, will remainspineless and toothless.At this juncture, a distinction must be made between moral norms and socialnorms,lestwefallintotheculturalisttrapofseeingcorruptionasthe“culture”(i.e.moral beliefs and value codes)
of
the people/nation, and lest we conate corrup-tion as ingrained in the moral fabric of a society and its people, with corruptionseen as a series of “standard operating procedures” that compels people to dothings that they think are morally wrong (Rothstein 2018: 41). On the one hand,moral norms are clusters of moral judgements that justify the “relevant normativeprinciple,” while on the other hand, social norms are clusters of normative atti-tudes that consist of the “presumed social practice” (Brennan et al. 2013: 89). esignicance of this distinction is conrmed by Bo Rothstein (2018: 40): “If travel-inginacountrywherethe‘presumedsocialpractice’forgettingmedicaltreatmentfor one’s children is to pay bribes to health personnel; most parents would likely pay the bribe. However, they could still be morally upset and convinced that do-ing so is ethically wrong. Similarly, a doctor in a systematically corrupt health caresystem may morally disapprove of the practice of taking money ‘hidden in an envelope,’ but it makes little sense to be the only honest player in a system wherethere is the presumed social practice.” In a similar way, many average Nigerianswho participate in corruption feel the context of political and moral economiesin which they live compel them to do so. Although they recognize and denouncecorruption in the abstract, these lowly Nigerians feel locked in a patronage systemthatdeterminestheallocationofstateresources(Smith2007:56).epoliticalsci-entist Rasma Karklins (2005) puts it succinctly: “e system made me do it.” To beclear,thesystemwearetalkingabouthereisonethathasdeprivedmillionsofable-bodied people of jobs, food, and shelter, reducing them to bare life, to the strugglefor daily survival. is is what Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (1999: 48) describesas “the general feeling of helplessness in the face of an infernal mechanism.” Nowonder Monica Prasad and colleague’s meticulous review of the corruption liter-ature concluded that corruption oen results from ordinary people trying to meettheir legitimate, day-to-day needs (2019: 99).e concept of
moral economy
originated from historian E.P. ompson’s sem-inal work on the eighteenth century hunger riots in England. ompson (1971)denes moral economy as “a consistent traditional view of social norms andobligations, of the proper economic functions of various parties within the com-munity, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of thepoor.” e concept of moral economy was later popularized in James C. Scott’sinuential work on peasant life-strategies in Southeast Asia. In this work, Scott(1976: 167) apprehends moral economy as a kind of alternative social order basedon two core principles: “the right of everyone to have access to the means of sub-sistence and survival, and the accompanying obligation to give and receive, thusobeyingthenormsofreciprocity”(Wutich2011:5).Sincethisworkwaspublished,
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a phalanx of scholars has applied moral economy to a broad selection of issues. InAfrica, moral economy has been applied to the (Newell 2006), political imagina-tion (Isichei 2004), witchcra beliefs (Austen 1993), and the relationship betweenfamine, climate, and political economy (Watts 1983). Beyond Africa, moral econ-omy has been used to make sense of racial health disparities in the United States(James 2003); poverty, immigration, and violence in France (Fassin 2005); theculture of entrepreneurship in Nepal (Parker 1988); the reciprocity of water inse-curity in Bolivia (Wutich 2011); and ancestral worship among Chinese migrants(Kuah 1999). e broad application of moral economy has increasingly made itsomething of an empty signier, a popularly invoked concept without substantialmeaning. Scholars such as Didier Fassin (2009) and Chris Hann (2016: 3) havecriticized the trivialization and thoroughly muddled nature of moral economy inthe social sciences. Yet, behind the muddle lies a powerful analytic concept thatcan help illuminate the dynamics of corruption.Africanist scholars Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan and Steven Pierce have re-claimed the concept of moral economy to understand the complexity of corrup-tion. While Pierce’s (2016: 174) account invites us to pay close attention to how and why particular public moral communities emerged over time, Olivier de Sar-dan (1999: 26) puts the emphasis on “as subtle as possible a restitution of the value systems and cultural codes by those who practice it.” For Olivier de Sardan(1999: 32), corruption is dicult to address because it is engrained in social habitsand,thus,deeplyinscribedinthemoraleconomy.Habitsconstitutethemoralfab-ric of any society and the rational order of social relations (Camic 1986: 1057;Weber 2012: 300). Habits connect social patterns, conventions, and orders witheveryday experience (Darmon & Warde 2018: 1039). Moral economy is loosely interpreted in this study as “the production, distribution, circulation, and use of moralsentiments,emotionsandvalues,andnormsandobligationsinsocialspace”(Fassin2009:15).isinterpretationenablesustofocusonthesocialevaluationof moralconductandthemoraljudgmentofsocialconduct(Smith2016:565).Mov-ing us beyond the usual focus on material/economic conditions, Didier Fassin’sinterpretation allows us to interrogate voices and lived realities on the margins of society. In short, the moral economy approach moves us beyond simplistic no-tions of
homo politicus
and
homo economicus
by focusing on “the cognitive worldsof the poor” (Isichei 2004: 10).In adopting the notion of moral economy as an explanatory model, my aim isto account for the ways in which corrupt practices are oen embedded in socio-political mutualities and cultural forms that grant them legitimacy. Furthermore,I seek to interrogate corruption as a central arena in which the state and ideasaboutinteractionwithitarediscursivelyconstructedineverydaylife(Gupta1995;Masquelier 2001; Sedlenieks 2004: 119). Going beyond unitary, monolithic, andsedentaristconceptions,thestateisreimaginedhereasaninherentlytranslocalin-stitution, which localizes itself in a multiplicity of sites, encompassing the village
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7land registry where the subaltern in India encounter corrupt bureaucrats (Gupta1995:379;Ferme2013),thepoorconditionofroadsorthevastmine-aectedareasofAngola’sMoxicoprovincethatfrequentlyclaimlivesandkeeppassengersawareof state abandonment (Neto 2017: 137), the checkpoints in Sri Lanka where botharmed soldiers and civilians anticipate violence (Jeganathan 2000), and the localdispensary in rural Niger whose emptiness reminds residents of the withdrawalof the state (Masquelier 2001). Lastly, moral economy sheds light on how corrup-tion gives rise to relationships of obligation and reciprocity (Carrier 2018: 30). Amoral economy approach advances our knowledge of how the ruler and the ruledshare the same “moral” universe whose values are not only linked to the ethic of economic survival but also reciprocal exchanges that are embedded in and reec-tive of a wide range of social relations and norms (Mauss 2000; Polanyi 1968). AsJames Scott notes:
is moral context consists of a set of expectations and preferences about rela-tions between the rich and the poor. By and large, these expectations are cast inthe idioms of patronage, assistance, consideration, and helpfulness. ey apply to employment, tenancy, charity, feast giving, and the conduct of daily social en-counters. ey imply that those who meet these expectations will be treated withrespect, loyalty, and social recognition. (Scott 1985: 184)
e Politics of Corruption: Between the Grand and the Petty
Until now, there have been surprisingly few studies of corruption in relation tothe overlapping logics of negotiation, gi-giving, solidarity, predatory authority,and redistributive accumulation (Olivier de Sardan 1999: 25). is is partly dueto the origins of research on corruption in the analytical toolkits of economicsand political science. Not so long ago, the eld of anthropology accounted for amere two percent of existing literature on corruption. In fact, save for Scott’s early work on clientelism, “corruption” was eerily muted in the anthropological litera-ture until the 1990s, when we saw a “corruption eruption” (Naim 1995; Torsello2016: 1). On the one hand, economists are interested in examining the structuresof economic incentives that make corruption more likely and assessing the im-pact of corruption on ecient economic outcomes (Mauro 1995; Bardhan 2015).Economists expect to see corruption when the benets are high and the costs arelow (Rose-Ackerman 1975). e costs of corruption are seen as primarily rent-seeking and social in nature. While the former describes the cost of the resourcesexpended in seeking the rents or navigating around the restrictions, the latter de-rives from the rents and restrictions created by public ocials (Khan 2006). Onthe other hand, the task of analyzing the roots of corruption has fallen to polit-ical scientists, who tend to dene corruption in relation to state legitimacy, civil
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society engagement, and the manner in which political power is imagined, exer-cised, and contested (Szeel 1998; Heidenheimer et al. 1989). Political scientistsargue that corruption is a problem of weak states, which are characterized by se-curity, capacity, and legitimacy gaps. Both economists and political scientists areunited in the view of corruption as illegality, that is, the violation of the formalrules governing the allocation of public resources by ocials in response to oersofnancialgainorpoliticalsupport(Khan1998;Nye1967).isconventionalno-tionofcorruption—whichoverlookshowpeopleeverywherecomeincontactwiththe state and imagine it—is directed by Max Weber’s conception of the modernbureaucracy, particularly its bifurcation of the public and private realms:
Legally and actually, oce holding is not considered ownership of a course of income, to be exploited for rents or emoluments in exchange for the renderingof certain services… Rather, entrance into an oce… is considered an accep-tance of a specic duty of fealty to the purpose of the oce (
Amstreue
) in returnfor the grant of a secure existence. It is decisive for the modern loyalty to an of-ce that, in the pure type, it does not establish a relationship to a person, likethe vassal’s or disciple’s faith under feudal or patrimonial authority, but rather isdevoted to impersonal and functional purposes… e political ocial—at leastin the fully developed modern state—is not considered the personal servant of aruler. (Weber 1978: 959)
Political scientists and economists typically converge on a basic distinction be-tween two corruption typologies: grand (high-level) and petty (everyday) corrup-tion. Grand corruption involves large nancial sums. e most extreme forms areinstanceswherethestatebecomesan“apparatusofcapture”(Ferme2013:957)andaconduitforprivateaccumulation(Joseph1987;Scott1972;Osoba1996).InNige-ria, for instance, political coalitions and clusters have historically been engaged indetermined eorts to capture the state apparatus for the purpose of using its re-distributivepowerstoenrichthemselvesandtheircronies(Joseph1987).Between1960 and 1999, an estimated USD400 billion was stolen from Nigeria’s public ac-counts, and between 2005 and 2014, about USD182 billion was lost through illicitnancial ows from the country (Homann & Patel 2017: iv). Given its vital rolein capital accumulation, eorts to capture the state in order to deploy a set of rent-seeking practices have intensied in the wake of the oil boom of the 1970s, when
 Like the concept of corruption, Foucault’s concept of “apparatus” (
dispositif
in French) is at oncea most ubiquitous and nebulous concept. However, in his
What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays
,Giorgio Agamben illuminates the notion. “I will call an apparatus,” he writes, “literally anything thathas in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure thegestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings” (2009: 14).
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9the expanded national revenue base from oil earnings rose dramatically, account-ing for about 75 percent of national revenues (Lewis 1996). Accordingly, politicalcapital became intertwined with economic power, so much so that the premiumon the former soon became a matter of life and death. As Nigerian historian ToyinFalola notes:
e only way to grow rich was through state patronage. Consequently, today’sbusiness elite struggles to identify with power in a variety of ways: by joining po-liticalparties,befriendingmilitarychieains,andhumoringthepeopleinpower.Either to protect wealth acquired corruptly, or to prevent their rivals from us-ing power to destroy them, the entrepreneur class continues to strengthen itsconnections with the protective powers in the government. (Falola 1998: 63–64)
It has been argued that public ocials in sub-Saharan Africa barely view them-selves as rule-bound bureaucrats in the Weberian sense but instead have a pri-mordial loyalty to family, kin, ethnic groups, and party supporters (Chabal & Daloz 1999). e logic for this so-called deviant behavior was explained by theNigerian sociologist Peter Ekeh; his central thesis is that the legacy of colonial-ism in Africa culminated in the coexistence of two distinct publics: the primordialand the civic. e former is perceived to be amoral and devoid of the generalizedmoral imperatives at play in the private realm and in the promoridal public (Ekeh1975: 92). While Africans experienced a moral obligation to the ethnic primor-dial public, the westernized civic public was largely seen as a contested terrainfor private accumulation. e dialectics of the two publics are implicated in thedistinctive woes that troubles Africa today, where people’s rst loyalty is to theirethnic identities at the expense of the nation state (Ekeh 1975: 92). Corruptionis the “acme of the dialectics,” and derives directly from the legitimation of theneed to nourish the primordial public (e.g. one’s kin) with largesse seized fromthe civic public (Ekeh 1975: 110). Public ocials in Africa are generally expectedby their own community and adherents to acquire fortunes through corruptionand cronyism. In Uganda for instance, stealing state funds is commonly seen as“smart,” not immoral. e one who fails to cash in on his position might be told,
Ngor nyak I boto pa lawok
(literally, “peas yield in a toothless person’s garden”)(Baez-Camargo et al. 2017: 27). In DR Congo, a policeman who does not acceptbribes is called
yuma
, which means stupid (Alexandre 2018: 568).Ekeh’s thesis rings true in contemporary Africa, where people oen express farstronger loyalty to their ethnic kinsmen than to the nation state. In Nigeria, theonly time when people appear to share a sense of national identity is when thenational football team—nicknamed the “Super Eagles”—is playing a match. Here,government business is no man’s business. In fact, a standing joke is that Nigeriais a career rather than a national identity. In this light, stealing from the state ap-paratus to nourish one’s community is widely justied, even a respectable crime.
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Not to do this is to risk being criticized and ostracized as a person without esteem(Tankebe 2010: 301; Tankebe et al. 2019). e huge pressures on African publicservants to break with conventional norms of civil service is evident in Nigeria,where the higher one ascends the social ladder, the more one is expected to dofor one’s people. High-placed government ocials and street-level bureaucrats areunder immense pressure to provide gis of money, jobs, and social amenities totheir ethnic communities (Agbiboa 2011: 498). In Cameroon, elites feel constantpressure from their local village or ethnic communities to use every means, bothmoralandimmoral,to“redistribute”asawayofdemonstratingtheircommitmenttoward development (Orock 2015: 562). In Kenya, the state and society are inti-matelylinkedbyagluttonousandimmoralmentality:“It’sourtimetoeat”(Wrong2009; Lindberg 2003).Yet, Ekeh’s thesis is not without aws, perhaps the most obvious one beingits over-simplication. ough inuential, his argument has been criticized fordisregarding the real experience of cleavages, inequalities, and ethnic hierarchiesshaping the life chances of Africans, and making ethnic mobilization an attrac-tive proposition for many elites and non-elites (Mustapha 2012). African civilsocieties, for instance, have been accused of ethnic fragmentation and primor-dial attachments (Osaghae 2006: 17). Moreover, Ekeh’s two publics overlooks thereality of multiple overlapping publics and counter-publics in postcolonial Africa(Mbembe1992:4;Mustapha2012)—afarcryfromJurgenHabermas’(1991,2006)unitary theorization. In short, Ekeh’s approach represents an inadequate heuristicfor locating popular politics in contemporary Africa.Despite the above shortcomings, Ekeh’s theory has inuenced major theoreti-cal frameworks and debates that seek to understand how and why patron-clientnetworks⁴ persists in Africa today through the merger of formal bureaucratic pro-cedureswithtraditionalneo-patrimonialnorms(Mamdani1996).Suchtheories—known as “politics of the belly” (Bayart 1993), neopatrimonialism (Bratton & vande Walle 1994; Medard 1986), “embedded autonomy” (Evans 1995), “instrumen-talized disorder” (Chabal & Daloz 1999), and “disorientations of civil society”(Osaghae2006)—havesoughttoexplainstatepathologiesandpoliticsinAfricaby alluding to the dynamics of internal social structures. Invariably, they have crys-talized in the view of corruption as woven into the fabric of the African polity (Chabal & Daloz 1999: 99), reinforced by political and moral economies in whichthe spoils of the state are expected to be (re)distributed through social networks
⁴ Patron-client networks generally describe “a set of transactions which may overlap with and yetare analytically distinct from corruption. Patron-client relationships are repeated relationships of ex-change between specic patrons and their clients. A number of features distinguish patron-clientexchanges from other types of exchange. First, such exchanges are usually personalized. ey involvean identiable patron and an identiable set of clients. Entry and exit are considerably less free com-pared to normal market transactions. Secondly, the exchange is between two distinct types of agents,distinguished by status, power, or other characteristics” (Khan 1998: 23).
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11embedded in the state (Joseph 1987; Bayart et al. 1999). In Nigeria, patron-clientnetworks constitutes much of the social fabric for informal and party politicsand controls the possibility for political participation and social mobility (Forrest1993: 5; Gatt & Owen 2018: 1198). e result is a personalized form of rule wherepolitical elites are able to shore up patronage by selectively distributing govern-ment resources to their local communities. In this perspective, corruption occurswhensocialexpectationsareunmetorwhenthespoilsofthestate(“nationalcake,”as Nigerians like to say) are not appropriately and timeously redistributed. In thislight, redistribution becomes the litmus test for political candidates and politicalaccountability.It is against this backdrop that Olivier de Sardan (1999: 18) has argued that thelogic of solidarity networks in Africa includes an obligation of mutual assistance:“I scratch your back, you scratch my back.” is logic of solidarity and reciprocity is richly documented in ethnographies of the state and socio-economic life insouthwest and southeast Nigeria. On the former, anthropologist Karin Barber(1981: 724) writes: “e dynamic impulse of political life is the rise of self-mademen. Individuals compete to make a position for themselves by recruiting sup-porters willing to acknowledge their greatness […] but the self-made man, ratherlike the Big Man of New Guinea, is only ‘big’ if other people think so. He has tosecure their attention by display and redistribution of wealth and by using his in-uenceasaBigMantoprotectthemandinterveneontheirbehalf.Ifheisnotableto do this, he will not attract a following.” On the latter, Smith (2007: 65) writes:“A man who enriches himself through emptying government coers is despisedin his community only if he fails to share enough of that wealth with his peoplethrough direct gis to individuals and community development projects, but alsothrough more ceremonial distribution such as lavish weddings for his children,spectacular burials for his parents, and extravagant chieaincy installations cere-monies for himself. At such events, his people enjoy his wealth—they
chop
(eat)his money.” In both ethnographies, the power of the big man intertwines with thepeople, putting both actors in a precarious⁵ position.Richard Joseph (1987: 191) challenged what Crawford Young and omasTurner (1985: 451) before him referred to as the state’s moral entitlement to le-gitimacy, arguing instead that insecurity is a common denominator for those inpositionsofpoliticalpower,theincluded,andthoseonthemarginsofthestate,theexcluded. is “precariousness of prebendalism,” as David Pratten (2013) framesit, explains in part why political patrons in Nigeria oen rely on mobilizing and
⁵ e Latin word
precarious
means “given as favor,” or “depending on the favor of another person.”e earliest meaning of the English word “precarious” relates to the idea of being given something—the right to occupy land, or to hold a particular position—“at the pleasure of” another person, whomight simply choose to take it back at any time. In its more modern usage, precarity means “subject toor fraught with physical danger or insecurity; at risk of falling, collapse, or similar accident; unsound,unsafe, rickety” (Oxford English Dictionary 2012; see also Standing 2011).
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arming marginalized youth⁶ during election times as political thugs. In Nigeria,bigmenareunderconstantpressuretorememberandrewardtheseruggedyouth,since the big man status is unxed and multiple: “followers may discard Big Menwhen they do not deliver. At the same time a follower is not loyal to just one BigMan, but typically enjoys dierent relationships with dierent Big Men” (Utas2012: 8). is is precisely the sense in which bigmanity in Africa has been linkedto being for someone else or other people; in Mende, “stand for them” or “be forthem” (
numui lo va
). As one young man put it: “‘being for’ someone implies thatyou have made yourself subject to the person. You work for him, ght for him, etc.And he is in turn responsible for you in all ways [such as court nes, clothes, food,school fees, or bridewealth]” (Bledsoe 1990: 75). Similarly, regarding Mende so-cialpractices:whatismostimportantisthateveryoneisaccountedforbysomeoneelse, that is, that everyone is connected in a relationship of patronage or clientship(Ferme 2001: 106). In return, the patron, the person who stands for someone else,expectsalevelofrespect,support,andprivilege,aswellasashareinanywealththatthe client might accumulate (Homan 2007: 652). is “wealth in people” (Utas2005a) is captured in an ethnographic study of the politics of plunder in southernNigeria, which nds that one’s achievements for one’s people (
se enye anam
) con-stitutes a key social marker of personal wealth (
ackpokpor inyene
), showing how the personal and the social are interconnected. is explains why the obituaries of big men (
akamba owo
) oen recount their achievements for their local communi-ties.elogicissimple:wealthbegetssocialresponsibilities(Gore&Pratten2003:219–20). Similarly, in his seminal study of political consciousness among the poorin Ibadan, southwest Nigeria, Gavin Williams found that “the values and goals interms of which the success of the rich is dened are to a large extent shared by the poor and dene their aspirations, thereby legitimizing the rewards of the rich”(1980: 112).What emerges from the above is a notion of corruption as a breakdown of traditional moral economy in which those who have (well-o elites) are obligedto provide for the have-nots (deprived non-elites). Perhaps, nowhere is this moreevidentthanintheriseofadvancefeefraud(“419”)inNigeriaand“themagicalal-lureofmakingmoneyfromnothing”(Andrews1997:3).egure“419”signies“Section 419” of Nigeria’s Criminal Code Act 1990, Chapter 38, which states that:“Any person who by any false pretense, and with intent to defraud, obtains fromany other person anything capable of being stolen, or induces any other person todeliver any person anything capable of being stolen, is guilty of a felony, and is li-abletoimprisonmentforthreeyears.”Builtuponduplicitousillusions,419e-mailsblur the putative lines between “the forged and the far-fetched, the spirit and theletter of the counterfeit, the fetish and the fake” (Comaro & Comaro 2006: 15).
⁶ In Nigeria, the concept of “youth” occupies a category of risk; it labels a dangerous, insurgent, andunpredictable force that threatens the social and political fabric (Pratten 2013: 245).
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13Although the name Nigeria has become a synonym for criminality and fraud inthe global imagination, 419 scams are not unique to that country. In fact, “post-colonies are quite literally associated with a counterfeit modernity, a modernity of counterfeit” (Comaro & Comaro 2006: 13).Whileeconomistsandpoliticalscientistshaveindubitablycontributedtoaglob-ally circulating set of anti-corruption campaigns, policies, and perception-basedsurveys, they have either explained away the social embeddedness of corruptionor lost sight of the local terrain and systems of action and meaning that animiatecorrupt practices and imbue them with social signicance (Pierce 2016: 18). Westill know remarkably little about how corruption is routinely encountered andnegotiated in concrete instantiations in state margins. Yet survey evidence fromAfrica shows that ordinary citizens are most burdened by corruption when try-ing to gain access to indispensable basic social services in their own country; inparticular, poor people who use public services in Africa are twice as likely asthe rich to pay bribes, particularly in urban areas (Global Corruption Barome-ter 2015: 2–3). In Nigeria, the average citizen expects to pay a bribe (
egunje
) togain access to public services, even those marked as free. e thread of corruptionruns through schools, courts, churches, hospitals, police stations and checkpoints(Obadare2019:165).SurveyevidencefromtheNigerianBureauofStatistics(NBS)shows that roughly a third ofadult citizenswho had comeinto contact with publicocials had been asked for a bribe. According to the NBS, a total of 82 millionnaira (USD200,000) was paid in bribes to public ocials in Nigeria in the previ-ous twelve-month period. is equates to an average of one bribe per person peryear (BBC 2017). Another survey by the UN Oce on Drugs and Crime (UN-ODC), in association with the NBS, found that poor Nigerians paid an estimatedUSD4.6 billion in bribes to public ocials between June 2015 and May 2016, con-cluding that “bribery is an established part of the administrative procedure inNigeria” (UNODC 2017: 5–6). Nigeria is not alone. In Kenya, it is estimated theaverage urban resident pays sixteen bribes per month (Ellis 2006: 204). PresidentDaniel Arap Moi, during his twenty-four years in power, is widely credited withreducing Kenya to the home of the bribe,
nchi ya kitu kidogo
(“land of the ‘littlesomething”’) (Wrong 2009: 2). An empirical study of Uganda’s health care systemfound that nothing can be obtained without paying a bribe. In fact, almost half of all people who contacted the health sector in Uganda paid a bribe (Marquette,Peier, & Armytage 2019). Soliciting a bribe from a poor woman with acute chestpain, a Ugandan nurse is quoted as saying: “ese days there are no free things,[not]evenatthemainhospital.Giveme20000[schillings]andIwilltakeyoutothedoctor”(Baez-Camargo et al. 2017: 12).Toreceivemedicaltreatment,poorUgan-dans oen have to nd a
musawo nga mukwanogwo
(health worker who is yourfriend). Beyond Africa, in the Philippines, poor people oen have to pay bribesranging from 3,000 to 5,000 pesos (USD58 to USD60), with some yielding up tothree months’ wages to their superiors in gratitude for their job (Quah 2006: 176).
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By happenstance rather than by design (Haller & Shore 2005: 6),⁷ a growingbody of anthropological literature on corruption has emerged relatively recently.ese ground-level studies have questioned the neat divide between the publicand the private, the legal and the illegal (Gupta 1995; Ruud 2000; Bocarejo 2018),especially neo-Weberian assumptions about the nature of state institutions orthe signicance of a clash between patrimonial and bureaucratic political logics(Pierce 2016: 18; Piliavsky 2014). is “anthropological turn” pivots on how cor-ruption, as a transgressive category, manifests in “gray practices” (Routley 2016;Muir & Gupta 2018). Anthropologists have also called attention to how peopleand NGOs navigate the ambivalence of corruption through tactics such as cul-tural construction (Lamour 2008), mis-recognition (Hansen 1995), negotiations(Routley 2016; Anjaria 2011), irony, rumor, and laughter (Gupta 2012), cate-gorization (Werner 2000), straddling of political and economic spheres (Bayart1993), and everyday deception (Smith 2007). ese anthropological analyses ex-tend to why corruption has taken on the forms it has and how cultural systemsand value codes permit the legitimation of corruption. By anchoring corruptionin everyday life, anthropologists call our attention to the social worlds that allowscorruption to ourish.Unlike the central focus of economists and political scientists on grand orhigh-levelcorruption,anthropologistsaregenerallyinterestedinpettycorruption,dened as “everyday abuse of entrusted power by low- and mid-level public o-cialsintheirinteractionwithordinarycitizens,whooenaretryingtoaccessbasicgoods or services in places like hospitals, schools, police departments, and otheragencies” (Transparency International n.d.). Known in Greece as
fakelaki
(“lit-tle bribery envelopes”), in Nigeria as
egunje
(involuntary gis), in Kenya as
kintukidogo
(somethingsmall),andinAngolaas
gasosas
(“sodrinks,”oendemandedat police checkpoints), petty corruption involves forms of bribery and extortion indaily life. In developing regions such as Africa and South Asia, petty corruption(particularly by law enforcement ocials) is the “most visible face of corruption”and a primary source of “public irritation” (Khan 2006). At the same time, petty corruption has been labelled “quiet corruption,” a term used by the World Bank (2010: 2) to capture forms of everyday corruption and malpractices that are nei-ther easily observed and quantied nor necessitate monetary exchange, but whichhold major, long-term ramications for service delivery, regulation, and house-holds. Visible or quiet, petty corruption has become a way of life and a mode of business and politics in much of the developing world (Ellis 2006: 204). In Nige-ria, petty corruption is commonly regarded as a necessary evil or simply “the way thingsaredone”(Homann&Patel2017).Asearlyas1950,futureNigerianprime
⁷ Many anthropologists say they stumbled upon or noticed corruption while researching other top-ics. For example, in his
Moral Economies of Corruption
, Steven Pierce (2016: 5–6) notes that “estarting point of this project came while I collected oral histories about local government across thetwentieth century.”
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15minister Tafawa Balewa noted that the “twin curses” of bribery and corruption“pervade every rank and department” (Watts 2019: 554). Two years later, in 1952,the Commission of Inquiry into the Administration of the Lagos Town Council(“Storey Report”) observed widespread practice of giving an unocial cash gi ora fee (bribe) for services rendered:Hospitals where the nurses require a fee from every in-patient beforethe prescribed medicine, and even the ward servants must have their
dash
[bribe] before bringing the bed-pan; it is known to be rife inthe Police Motor Trac Unit, which has unrivalled opportunities onaccount of the common practice of over-loading vehicles; pay clerksmake a deduction from the wages of daily paid sta; produce exam-iners exact a fee from the produce buyer for every bag that is gradedand scaled; domestic servants pay a proportion of their wages to thesenior of them, besides oen having paid lump sum to buy the jobs.”(Storey Report 1953)Despite attempts to trivialize petty corruption, empirical studies show that thisformofcorruptionsapsthelegitimacyofthestateanddamagescondenceinpub-licinstitutionsandthepoliticalsystem(DFID2015:83).⁸Further,pettycorruptiondisproportionately aects the poor in developing countries, while increasingtransaction costs and general lawlessness (Khan 2006). Every stolen money robsthe poor of an equal opportunity in life and precludes investment in human capi-tals by governments (World Bank 2020). While grand corruption did not preventthe rapid development of the East Asian countries, each of these countries took steps to address bureaucratic corruption (Kang 2002; Prasad & Nickow 2016),illustrating the cumulative threat of petty corruption.
Grand and Petty Corruption: Two Poles of a Continuum
edisparitiesbetweenhigh-levelandpettyformsofcorruptionnotwithstanding,this book interrogates both basic typologies as interconnected (Torsello & Venard2015:40),or,asOlivierdeSardan(1999)putsit,“twopolesofacontinuum.”Inherstudy of corruption in Accra, Jennifer Hasty (2005a: 342) argues that the ubiqui-tous nature of petty corruption “performs mimetic and contagious relations withthe episodic spectacles of grand corruption—and vice versa. is enchanted rela-tion is essential to the durability and proliferation of corruption.” e implication
⁸ Empiricalresearchhasshownthatcitizenswholackcondenceinpublicinstitutionsmaybemorelikely to accept bribery and less likely to participate in political processes (DFID 2015: 83).
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16
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is that neatly categorizing corruption into only two typologies reduces its com-plexity and uidity. As Davide Torsello and Bertrand Venard (2015: 37) tell us,“focusingononetypeofcorruptionputsanysocialrealityintoastaticstatewithouttaking into account its environment, when corruption is in fact a dynamic socialrealitylinkedtoitssocialandpoliticalsetting,whichbynaturechangesovertime.”Moreover, the distinctions between grand and petty corruption downplays the in-terplay between elite and popular politics, especially the cultural forces that shapeelite-subaltern interaction (Obadare 2019: 164). A case in point is Lagos, wheretransport trade unions and local and state governments are deeply embroiled ina complex relationship that evokes Ba¨hre’s notion of violent and shiing mutuali-tiesinCapeTown.AccordingtoBa¨hre(2014:576),mutualitiesproduceparticulareconomies that cannot exist without some level of social networks of trust, reci-procity,andprotectiontodealwiththerisksandradicaluncertaintiesthataveragecitizens and public ocials face on a day-to-day basis. Mutuality is most visible indeveloping countries, where the state may be unable or unwilling to deliver polit-ical goods. In such a seemingly weak environment, the state and (un)civil society are oen implicated in political and moral economies of corruption. As Adebanwiand Obadare note regarding Nigeria:
Given the incapacity of the state, its divisive nature, and the pervasive poverty whichthese(re)produce—muchofwhichisalsoexplainedbycorruption—many Nigerians survive on the patron-client relationships and other identitarian con-nections which link them to particular members of the elite. is means thatwhile Nigerians are generally socially supportive of anti-corruption eorts, many are politically or economically connected to the corruption complex directly orindirectly. (2011: 195)
As a fundamental aspect of social relations, the logic of mutuality has yet to pen-etrate the existent literature on corruption in Africa, which all too narrowly pivoton the idea of the state while overlooking the people who populate it. In fact, “the very idea of elites suggests qualities of agency, exclusivity, power and an appar-ent separation from mass society” (Shore 2002: 4). Yet, as scholars such as PhilipAbrams (1988) and Timothy Mitchell (1991) remind us, states in their abstractform do not actually exist as distinct entities but rather as socially embedded andrelational sets of persons that animate state institutions. No wonder, then, thatGeorge Marcus (1983: 12) calls for a rethinking of elites as socially situated groupsin relation to other non-elite groups. In a like vein, Sandipto Dasgupta (2019: 562)argues that “public ocials are not abstracted from private power relations in so-ciety, and private actors are not bere of public political capacities.” From Africato Latin America and South Asia, corruption is embedded within the logics of negotiation and bargaining, and ordinary citizens simultaneously encounter thestate as an extension of disciplinary power and an epicenter of negotiation and le-gitimation of spatial claims (Anjaria 2011: 58; Olivier de Sardan 1999: 253, 256).
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17In Cameroon, for example, Orock points to how the social expectation that elitesprovide development projects “evokes the assumptions of conviviality that under-lie social relations between the well-o (elites) and the less privileged non-elites”(2015: 541).
About this Book
is grounded, bottom-up study examines corruption in the context of every-day encounters and interactions between state (e.g. law enforcement agents) andnonstate(e.g.transportunionistsandtaxcollectors)actorsinNigeria’sroadtrans-port sector. e study is about the commonplace struggles and instrumentalitiesof survival of informal road transport workers (e.g. drivers, conductors, own-ers, unionists) refracted through a “thick” discussion of corruption, coercion,and complicity on the congested and dangerous roads of Lagos. Located withinthe above anthropological critique of corruption, the book argues that averageNigerians (in particular, road transport workers) are not passive in the face of cor-ruption, but rather appropriate it in a variety of ways to minimize risk, maximizeprot, and impose order on their workaday world. e study takes an actor-centered approach that explores how transport workers encounter and respondto the situation dened by extortion and violence in which they ply their trade.e book’s overarching focus is, thus, on the role and impact of corruption inthe context of the everyday life of informal road transport workers, particularly how these mobile but immobilized actors bend the rules to manage their pre-carious dwelling-in-motion. By so doing, the book takes up Olivier de Sardan’s(1999: 25) call to explore the social mechanisms of corruption and its processes of legitimation from the actors’ viewpoint.As used in this study, the concept of “informal” means the self-organizingcapacity of social actors who operate “inside the system, but outside the law”(Rasmussen 2012). Across African cities, informality is a way of life and a survival tactic for growing numbers of people on the margins of society, accountingfor an estimated 86 percent of total employment, or 72 percent, excluding agricul-ture. In fact, nine out of ten jobs in Africa today are informal (Lindell & Adama2020: 3–4). Despite the vital role of the informal sector as the main driver of jobgrowthinurbanAfrica,informalworkersarecommonlystigmatizedasillegalandundesirable occupants of urban spaces and thus targeted by state restrictions andeviction campaigns based on neoliberal policies aimed at modernizing and order-ing the city.⁹ To survive, informal workers oen resort to giving bribes to secureprotection from daily harassment and arrest. I want to suggest up front that theinsights of this book are equally about corruption as they are about the struggle
⁹ ese actions run contrary to the basic thrust of the “New Urban Agenda” of the UN Habitat III,which seeks to promote inclusive cities that “leave no one behind” (UN Habitat III 2016: 7).
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18
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for daily survival—the two intertwine in the context of informal transport andcommuter journeys in Lagos, where giving
egunje
(bribes) is generally viewed as alegitimate survival strategy. In other words, this book is less a systematic accountof corruption than an empirically grounded analysis of the politics and poetics of survival in everyday, urban Nigeria.In addition to the “demand side” of corruption (e.g. bribe solicitation by policeocers), this book engages the o-neglected “supply side” (e.g. facilitation pay-ments). In Uganda, for example, so high is the supply side that the courts, in abid to combat it, have plastered signs all over the courthouse. “Most court servicesare free,” the inscriptions read. “Do Not Corrupt Us. Oender will be Prosecuted”(Tabachnik 2011: 23). In Freetown, Sierra Leone, it is common for motorbike-taxi(
okada
) drivers to supply bribes to police ocers
ex ante
. Known as
bora
and
ajo
,this advance payment eases their passage through road checkpoints (Lipton 2017:93).InBukavu,theDRC,mosttaxidriverslacktherequireddrivingparticulars.So,they supply USD1 as bribe to each police station before driving. In this way, they are able to drive without police harassment. Police stations, for their part, mustremit a weekly bribe of USD60–120 to the trac police headquarters in Bukavu,depending on the lucrative location of the police station (Alexandre 2018: 564).e concepts of demand and supply are used loosely in this study, since av-erage citizens can, and regularly do, “demand” corruption on the part of peoplein positions of power or control (e.g. drivers). To illustrate, during my eld-work in Lagos, I was struck by how oen passengers of the yellow minibus-taxis(
danfos
) persuaded their driver⁰ to follow the illegal “one way” route in order tobeattracjam(
go-slow
,astheysayinLagos).esamepassengersdonothesitateto insult the driver when he is pulled over by the policeman for a trac viola-tion. ey will demand that he “settles” (bribes) the ocer to avoid delay. is, of course,isarationalresponseonthepartofpassengers,sincebribingalawenforce-ment agent to avoid a penalty for a trac violation is generally less costly, risky,and time-consuming than would be going through “due process” for the violation(Homann & Patel 2017: 10). When a driver chooses to maintain his correct lane,whether slow or fast, the same passengers are oen incensed and start to repeat-edly berate him. ese passengers are aware that following “one way” is illegal anddangerous. Yet, they demand it because they see others doing so or expect othersto do so. ey rationalize “one way” as a practical response to the existential angstof being stuck in trac and “packed like sardines” for any number of hours. issocial expectation is conveyed by the popular Nigerian saying,
Naija no dey carry last
(“Nigerians strive to nish rst”). e central point here is that corruption
⁰ In Lagos, the taxi-driver is a “big man” in relation to the passenger. For, as Olatunde Lawuyi(1988: 5) observes with regard to Yorùbá taxi-drivers in southwest Nigeria: “e travelers themselvesknow that, if angered, the driver may refuse to take them to their destinations, for a certain powerinheres in the owner’s control of the vehicle and in a sense makes him a privileged citizen.” “Naija no dey carry last” is the title of a book satirizing Nigeria by the late Pius Adesanmi.
or

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19is oen a tactical weapon wielded by both the strong and the weak, by those in theproverbial driving seat and those being chaueured around the city. In short, asOlivier de Sardan (1999: 250) argues, corruption is so widespread in Africa thatthe average citizen has a routine experience of dealing with it.e above necessitates a dialectical approach that pays attention to the practi-cal and social life of corruption, and the strategies of the various actors involved.at dynamic approach will shed much-needed light onto “gray practices” thatchallenge
idées reçues
of corruption. us, a dialectical approach to corruptionlays bare the complicated web of social norms, value acceptances, power relations,negotiations, and social networks that animates local discourse and practices of corruption. In this light, then, corruption is best approached as a window ontohow the postcolonial state is imagined and experienced in everyday life (Gupta1995: 385; Masquelier 2001: 269). So conceived, any serious study of corruptionin Africa today must move us beyond the idea of the state as an autonomous andunied entity and, instead, explore thoroughly its embodied and hybrid realities.
A Culture of/against Corruption
is book grounds corruption on the survival tactics of marginalized transportoperators in Lagos as they socially navigate a bumpy terrain embroiled in man-ifold risks, ranging from travel to unfamiliar places and, most of all, other city dwellers. In so doing, this book breaks with cultural primordialist analyses of cor-ruption in Africa (in the form of Patrick Chabal & Jean-Pascal Daloz [2006] andJean-Francois Bayart [2005]) that tend to misconstrue culture as path dependent,that is, as a set of primordial phenomena rather than of contested and proteanattributes, both shaping and being shaped by socio-economic aspects of daily hu-man interactions. Citizens and public ocials run the risk of essentializing ratherthan explaining culture when they apply it as a “primordial trap, a mystical haze,or a source of hegemonic power” (Rao & Walton 2004: 3; see also Meagher 2006)in justication of otherwise despicable acts of corruption. While corruption sat-urates the political economies of African countries, it is not somehow organicto African culture. As Smith (2007: 224–25) notes, Nigeria is as much a culture
against
corruption as it is about a culture
of
corruption. Corruption is neitherrootedinprimordialtraditionalculturenorisitadesirablefeatureofeverydaylife.If by culture we mean the general moral orientation of the population in question,then the vast majority of Nigerians, nay Africans, are against rather than in sup-port of corruption (Rothstein 2018: 39). Gi giving in Africa is not infrequently
 Henrik Vigh denes navigation as the striving “to direct and control the movement of one’s liferather than having it be directed and moved by the shiing of the unstable social environment it isimmersed in” (2006: 130).
or

20
   
rationalized by political elites and street-level bureaucrats as “part of our culture,”and outsiders are warned not to conate it with bribery. However, Chief OlusegunObasanjo, a former Nigerian president (1999–2007), debunked this viewpoint:
I shudder at how an integral aspect of our culture could be taken as the basis forrationalizing otherwise despicable behavior. In the African concept of apprecia-tion and hospitality, the gi is usually a token. It is not demanded. e value is inthe open and never in secret. Where it is excessive, it becomes an embarrassmentanditisreturned.Ifanything,corruptionhaspervertedanddestroyedthisaspectof our culture. (cited in Pope 2000: 8)
Obasanjo’s observation is not evidently insincere. A 2005 Afrobarometer surveyin Kenya found that 84 percent of all respondents think that a public ocial whodemands a favor or an additional payment for some service that is part of his jobis violating his responsibility to the public (Figure 2). Kenyans are also less accept-ing of a public ocial who gives a job to someone from his family who does nothaveadequatequalications,with72percentconsideringthisapunishableaction.e study concluded that, “Clearly, traditional cultural practices, whether of gior other varieties, do not, in the eyes of the public, entitle government ocials totake advantage of them” (Afrobarometer Data 2006a: 1).
90807060504030201001626556217231184Development for friends /supportersJob for unquali󿬁ed family memberFavor or payment forserviceNot wrong at allWrong and punishableWrong but understandable
p e r c e n t
Fig. 2.
What is corrupt?
Source:
Afrobarometer (2006a: 2).
Similarly,inhisanalysisofcorruptionandtheuseofmoniesinMongolia,DavidSneath contrasts “acceptable enaction” (e.g. helping family and friends) with “un-acceptable transaction” (e.g. bribing an ocial). He oers this example: “e gi
 eAfrobarometersurveywasconductedbetweenSeptember2and28,2005.Itinvolvedface-to-face interviews with 1278 Kenyan men and women of voting age, selected through a scientic randomsampling procedure in accordance with international polling standards. Interviews were conductedin all eight of the country’s provinces, and 51 of its 72 districts. Citizens of each province are repre-sented in the weighted sample in proportion to their share in the national population (Afrobarometer2006a: 1).
or

:  
21of a bottle of vodka to a relative who uses a company truck to help a family move,for example (a very common form of assistance among rural kin), is expressiveof the supportive relationship between the parties concerned and is not thoughtof as an exchange. But giving cash to a railway baggage handler to load an over-weightpackageontoatrainisclearlyunderstoodtobeatransaction—inthissensea potentially corrupt one” (Sneath 2006: 89). In a study of the social life of cor-ruption in India, Arild Ruud (2000: 282–83) shows that, even from a culturally sensitive perspective, ordinary people from many dierent backgrounds oen de-nounced corrupt practices such as bribe-taking, rule-bending, and favoritism. Inhis study of the relationship between corruption and culture in the Pacic Islands,Peter Lamour (2008: 229–30) quotes a Prime Minister in the State of Samoa whosaid: “What determines an acceptable gi is 5percent policy/law and 95percentcommon sense,” adding “a bottle of whisky or ten tala [USD3.60] is consideredto be acceptable gi, while a gi of say 3,000 tala [USD1,080] would certainly beregarded as unacceptable and this would be seen as a bribe.” e foregoing chal-lenges the common recourse to some generalized notion of culture to explain thebanalization of corruption and supports the call for an avoidance of the “dual trapof condemnation and relativism” in the corruption literature (Das 2015: 323).eAfrobarometer(2006b: 33) survey showsthat most Africansthink that cor-ruptionis“wrongandpunishable”⁴(Figure3).Hence,toblamecorruptiononthecultureofanationistantamounttosayingthatitspeopleareinherentlyfraudulentor prone to corruption, which is hardly a sound point of departure for inclusivepolicy change (Rothstein 2018: 40). In the case of Nigeria, ordinary citizens arelargely supportive of anti-corruption campaigns, even if for ethnic, religious, orpoliticalreasons,theymaynotwanttoseecertainpoliticiansheldaccountable(i.e.punished) for their corrupt behavior (Adebanwi & Obadare 2011). is observa-tion problematizes the moralizing, culturalist view that Nigerians are somehow more prone to corruption than others. is view is best exemplied by remarksmade by former United States’ Secretary of State Colin Powell, who suggested thatcorruption and crime are natural to Nigerians, because “it is in their natural cul-ture” (cited in Gates 1995). But, as Stephen Ellis (2016: 3) asks, “Can culture be anexplanation for such behavior? In any case, how does a specic culture come intobeing? Didn’t the experience of colonial rule play some part?”e above-cited Afrobarometer survey is buttressed by further survey evidencefrom Africa and South Asia which demonstrates that ordinary citizens in thesesocieties do not only take a clear stance against corruption but also conceive of corruption in a similar way to global organizations such as the World Bank and
⁴ e Afrobarometer surveyed individuals from Nigeria, Benin, Botswana, Cape Verde, Ghana,Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Namibia, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania,Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
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For each of the following, please indicate whether youthink the act is not wrong at all, wrong but understandable, or wrong and punishable.Response (%)Category
A public official decides to locate a developmentproject in area where his friends and supporterslive.A government official gives a job to someone fromhis family who does not have adequatequali󿬁cations.A government official demands a favor or anadditonal payment for some service that is part of his job.Not wrong at allWrong but understandableWrong and punishableDon’t know 3128241691118883Not wrong at allWrong but understandableWrong and punishableDon’t know Not wrong at allWrong but understandableWrong and punishableDon’t know
Fig. 3.
inking about corruption
Source:
Afrobarometer (2006b: 33).
Transparency International (Rothstein & Torsello 2014: 276). In its Annual Meet-ing’saddressin1996,formerWorldBankPresidentJamesD.Wolfensohnadducedthe
vox populi
as the primary reason why the World Bank reinvented itself as ananti-corruption organization:
Andlet’snotmincewords:weneedtodealwiththecancerofcorruption.Incoun-tryaercountry,
itisthepeoplewhoaredemandingactiononthisissue
.eyknow that corruption diverts resources from the poor to the rich, increases the costof running business, distorts public expenditures, and deters foreign investors.ey also know that it erodes the constituency for aid programs and humani-tarian relief. And we all know that it is a major barrier to sound and equitabledevelopment. (Wolfensohn 1996; my emphasis)
While the above evidence shows that most people in the developing world disap-prove of corruption, it persists nevertheless because it is tied to the pursuit of daily survival.Myownndingsfrom“hangingout”inthecongestedbusstations-
cum
-marketsof Lagos suggest that the everyday and political life of corruption are intertwined,givingrisetosystemiccorruption.Forinstance,duringmyeldwork,minibus-taxidrivers and passengers stressed that the dreaded motor park touts (
agberos
)—who violently extract bribes from drivers in the name of the National Union of RoadTransport Workers (NURTW)—are powerfully linked to politicians and policechiefs.ecashbribestheycollecteachdayservestogreasetheunion-state-policemutualities. As one resident of Lagos opined: “ere is an apparent collusion be-tween these touts, law enforcement agencies and some highly inuential personsand politicians in the state. at is the reason why at some bus stops, unionistsare deployed to collect illegal tolls and levies on behalf of inuential persons,
or

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23evenlawenforcementagents”(
eGuardian
2017). isobservationpointstothelimitation of the anthropology of corruption, especially its tendency to overlook political science literature, including political culture, thought, and language.⁵ AsSusan Rose-Ackerman (2010) observes: “Ethnographic research tends to concen-trate on cultural and social expectations to explain the prevalence of personalisticties and quid pro quo transactions to the exclusion of looking at the dynamicsof ‘grand’ corruption, its systematic qualities, or the central role played by thestate.”
A Critical Ethnography of the State
is study takes a critical ethnography of the state perspective, which focuses onhow the postcolonial state is constructed from below through the practice of ev-eryday corruption and discursive productions. e state becomes an agent thatsimultaneously exists in and is continuously created by society. As Ruud (2000:282) argues, “the state as it appears locally in the eyes of its citizens is colored by thecircumstanceofcorruptionasoneofthemeansofmediationbetweenthestateand individuals.”is study is positioned within an emergent corpus of works that have articu-lated the theorized shi from government to
governance
in the developing world,whereby the state is increasingly hollowed out as functions are dispersed to supra-national entities and nonstate actors (Ferguson 2006; Bagayoko et al. 2016). By governance, I mean the hybrid arena in which formal and informal, and stateand nonstate, actors interact to make decisions and regulate the public realm. Inthis light, bifurcated notions of the state as either strong or weak pale into in-signicance when compared with a hybrid form of governance, and “language of stateness,”⁶ that is neither hegemonic nor subaltern (Hansen & Stepputat 2001;Jae2013:736).ishybridsystemis,perhaps,mostdiscernableinthedecenterednotion of power that underpins state-society dialectics.Rejecting Nietzsche’s notion of power as relations of domination, that is, thatpower descends in a linear direction from those who have it to those subjected toit (Sluga 2005: 232), this book operates from the Foucauldian mobile understand-ingofpowerasprofoundlyrelational.Powerisaproductofcomplexstrugglesandnegotiations over authority, status, reputation, and resources, which requires theparticipation of networks of actors and constituencies (Long 1999: 3). Far from
⁵ A notable exception is Claudio Lomnitz’s brilliant article on “Ritual, Rumor and Corruption intheConstitutionofPolityinModernMexico,”whicharguesthatthereisageneralrelationshipbetween“political ritual” and localized appropriations of state institutions (corruption) (1995: 20–21).⁶ Hansen and Stepputat (2001) distinguishes practical languages of governance (such as themonopoly over violence) from the symbolic languages of authority (such as the institutionalizationof the law).
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   
being a universal or autonomous source of power, the state is nothing else but “amultiple and mobile eld of force relations” (Foucault 1978: 102). Until recently,studies of corruption pivoted on how the state “sees” citizens (Scott 1998), how “stateness” is performed (Hansen & Stepputat 2001), how power is “sustained andarticulated” (Rademacher 2008: 106), and how the aura of sovereign ultimacy is“internalized” (Chaln 2008: 250). Less well known is how socio-economic prac-tices at the margins shape the state itself (Das & Poole 2004) and, related to this,howthestateislocalizedormadevisibleindiscursivepractices(Gupta1995).isbook contributes to bridging this lacuna in the existent literature.
Toward the Corruption Complex
Corruption is behavior which deviates from the formal duties of a public rolebecause of private-regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or state gains; or violate rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding inuence. is includes such behavior as bribery (use of a reward topervert the judgement of a person in a position of trust); nepotism (bestowalof patronage by reason of ascriptive relationship rather than merit); and misap-propriation (illegal appropriation of public resources for private-regarding uses).(Nye 1967: 419)Corruption is a kind of behavior that deviates from the norm actually prevalentor believed to prevail in a given context, such as the political. It is deviant behav-ior associated with a particular motivation, namely that of private gain at publicexpense.Butwhetherthiswasthemotivationornot,itisthefactthatprivategainwas secured at public expense that matters. Such private gain may be a monetary one, and in the minds of the general public it usually is, but it may take otherforms. (Friedrich 1989: 5)
Contained in theaboveconventionaldenitionsofcorruption aretwofundamen-talassumptions:rst,thatmutuallyexclusivepublicandprivateinterestsexistand,second, that public servants must necessarily abstract themselves from the privaterealm if they are to properly function (Bratsis 2003: 11). ese assumptions restsimply on a Weberian-style modern bureaucratic state which assumes—in con-trast to the patrimonial state—the existence of a public oce that is distinct fromthe private domain. As Weber notes, “e patrimonial oce lacks above all thebureaucratic separation of the private and the ocial sphere. For the political ad-ministration, too, is treated as purely personal aair of the ruler, and politicalpowerisconsideredpartofhispersonalproperty,whichcanbeexploitedbymeansof contributions and fees” (cited in Hyden 2006: 95). e Weberian rational legal
or

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25state reies corruption and overlooks its situation in overlapping publics and theirdistinct but interdependent logics.Ethnographic studies of corruption have presented bottom-up evidence toshow that the public/private bifurcation is oen context-dependent (Gupta 1995;Muir & Gupta 2018; Bocarejo 2018). Evidence from my own eldwork in Lagossuggests that the public/private dichotomy represents a normative demand ratherthan an empirical reality. “Corruption entails of very many things we don’t be-lieve to be corruption. If you inuence a pastor of your church it is corrupt. Youwant him to do a special prayer for you, so you buy tubers of yam or bags of rice and take it to him. Some think it is a gi, but I call it corruption.” at washowaminibus-taxi(
danfo
)driverinLagosexplainedcorruptiontome.Hiswordsstrike at the profoundly ambiguous concept of corruption (Haller & Shore 2005).e anthropology of corruption has shown that the concept of corruption cov-ers a confusingly wide spectrum of practices (Gupta 1995; Bocarejo 2018; Sneath2006; Smith 2007), including criminality and fraud. In this light, then, Olivierde Sardan’s inuential concept of the “corruption complex” (1999: 26) remains,perhaps, the most nuanced and productive theoretical lens for interpreting cor-ruption in Africa. By denition, the corruption complex designates a number of illicit practices (such as nepotism, abuse of power, gra, and various forms of mis-appropriation), all of which are technically distinct from corruption but yet havein common with corruption their link to the state. us, the corruption complexdescribes practices that are deemed corrupt but may or may not be illegal as such(Routley 2016: 119; Pierce 2016: 8, 22).One of the earliest observations of the corruption complex in Nigeria wasamong the Hausa-speaking people of northern Nigeria. Anthropologist M.G.Smith (1964: 164) argues that Hausa people lack a term for political corruption
sensu stricto
, which makes it dicult to isolate corruption from other conditionsof its context for formal analyses. e Hausa people do, however, have severalterms denoting a range of political conditions and practices related to corruption:“
Zalunchi
which refers to oppression,
tilas
to compulsion,
zamba
to oppressionand swindling,
rikice
to fraud and confusion alike,
ha’inci
to bribery,
cin hanci
to taking bribes,
yi gaisuwa
to making greetings or gis,
tara
to nes,
cin tara
totaking (keeping?) nes,
wasau
to forcible conscation of property,
manafunci
totreachery and breaking of political agreements,
hamiya
to political rivalry,
kun- jiya
to a faction or group of supporters,
baranktaka
to political agency,
kinjibbi
and
kutukutu
to diering types of intrigue, character assassination, and so on”(Smith 1964: 164). is semantic variability of corruption adds weight to StevenPierce’s diagnosis of corruption as “epistemologically shiy,” as it refers to variousmeanings and phenomena (Pierce 2016: 5, 20).Four decades aer M.G. Smith’s work, D.J. Smith corroborated the corruptioncomplex among the Igbo people of southeast Nigeria. He observes that the talk of corruption in Nigeria extends beyond the abuse of public oce for private gain to
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26
   
include“awholerangeofsocialbehaviorsinwhichvariousformsofmorallyques-tionable deception enable the achievement of wealth, power, or prestige as well asmuch more mundane ambitions. Nigerian conception of corruption encompasseseverything from government bribery and gra, rigged elections, and fraudulentbusiness deals, to the diabolical abuse of occult powers, medical quackery, cheat-ing in school, and even deceiving a lover” (2007: 55). In urban Nigeria, it is quitecommon to hear the word “corrupt” being used to describe a man that “carrieswoman”—a womanizer. is polyvalence of corruption
talk
is hardly specic toNigeria. InLubumbashiinDRCongo,corruptionisso rifethatpeoplehavedevel-oped an elaborate terminology for it: “Beans for the children, a little something,an encouragement, an envelope, something to tie the two ends with, to deal, tocome to an understanding, to take care of me, to pay the beer, to short-circuit, tosee clearly, to be lenient or comprehensive, to put things in place, to nd a Zairiansolution” (Riley 1999: 190).ere is no one-size-ts-all interpretation of corruption, so to ask what
exactly
is the meaning of corruption amounts to an exercise in futility. e real bound-ary between what is corruption and what is not is uid and context-dependent(Olivier de Sardan 1999: 34). us, Torsello (2016: 15) is well within his rightsto ask: “[W]hy stick to a single denition [of corruption] if the phenomenon isin constant mutation?” My ethnographic tendency is not to impose a universalmeaning of corruption on the local context and then arrange my data accordingly (
etic
approach). Instead, my objective is to explore the range of behaviors that lo-cals deem corrupt and to weave a grounded analysis based on what they do or say (
emic
approach). is approach is consistent with Mushtaq Khan’s unansweredcall for an analytical frame, which allows corruption to have dierent meaningsand eects in dierent countries.⁷ If, indeed, corruption has a uniform meaningand eect everywhere, argues Khan (1998), then we should reach this conclusionat the end of an evaluative process rather than make a presumption
ab initio
. e
emic
inclination of this study addresses the argument that corruption can only be fully grasped when it is situated within the setting where it appears and withwhich it continually interacts. is nuanced contextualization of corruption isfundamental, since more oen than not, what strikes us as a clear case of uneth-ical corrupt exchange turns out to be morally acceptable and socially legitimatewhen seen from the vantge point of local culture and the everyday lives of ordi-nary people. is reality, says Manuel Velasquez, calls for “greater caution whenwe are tempted to issue universal and absolute moral condemnation of corrup-tion” (Velasquez 2004: 148). e title of Velasquez’s essay is particularly telling: “IsCorruption Always Corrupt?”
⁷ isapproachisparticularlyaptinEastandSoutheastAsiancountries,whichcombinehighlevelsof corruption with good economic performance, challenging the popular assumption that corruptionis associated with poor performance (Khan 1998).
or

:  
27
Corruption, Language, and Social Action: Towarda Dialogical Approach
Inspired by calls to localize corruption in everyday discourse and practices, thisbook sees corruption as a social malpractice whose meaning is co-constructed by social actors and which emerges from specic social interactions. Corruption isintertwined with the evolving process of negotiation between citizens, public of-cials, and semi-private actors in particular settings and sectors. In other words,corruption generally unfolds in the “wider matrix of power relations in society”(Nuijten & Anders 2007: 2) and positions itself in the liminal space of interactionbetween the public and private realms. Given its embeddedness in everyday lifeandnetworksofsocioculturalrelationsandlogics,corruptionisdeeplyinterwovenwith language and idiom.Language emerges as “a powerful vehicle of thought and a crucial instrumentfor accomplishing social interaction, as an indispensable means of knowing theworld and of performing deeds within it” (Basso 1992: xii). From the perspectiveof linguistic anthropology, language, culture, and society are mutually consti-tuted; language shapes and is shaped by sociocultural factors and power dynamics(Ahearn 2001: 110–111). If the questions that social scientists seek to answer—forexample, issues of bribery and corruption—are invariably posed rst in ordinary language, it follows that “stipulating or legislating the meaning of a social scienceconcept without rst explicating the range of its ordinary language meanings is adangerous practice” (Fearon and Laitin 2000: 5). Similar to speech and language,the discourse of corruption does not merely reect an already existing social real-ity; it also helps to create that reality (Ahearn 2001: 111; Gupta 1995). Speech andidioms have the capacity to grasp corruption in its complexity because they tooare embedded within the larger socio-economic fabric of society.Understanding corruption as a complex, both practically and discursively,constitutes a radical break with normative analytical models based on compara-tive macro-level econometric-based data (Bardhan 2015; Mauro 1995). is study challenges the continued reliance on perception-based data and the conation of data aggregation from various surveys into one gure used in international cor-ruption barometers such as Transparency International’s Corruption PerceptionIndex (CPI). Instead, this study responds to recent calls to “rene and gathermore experience-based measures of corruption” (Triesman 2007: 213; UNODC2017: 11–12). Rising to the occasion, critical ethnographies of the state have es-tablished a symbiotic relationship between everyday corruption and the state’sgeneralizedinformalfunctioning(Blundo&OlivierdeSardan2006).Forexample,in his study of corruption in contemporary India, Gupta nds that the pub-lic/private spatial separation is weak to non-existent among public ocials: “Onehas a better chance of nding them [the ocials] at the roadside tea stalls andin their homes than in their oces” (1995: 384). It is against this backdrop that
or

28
   
corruption is best situated within the wider pattern of interaction between centersand margins.
Beyond the Corruption Perception Index (CPI)
e CPI measures the perceptions of businesspeople and country experts regard-ing the degree of corruption among public ocials and local politicians. A highscore indicates greater levels of corruption. Self-styled the “survey of surveys,” theCPIwasoriginallycompiledonthebasisofsixteendierentpollsandsurveysfromeight independent institutions comprising businesspeople, country analysts, andthe public (Lambsdor 1999). e CPI has undoubtedly contributed to a world-wide movement and widespread consensus against corruption, tapping a decisivenail or two into the con of self-styled revisionists who, during the 1960s and1970s, advocated the functionality of corruption for newly independent states inAfrica and Asia (Le 1964; Huntington 1968).⁸ e CPI brought corruption intogreater international prominence. As Fredrik Galtung writes:
e CPI was a formidable instrument in raising awareness about the interna-tional scope and shared burden of corruption and driving corruption onto thefront pages of newspapers throughout the developing world. e CPI levelledthe playing eld by comparing, for the rst time, disparate and distinct coun-tries on the same scale. e international shaming that ensued encouraged a raceto the top, that is, to lower levels of corruption… and for some selected coun-tries at the bottom of the league table (e.g., Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Paraguay) ithas spurred a determination to shed the label of being “one of the world’s mostcorrupt countries.” (2006: 106)
Quoting his taxi driver in a piece on corruption in Pakistan, one journalist sharedthis joke:
“You know,” asked Ahmad, “swerving around a crater that could have swallowedhis little taxi, “how Pakistan was No. 2 in the world in corruption?” I said thatI’d heard something about it. Pakistan had been ranked second only to Nigeria ina 1996 “global corruption index” by an outt called Transparency International.“Actually,” Ahmad went on, “we were No. 1. But we bribed the Nigerians to takerst place.” (Stein 1997: 15)
⁸ Revisionistsarguedthatitis“naturalbutwrongtoassumethattheresultsofcorruptionarealwaysbothbadandimportant…Wherebureaucracyisbothelaborateandinecient,theprovisionofstrongpersonal incentives to bureaucrats to cut red tape may be the only way of speeding the establishmentof a new rm” (Leys 1965: 222). Today, however, there is no denying the “self-defeating” nature of corruption in the long run (Caiden 1988: 21, Agbiboa 2012).
or

:  
29DespitetheCPI’simpactoncorruption,concernsaboundaboutwhetherapolyva-lent and hidden phenomenon such as corruption can be measured at all, let alonereduced to a single number (Haller & Shore 2005; Nuijten & Anders 2007). eproblemwithanevaluationsuchastheCPIisthatcorruptionvariessomuchfromcountry to country, no single number can accurately compare the wide range of forms that corruption takes from one country to the next (Johnston 2001: 63).A proper understanding of corruption must rst locate it within the local con-texts out of which it emerges and with which it routinely interacts. e focus of this study is not so much grand corruption as petty corruption, which is easierto observe but harder to quantify because it varies enormously and is embeddedin complex social networks, which are in turn embedded in the state. In this light,then,thereisnosubstituteforacriticalethnographicapproachwhichinterrogatesnot only “the social mechanisms through which corruption takes place” but also“the wider interactions of dierent spheres (economic, political, legal, social andcultural) and the symbolic reconstruction of this interaction” (Torsello 2016: 16).e very nature of ethnography develops through interactions with local popula-tions,whichevolveintothebuildingofmutualtrustandunderstandingwiththem(Torsello & Venard 2015).
Research Setting and Methodology
Roads connect food, goods, markets, people, families, communities, and lives.ey connect politicians, civil servants, the police and the military, the judiciary,and governments. But roads can lead from heaven to hell, as the ugly heads of greed and envy oen seize the material opportunities for gra and corruption inthe development, maintenance, and operations of roads. (Paterson & Chaudhuri2007: 159)
is study grounds corruption in the “politics of transporting” (Peace 1988), thatis, the micropolitics of relationships between drivers, passengers, unionists, law enforcement agents, and local politicians. e study is guided by the overrid-ing premise that transportation has been as much about dening state-society relations as it has been about controlling people. In this perspective, mobility embodies the melding of the “high politics of the state” with the “deep poli-tics of society (that is, the relations between rich and poor, powerful and weak)”(Lonsdale 1986: 130). If mobility makes states (Vigneswaran & Quirk 2015: 7),then the state itself is nothing but “a mobile entity capable of mirroring the mobil-ity of subjects in the regulation of them” (Gill, Caletrio, & Mason 2014: 6). Moreand more, especially in conditions ofendemic crisis, being on themove is the very condition of your survival and continuing relevance. If you are not on the move,the chances of survival are diminished (Mbembe 2018). is echoes the idea that
or

30
   
bottlenecks—or
embouteillages
—can be seen as a literal and metaphorical entry point into how young taxi men in Dakar, Senegal, increasingly congured mobil-ity as “a social value and a resource in itself: it was
through mobility
that one wasable to stake claim to urban permanence and social presence” (Melly 2017: 5).In Lagos, the law-abiding driver who refuses to pay cash bribes at checkpointsor roadblocks will nd himself stuck, both physically and existentially. All driversmust stop at checkpoints for inspection. But what is being inspected is neithertheir vehicle contents (
wetin you carry?
) nor their compliance with the rules andprotocols (
wetin you do?
), but rather their readiness to break them. Experienceddrivers know how to deploy strategies—such as humor, strategic ingratiation, sit-uational friendship, and appeal to ethnicity— to negotiate checkpoints. In otherwords, they know that “the rst law of survival in Nigeria is understanding thata police ocer at a checkpoint is, quite literally, above the law” (Obadare 2021:184). Drivers that dare to resist this “rst law” and challenge the shakedowns thatthey endure at endless checkpoints are labeled “enemies of the state” and arrestedon the move or subjected to violence, which is oen lethal. At the checkpoint, thedriver is both a victim and a participant in a state-society “dance.” e fact thatmany drivers across Nigerian cities have been shot dead for resisting police de-mand for bribes reinforces people’s collective fears of state caprice and coercion,even blackmail. It is in this context that Mbembe and Roitman have argued:
ose who follow the rules scrupulously sometimes nd themselves in a snarl,facingguresoftherealthathavelittlecorrespondencetowhatispubliclyallegedor prescribed… Every step or eort to follow the written rule is susceptible tolead not to the targeted goal, but to a situation of apparent contradiction andclosure from which it is dicult to exit either by invoking the very same rulesand authorities responsible for applying them, or by reclaiming theoretical rightssupposed to protect those who respect ocial law. (1995: 342)
is study is set in the megacity of Lagos in southwest Nigeria (Figure 1). Lagosis home to an estimated 18 million people, projected to rise to 25 million by 2025(World Bank 2011). is would place the city as the third largest agglomeration intheworld,behindonlyTokyoandMumbai.Overtheyears,Lagoshasevolvedintoa“culturalamalgaminwhichdierentethnicgroupsandclasses,andtypesofper-sons attempt to make their own lives, ‘nd their own ways,’ express themselves asthey can and experience the many-sided realities that are both theirs and others”(Aina 2003: 176). e megacity displays the grit, determination, and inventive re-sponsesthatiscriticaltourbansurvivalintheglobalSouth.InthewordsofRobertCampbell, “ere is certainly no more industrious people any where, and I chal-lenge all the world besides to produce a people more so, or capable of as muchendurance” (1860: 16). Following Nigeria’s transition to civil rule in 1999, Lagosexperienced a major urban reform that sought to order its chaos by upgrading
or

:  
31masstransportation(amongotherthings),mainstreamingrevenuereform,andre-newingthesocialcontractbetweenthestateandthepeople.Inshort,thepost-1999urban renewal plan in Lagos aimed to “convince the majority of… people that thegovernment exists to serve rather than to prey upon them” (Maier 2000: xxviii).However,thisapproachtoneoliberalurbanismneitherhadaplaceforthepoornorrecognized informality as, above all, a way of life and an organizing logic (Roy & AlSayyad 2004).Lagos relies heavily on road transportation, precisely because the state iscomposedofacollectionofislandsseparatedbycreeksandtheLagoslagoon,withbridges connecting the islands to the mainland. Historically, Lagos has enduredthe yoke of a poorly coordinated public transportation network and, until 2008,was the largest city in the world without any form of government-organized masstransit (Cheeseman & de Gramont 2017). Instead, millions of urbanites seekingto traverse the megacity each day are served by privately run and alternatively regulated paratransit vehicles, including
danfos
, motorbike-taxis (
okadas
), andtricycle-taxis (keke NAPEPs, which derives from the National Poverty Eradica-tion Program). ese informal modes of transport are vital to everyday survivaland sociability. In Nigeria, public transportation is mainly a road-based aair,accountingforthree-fourthsofmobilityneeds.InLagosalone,nolessthan16mil-lionpassengertripsaremadeeachday(NigeriaTransportPolicy2010).Paratransit vehicles aord vibrant spaces of exchange, interaction, production, and predation,entangling the life of the road with the life of the people. Just like the vehicles thatplythemdaily,roadsarespacesofmobilityandstuckedness,ofsurvivalanddeath.Lagos is home to a variety of violent extortionists, from NURTW tax collectors(motor park touts, or
agberos
) to mobile policemen (also known as “Kill and Go”),who “eat the sweat” (i.e. hard work) of informal transport workers on a regularbasis. Corruption and coercion are most rampant at motor parks (bus stations),busterminals,junctions,andcheckpoints,wheretoutsandlawenforcementagentsexercise biopower—the ability “to make live and to let die” (Foucault 1976: 241).Despite a hard day’s work averaging up to twenty hours per day (“24 Hours on theRoad,” as one
danfo
slogan puts it), many transit workers make meagre returns,due to a mixture of bribe-eating and trigger-happy police ocers; daily paymentsmade to vehicle owners based on a hire-purchase contract; and the extortionatepowers of politicized and violent transport unions. Not surprisingly, most driversin Lagos view their work as just daily income. As one driver puts it: “What you gettoday you use today, and tomorrow you start again from scratch.”
Fieldwork Approach: Mobile Ethnography
e eldwork for this book was conducted over a twelve-month period in Lagos.Two local government areas (LGAs) were selected, based on their centrality to ur-banowsandxities(Figure4).OneofthemwasOshodi,thecentralterminusfor
or

32
   
intra-city and inter-city circulation in Lagos. Prior to its radical transformationin 2007, under the post-1999 Lagos state urban renewal campaign, Oshodi waswidelyseenas“themostradicalurbanconditionontheplanet”(Probst2012:138),a space that functions without a script (Aradeon 1997: 51). e other eld site wasAlimosho, the largest LGA in Lagos, with more than two million people. e areais predominantly inhabited by the
Egbados
(
yewa
), a subset of the larger Yorùbaéthnic group. Both Oshodi and Alimosho LGAs are known for their massive
go-slows
, complicated by an interminable tug of war involving drivers, conductors,commuters, touts, street vendors, and police. e overlapping circuitries of move-ment and standstills in Oshodi and Alimosho are central to political-economicand cultural processes in Lagos. Data for this book were collected from the co-ercive and vibrant spaces of bus stations, bus stops, checkpoints, and junctions.ese are not only spaces of opportunities but also of terror. Here, the instrumen-talities of daily survival conform to what Zygmunt Bauman calls the postmodernstrategy for warding o death: “Daily life becomes a perpetual dress rehearsal of death” (1992:186).Daily headlines about incidents at motor parks and bus stops in Lagos, andthe transport union gangs riding roughshod over informal transport operators,are particularly revealing. A quick Google search produces the following results:“At Lagos Bus Stops, It’s Extortion Galore by Police, Agberos,” “Alcohol, Smok-ing Rule Night Life at Motor Parks [in Lagos],” “ree Killed in Lagos BrutalNURTW, Gang Clashes, 75 Arrested,” “9 Dead as NURTW Fractions Clash inLagos;” “NURTW Members Fighting over Commercial [Motor] Park,” and so on.e Yorùba´ people have a popular saying:
omoluabi kan ki hu iwa omo garage
(aperson of good character does not behave like a child of the garage [garage is an-otherwordformotorpark]).isreinforcestheargumentthatparks,markets,androadsides (all of which bleed into each other in Lagos) evokes “danger and plea-sure, segregation and communitas, sincerity and irreverence” (Gandhi & Hoek 2012: 4). It is no coincidence, therefore, that Robert Kaplan’s inuential thoughproblematic essay, “e Coming Anarchy,” was set in West Africa’s bus terminals:
Each time I went to the Abidjan bus terminal, groups of young men with rest-less, scanning eyes surrounded my taxi, putting their hands all over the windows,demanding “tips” for carrying my luggage even though I had only a rucksack. IncitiesinsixWestAfricancountries,Isawsimilaryoungmeneverywhere—hordesofthem.eywerelikeloosemoleculesinaveryunstablesocialuid,auidthatwas clearly on the verge of igniting. (Kaplan 1994)
Africa’s bus stations and terminals are uid spaces where the everyday and thepolitical intertwine in extremely dense ways (Stasik & Cissokho 2018; Quayson2014; Ismail 2009). ey have a dual quality, being simultaneously at the centerand at the margins of the state. During the course of my eldwork, I experienced
or

:  
33
Adeleye
deleye
Mosan
osan
Aklnyele
klnyele
Agun
gun
Fatade
atade
Cardoso
ardoso
Oduwole
duwole
Ishen-Olo󿬁n
shen-Olo n
Idirt
dirt
Mushin
ushin
Arlda
rlda
Kotan
otan
Egbe
gbe
Ejigbo
jigbo
Isolo
solo
Ishaga
shaga
Ewu
wu
Shogunle
hogunle
Murta’a mohammeo Airport
urta’a mohammeo Airport
Allmoso
llmoso
Akowonjo
kowonjo
Alagba
lagba
Magbon
agbon
Agege
gege
Ikeja
keja
Agidingbi
gidingbi
Hausa
ausa
Saglsa
aglsa
Erutan
rutan
Onikosi
nikosi
Ojota
jota
Ogudu
gudu
Maryland
aryland
Oruba Agboyl
ruba Agboyl
Odogun
dogun
Ologode
logode
Ebute-Egga
bute-Egga
Somolu
omolu
Ibeshe
beshe
Owaranshoki
waranshoki
Abule Ijesha
bule Ijesha
Onibri
nibri
Tatala
atala
Onike
nike

Iwaya
waya
Makoko
akoko
Okera
kera
New Lagos
ew Lagos
Alcangba
lcangba
Ibire
bire
Iseri-Osun
seri-Osun
Ikeja
keja
Ijesa-Tedo
jesa-Tedo
Osho
sho
Coker
oker
Aqani
qani
Lawani Oguntayo
awani Oguntayo
Ijora
jora
Aijetoro
ijetoro
Alegunle
legunle
Aliayabiagba
liayabiagba
Apapa
papa
Oluwa
luwa
Igbo Ejo
gbo Ejo
Agala
gala
Oke Ogbe
ke Ogbe
Ogogo
gogo
Inupa
nupa
Apapa Eleko
papa Eleko
Ipewu
pewu
Jinadu
inadu
Okepa
kepa
Bamgboshe
amgboshe
Obalende
balende
Logos
ogos
Oto
to
Ebute-Metta
bute-Metta
Iganmu
ganmu
Abude-Na
bude-Na
Iponn
ponn
Lagos
agos
Maroko
aroko
Bado
ado
Araromi
raromi
Mobba
obba
Ogoyo
goyo
Igboefon
gboefon
Alaguntan
laguntan
Mekunwen
ekunwen
Inogbe
nogbe
Origbolun
rigbolun
Igbologun
gbologun
Darkaka
arkaka
Klrlklrl
lrlklrl
Isunba
sunba
Olute
lute
Agboju
gboju
Amuwo
muwo
Alapako
lapako
Imore
more
Elachl
lachl
Ikuata
kuata
La󿬁a
a a
Sufu-Lene
ufu-Lene
Tinubu
inubu
Idioro
dioro
Mushin Halt
ushin Halt
Shomolu
homolu
Obanikoro
banikoro
Igbobl
gbobl
Isasi Ososun
sasi Ososun
Ilemene
lemene
Ofn
fn
lkorodu
korodu
Oshosun
shosun
Oshod
shod
Orlle Oshodle
rlle Oshodle
Ajegunle
jegunle
Kadara
adara
Okunola
kunola
Apese
pese
AdeleyeMosanAklnyeleAgunFatadeCardosoOduwoleIshen-Olo󿬁nIdirtMushinArldaKotan EgbeEjigboIsoloIshagaEwuShogunleMurta’a mohammeo AirportAllmosoAkowonjoAlagbaMagbonAgegeIkejaAgidingbiHausaSaglsaErutanOnikosiOjotaOguduMarylandOruba AgboylOdogunOlogodeEbute-EggaSomoluIbesheOwaranshokiAbule IjeshaOnibriTatalaOnik

eIwayaMakokoOkeraNew LagosAlcangbaIbireIseri-OsunIkejaIjesa-TedoOshoCokerAqaniLawani OguntayoIjoraAijetoroAlegunleAliayabiagbaApapaOluwaIgbo EjoAgalaOke OgbeOgogoInupaApapa Eleko IpewuJinaduOkepaBamgbosheObalendeLogosOtoEbute-MettaIganmuAbude-NaIponn
Lagos
MarokoBadoAraromi MobbaOgoyo IgboefonAlaguntanMekunwenInogbeOrigbolunIgbologunDarkakaKlrlklrlIsunbaOlute AgbojuAmuwoAlapakoImoreElachl IkuataLa󿬁aSufu-LeneTinubuIdioroMushin HaltShomoluObanikoroIgboblIsasi OsosunIlemeneOfnlkoroduOshosunOshodOrlle OshodleAjegunleKadaraOkunolaApese
Fig. 4.
Map of major roads in Lagos
motor parks, bus terminals, and junctions as vibrant sites of party politics at boththeunionandstatelevel.Here,asinthebazaarsofIndiaandcountlessotherpublicspaces, “‘talking politics’ turns from abstract reection and idle rumor-mongeringintofocuseddiscussionswherepoliticalviewsanddesiresareforgedandoutcomesintermittently secured” (Piliavsky 2013: 109).My eldwork followed a “mobile ethnography” (Novoa 2015) approach, en-compassing walking and traveling with people as a form of sustained engagementwith their worldview and lifeworld. rough such “co-present immersion,” the re-searcher moves with modes of movement and employs a range of observation andrecording techniques. is method of research can also involve “participation-while-interviewing,” in which the ethnographer rst participates in patterns of movement, and then interviews people, individually or in focus groups, to show howtheirdiversemobilitiesconstitutetheirpatterningofdailylife(Urry2007:40).Taking to the road allowed me to experience the world of the road transport

or

34
   
worker as he negotiate “the multiple relations of power that intersect in complexways to position individuals and collectivities in shiing and oen contradictory locations” (Stasiulis 1999: 194). At its core, the road is a contested space where hu-mans and nonhumans, and visible and invisible forces, intermingle and confrontoneanother(Mbembe&Roitman1995:329).IfoundJulienBrachet’s(2012)work very helpful in conceptualizing mobility as a “eld site,” that is, as a privileged mo-mentofobservationanddiscussionofspatialpractices,suchascorruption,thatareotherwiseconnedtothesphereof“theimplicit,theunsaid,andtheinadmissible”(Blundo 2007: 36). Studies have shown that matters concerning corruption are of-ten characterized by secrecy: “Real conversations take place elsewhere: o display,behind closed doors” (Piliavsky 2013: 105). By participating in a moving eld-site,thatis,followingminibus-andmotorbike-taxidriversbackandforth,askingques-tions on the way, and taking notes of mobile exchanges with NURTW ocialsand law enforcement agents, I gained a deeper understanding of the precariouslives and exploitative nature of informal transport work in Lagos. is “go-along”approach (Kusenbach 2003) allowed me to experience rsthand the violent andshiingmutualitiesbetweenlawenforcementagents,transportunionists,andmo-bile individuals, particularly as it relates to situations and practices of corruptionand coercion, of control and taxation (Brachet 2012: x).
Data Collection
For data collection, I used a combination of participant observation, in-depth in-terviews, critical discourse analysis, court records, archival records, and anecdotalevidence.Participantobservation—orwhatCliordGeertz(1983:127)referstoas“the dialectic of experience and interpretation”—necessitated continuous move-ment between the “inside” and the “outside” of the relationships under study (Baviskar 1995: 8). In turn, this helped not only to situate respondents withincontexts that they are most familiar with, but also to experience their lived real-ities through the partial eyes of the “outsider within.” Unlike Walter Benjamin’s(1985)
aneur
, the detached observer of modern city life, I entered into theworkaday world of informal transport operators by means of what Gerd Spit-tler (2001) calls “thick participation.” To wit: I did a two-months stint as a
danfo
conductor in a busy motor park along Oshodi-Ikotun route (Figure 5). is learn-ing by doing is consistent with the “apprenticeship” approach that emphasizesthe participant dimension of eldwork (Downey, Dalidowicz, & Mason 2015:184), turning researchers into “observing participants” more than “participantobservers” (Woodward 2008). Working and learning by doing exemplies the un-resolved tension in participant observation. e fact that I was a bus conductor
or

:  
35
Fig. 5.
A conductor hangs out of a minibus-taxi (
danfo
) in Lagos.
Photocredit:Author
raised the kind of self-reective questions that Laura Routley (2016) encountered:“Was I an observer or a participant? Was I working with them, or studying them?”My conductor work came through a chance encounter with “TJ” (short forTunji),achildhoodfriendofminewhomIencounteredonthestreetsofAlimosho.TJ had graduated from being a conductor to being the proud owner of two
danfos
.Aer informing him of my research, TJ invited me to work as his bus conductorto experience the business from within. ough the prospect was daunting, Iaccepted his “informal” oer, mindful of the point that by actively participating inthe lived experiences of drivers and conductors, I can come closer to experiencingand understanding their point of view (cf. Hume & Mulcock 2004: xi). By hangingout and hanging about with TJ, weaving in and out of the go-slows and potholedroads of Lagos, I operationalized Kusenbach’s “go-along” method. As a conductor,Idirectlyexperiencedthecoerciveexchangesandunreceiptedfeesthatdrivershadtomakepertriptopoliceocersandtouts(
agberos
)atcheckpointsandbusstops,and the violence administered to those who refused to comply. A common sightat most checkpoints in Lagos is that of a soldier poking the muzzle of his AK-47into a driver’s eyes for refusing to supply the exact cash bribes, or motor park toutsattacking a conductor with a glass bottle for refusing to “settle” his dues. In twomonths, I witnessed rsthand the violent death of four conductors in the hands of
agberos
due to disputes over the illegal
owo load
(“loading fee”). “I just pay themand go on my way,” said a crestfallen TJ. “What else can I do? ey are kings of
or

36
   
our roads.” For many drivers like TJ, mobility is experienced as a contradictory resource, that is, as both a source of agency and a form of constraint. My physicalappearances (black) and gender (male) combined with my uency in Yorùba´ (thelingua franca in southwest Nigeria), English (the ocial language of Nigeria),and Nigerian Pidgin English (a more or less national lingua franca) ensured thatI retained a level of anonymity on Lagos roads, a vital element of “surreptitiousethnography” (Neto 2017). Participant observation is most authentic and reliablewhen the researcher is able to go unobserved (Kusenbach 2003: 461), because itprovides much-needed access to “naturally” unfolding events (Becker 1958).As a
danfo
conductor, I was able not only to witness violent extortion on theroads that my mobile interlocutors regularly traversed, but also to call on some of the “tactics” (in the de Certeauian sense) that they use in the face of agents of cor-ruptionwhoseektoimposefearontransportoperatorsandmakethemlessmobileor free to move. In this sense, movement and the blockades that impede it werecentraltomyeldworkandconstitutedanentrypointtocorruptionandthestrug-gle for survival. As a conductor, my duties involved (un)loading the bus, callingbus stops, negotiating the various fees demanded by battle-ready touts, collectingbus fares, attending NURTW monthly meetings, and the occasional extravagant
faji
or
jaiy’e jaiy’e
(social enjoyments) where people
chop awof
(“eat for free”). Onthe busy Ikotun-Oshodi routes, which I plied daily with TJ, I grappled with thesheer demands on conductors, especially the ability to multitask on the go: hold-ing money, counting change, opening and closing the poorly oiled sliding doors(sometimes the doors would slide o in motion, resulting in a “stop-go” process),attending to passengers, and watching the driver’s blind spot—many
danfos
arewithout functioning gadgets. Amid all of this, I had to be alert to potential passen-gersalongtheroad;todiscernwhentohangfromthedoorandscanforpassengersand when to shut the door and squeeze in to avoid police nes; and the tactic of “no shaking” (courage) in the face of menacing shouts of
owoo da?
(“Where isyour money?”) by the tax-collecting
agberos
. I also developed a “thick skin” in theface of insults from passengers with xed notions of conductors as
con
-ductors. Inshort, throughout my eldwork in Lagos, I was constantly aware of my precariouspositionality as a researcher navigating an unpredictable and risky terrain, as wellas the social stigma attached to driving work.When I was not walking around the motor parks and bus stops, I joinedLagosians by the crowded roadsides, where nearly every inch has been appropri-ated by a vibrant informal market amid a failure of urban planning. As one tracpoliceman complained to me: “In Lagos, people will just see space and occupy it.”According to Filip De Boeck and Marie-Francoise Plissart, “e process of ran-dom occupation of space also reveals the organic approach [of urbanites] to theproduction of the city. Space, in a way, belongs to whomever uses it, despite thehalf-hearted attempts at the city authorities to control the… denser use of thatspace” (De Boeck & Plissart 2004: 230). e boundaries between motor parks and
or

:  
37markets in Lagos are oen so blurred that it is hard to tell where one ends and theother begins. is blurring facilitates corruption by expanding the extortion rack-ets of touts and police, who now tax not just informal transport workers but alsostreet vendors. “eir code is to tax anything taxable,” said a street vendor in Os-hodi.Withoutastart-uploantorentexpensiveretailspaces,streetvendorssuchasthesellersof
paraga
(alocalalcoholbeverage)oensetupcollapsiblekiosksbytheroadside, while itinerant vendors cash in on the Lagos
go-slows
to adroitly weaveinandoutoftractoselltheirgoods.ereisabaingmobilityamidtheendlesstrac jam: drivers pull in their side-view mirrors to squeeze through incredibly tight spaces, and mobile street vendors move between stranded commercial ve-hicles. e
okadas
(motorbike-taxis) weave through the gaps as their passengershangonfordearlife.AllthismakesnavigatingLagosroadsan
art
ofimprovisationand, above all, a relentless practice of “
shinning your eyes well well
” (“Open youreyes,” never drop your guard). Fela sang about the confusion, contradiction, anddanger of navigating Lagos:
Bi mo ba wa moto ni London o, ma tun sese wa ko ti wa n’ile
(Even if I drove in London, I would have to learn driving anew when I return home)
Bi o ba wa moto ni New York o, wat un sese wa ko ti w anile
(Even if you drove in New York, you would have to learn drivinganew on return)
Tori Turn Right l’Eko o, la’ju e, Turn le l’ori o
(Because “Turn Right” in Lagos, open your Eyes, is really “TurnLe”)
Tori Turn Right l’Eko o, ore mi, Turn le lo ri o
Because if you see “Turn Right” in Lagos, my friend, it is really “Turn Le” you see
Tiw a tun yato si tiyin o se e ngbo e o, eko ile
Ours is dierent from yours, you hear, Lagos home.(Olaniyan 2004: 40)
Rhythmanalysis of Lagos
Henri Lefebvre tells us that wherever place, time, and energy interact, rhythm isinvariably present. And every rhythm indicates a “relation of a time to a space,a localized time, or if one prefers, a temporalized space” (2004: 15, 89). istriumvirate of time-space-energy has its ultimate reference point not only inhuman bodies (2004: 67), but also in the non-human vessels that move thosebodies on a daily basis (such as the
danfos
). Drawing on Lefebvre’s concept of “rhythmanalysis”—a method for analyzing the rhythms of urban spaces and the
or

38
   
eects of those rhythms on dwellers in motion—I sought during my eldwork tocapture the manifold, overlapping rhythms that manifest themselves in the sense-world surrounding Lagos, especially what they tell us about this “no man’s land.”Senses of place are intrinsically interwoven with cultures and shared bodies of local knowledge and wisdom, with which places are rendered meaningful and so-cially important by individuals and whole communities (Basso 1996). As such,with my digital camera and sound recorder, I was able to capture the hypervi-suality and soundscape of Lagos life, which result as one moves about (oen ina zig-zag style) within the megacity. ese spatio-auditory sensations includedthe colorful and wry vehicle slogans and mottos, the blaring Fuji music of
danfos
,and loud sirens of police vans, revealing the conuences between music, mobil-ity, and urban spatiality (Chapman 2013). It is a symphony of sound and sight:the syncopated cries of
pya wata pya wata
(“pure water, pure water”) by itiner-ant female vendors, some with small children on their backs, handing small bagsof water through the windows of (im)mobile
danfos
to the keenly outstretchedarms within; the foul-mouthed and irtatious conductors calling out their respec-tive termini, jostling for passengers, and warning passengers to
wole pelu shenji eo
(enter with the exact fare); the rag-tag touts shouting
owoo da?
(where is yourmoney?); the
okada
drivers weaving in and out of fast and slow lanes without re-gard for human life; the impatient bleats of vehicle horns (on the roads of Lagos,thereisacompetitionastowhichvehiclehastheloudesthorn.Here,loudhorninggives you right of way); and the hordes of people dwelling in a kind of
perpetuummobile
.Beyond enabling my stint as a conductor, TJ was also helpful in connectingme to other security personnel and transport operators in his social network—a strategy variously known as “snowball technique,” “referral sampling,” or “chainof recommendations.” Studies of corruption elsewhere demonstrate that “despiteextensive knowledge of corruption, this topic is usually conned to close circlesof acquaintances, friends and relatives” (Sedlenieks 2004: 120). TJ prided himself in his “long legs” (connections), both horizontally and vertically. He belaboredthepointthatLagosoperatesaccordingtoanepistemiclogicof“man-know-man.”“Whenyouruninto
wahala
(trouble),”heinsists,“yourlifecomesdownto‘whom-you-know.”’ In an urban context where everyday life is characterized by a state of emergency (Simone 2004a: 4), “Woe betide the man who knows no one, either di-rectly or indirectly” (Olivier de Sardan 1999: 41). Using the snowball techniquemeant that I was able to draw on TJ’s interpersonal networks to vouch for my own reliability and trustworthiness. is is vital in a Lagos environment whereepistemological uncertainties and widespread anxieties over the authenticity of information and the veracity of claims abounds. is is largely due to the cultureof deception, political chicanery, and advance fee fraud (“419” scams), for whichNigeria is deservedly notorious. Survey evidence shows that four of ve Nigerians(80percent)arenaturallyverycarefulwhendealingwithotherNigeriansandonly
or

:  
39nearlyoneinsevencitizens(15percent)believethatmostNigerianscanbetrusted(CLEEN 2013).I relied on face-to-face, in-depth interviews and informal conversations togarner real evidence on the corrupt and coercive relationships between commer-cial drivers and conductors on the one hand, and transport union tax collectors(
agberos
) and law enforcement agents on the other hand. My main dramatispersonae, commercial drivers and conductors, were interviewed at both xedand moving sites: at motor parks and bus stops, as they waited in line to loadpassengers; on the road, as they wove in and out of trac gridlocks and water-logged potholes. By navigating (bodily and mentally) these ows and xities, Icame to experience how mobile operators in Lagos physically made the place(as actual and imagined) by routinely moving through it (Buescher & Urry 2009; Kusenbach 2003). is mobile ethnography supports the call for eld-work in a deterritorialized world that focuses not so much on bounded eldsas on shiing locations. e invitation here is to see familiar things in unfa-miliar ways and in unlikely places (Gupta & Ferguson 1997: 35–40). As thecharacter Ezeulu, in Chinua Achebe’s
Arrow of God
, quipped: “e world islike a mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place”(1964: 46).Aside from commercial drivers and conductors, a broad range of social ac-tors within Lagos’s transport sector were interviewed, including passengers, touts(
agberos
), street vendors, mobile police and trac inspectors, Vehicle Inspec-tion Ocers, and ocials of the National Union of Road Transport Workers(NURTW), theRoad Transport EmployersAssociationofNigeria (RTEAN),Kick Against Indiscipline (KAI), and the Lagos State Trac Management Authority (LASTMA). All interviews were conducted in English, Yorùba´, and Pidgin (or acombination of all three), depending on the preferences of my informants. eservices of a eld translator were not required, as I am conversationally uent inall three languages. Beyond its capacity to reect urban social realities, there is aperformative side to language that gives it an active function in social interactions(Petit 2005: 473; Quayson 2014: 20).Withtheconsentofmyinformants,Iinitiallyrecordedinterviewsessionsinor-dertoassistthenaturallimitationsofmyownmemory andnote-taking. However,most informal transport operators felt uneasy about being voice-recorded. eiranxieties are understandable, considering that many commercial drivers in Lagosoperate without licenses. Any time I brought out my digital voice recorder, I couldsense their discomfort. As a consequence, I adjusted my approach and started totake extremely detailed hand-written notes aer all interviews. is proved eas-ier and less obtrusive, as many of my interlocutors were more forthcoming in anunrecorded interview setting. Hence, for the rest of my eldwork, I used meth-ods similar to those described in Robert Desjarlais’ award-winning
Shelter Blues:Sanity and Selood Among the Homeless
:
or

40
   
I spent much of my time hanging about, listening to conversations, and thennding a place to write down the gist of these exchanges… My notes on theseconversations, which typically contained quasi-verbatim accounts, lacked theprecision that tape or audio recordings could have provided. However, as many anthropologists have found, especially those who have worked among homelesspopulations, the advantages of unassuming participation in daily activities, dur-ing which one can develop lasting, informal ties with people, oen outweigh thebenets of information obtained through surveys and more intrusive methods.(1997: 41)
I found interviews inherently exible, allowing me to use probes to solicit depthand to foster relationships of trust. Interviewing allowed for exible responses,where my interlocutors could guide the interview toward the topics they consid-ered relevant. Given the sensitive, almost taboo, nature of corruption talk (Myrdal1968: 938–39), I soon adjusted my interview strategy to what I call an “alien-ation eect,” that is, requesting the reactions of operators to a practice observedon the road. With this approach, respondents were more relaxed about talkingabout their mobile encounters, relieved that they were not being directly accusedof corruption. Other ethnographers of corruption have shared a similar experi-ence. In India, Veena Das found that while her interlocutors spoke easily of elitecorruption and massive gra, it was much more dicult to speak freely about ev-eryday or immediate forms of corruption (2015: 340). In his study of corruptionin contemporary Bolivia, SianLazarfoundthat,“Corruption isalwayssomewhereelse, perpetrated by someone else” (2005: 212). Despite the serious dilemmas pre-sented by corruption, Jennifer Hasty observed that people in Accra, Ghana, oenburst into laughter when instances of corruption are discussed in public: “ere’ssomething humanly embarrassing, self-ironizing, and mutually implicating in theanxious bathos of corruption” (2005b: 359). Other times, my alienation eect wassimplytoaskmyinterlocutorstotellmeabouttheirday-to-daychallengesandhow they navigated around them to make the most of their time. More oen than not,corruption emerged organically, overshadowing every other articulated concern.I also sourced data using an interpretative analysis of vehicle slogans, combinedwith content analysis of court records involving the Lagos State Government ver-sus
okada
unions.Pressmaterialswerekeytounderstandinglocalattitudestowardcorruption,sincetheydenotedadiscursiveandchangingeldthatenablescorruptpractices to be labeled, discussed, decried, justied, and denounced. Data assem-bled from these newspapers informed my interviews and helped to triangulatemy data to derive a nuanced perspective. Social scientists should not only striveto collect many instances of an identied phenomenon but also seek to gather“many kinds of evidence” to enhance the validity of a specic conclusion (Becker1958: 657). I approached my data analysis using an iterative strategy, that is, asystematic, repetitive, and recursive process in qualitative data analysis (Mills,
or

:  
41Durepos, & Wiebe 2010). In practice, this meant that I transcribed and analyzedmy data as I collected them, using this analysis to inform further research. isiterative process helped me to spot and address gaps in my interviews while I wasstillintheeldandwhilethediscussionswerestillfreshinmymind.Assuggestedabove, corruption is a sensitive topic, more so in a sector such as public transport,where marginal men with a criminalized identity are stigmatized as “dirty work-ers” (Hughes 1958). As such, I have used pseudonyms and altered the context of specic interviews to protect my interviewees.
Subjugated Knowledges
is book reclaims the power of “subjugated knowledges”⁹ (for example: stories,rumor, and gossip) for uncovering inaudible and unspeakable truths about cor-ruption. Writing about the Mende in Sierra Leone, Mariane Ferme calls this “theunderneath of things.” Interestingly, the Mende word for meaning,
yembu
(thatwhich lies underneath), emphasizes the vital role of the concealed, the subjugated,in making sense of the visible (Ferme 2001: 4). Far from being mere deceptions of reality (Taussig 1980: 229), subjugated knowledges are a powerful means throughwhich average citizens in many African countries encounter the state, a statewhich, like the Mawri stories of man-eaters, “illicitly appropriate the vitality of those subordinated to them” (Masquelier 2000: 89). Subjugated knowledges aremost visible in postcolonial contexts where the state lacks popular legitimacy and,thus, relies on (the threat of) violence to compel compliance and induce loyalty.Here,citizensprefertosourceinformationfromunocial(e.g.rumor)ratherthanocial channels since the latter lacks any credibility (Lomnitz 1995: 36).rough subjugated knowledges, ordinary people not only make explicit theirfears, aspirations, and anxieties about politics, which is widely seen as corrupt-ing those involved, but also partake in moral evaluations of their political leaders(Turner 2007: 93). Corruption involves a kind of “public secrets” (Taussig 1999), apublic knowledge that cannot be articulated: “everyone knows that this cannot beknown” (Newell 2012: 100). Secrecy is a politicized domain; “In a context wherespeakingtruthtopowercanleadtoarbitrarydangeranddeath,secretdomainsarealsowherepopularculturalcreativityproducesalternativediscoursesthatlimittheexercise of political power, through the systematic intrusion of unpredictability”(Ferme 2001:6).
⁹ Michel Foucault coined the term “subjugated knowledges” to describe insucient or disqualiedset of knowledges; in other words, “naïve knowledges, located down on the hierarchy, beneath therequired level of cognition or scienticity.” He believes that “it is through the re-emergence of theselow-ranking knowledges, these unqualied, even directly disqualied knowledges… that criticismsperform its work” (1980: 81–82).
or

42
   
A long standing criticism levelled against the anthropology of corruption isthat “observer eects” can bias research ndings (LeCompte & Goetz 1982; Rose-Ackerman2010).us,criticsclaimthatthe“thick”presenceofaresearchercouldinuence the behavior of those being studied, making it dicult for ethnogra-phers to document social phenomena in any accurate, let alone objective, way (Wilson 1977). Yet, such critics too oen miss the fact that, however staged foror inuenced by the observer, informants’ performances reveal profound truthsaboutsocioculturalphenomenasuchasbriberyandcorruption.Inanalyzingtheseperformances, we gain a better understanding not only of how local people per-ceive themselves but also of how they would like to be perceived by others. Asan
omo eko
(“child of Lagos”), I tapped into my own longstanding embodied ex-periences of the quotidian rhythms of Lagos life to enrich my data analysis. Tobridge other knowledge gaps, I regularly performed pragmatic validity checks by comparing corruption discourse to daily practice and triangulating articulationsfrom multiple informants, looking for any (in)consistency. In so doing, I was ableto “forge links between dierent knowledges that are possible from dierent loca-tions and trace lines of possible alliances and common purposes between them”(Gupta & Ferguson 1997: 39).
Limitations of Study
My eldwork in Lagos spanned an extremely dicult four-month period (July toOctober 2014), when the sprawling metropolis suered the outbreak of the deadly EbolaVirusDisease(EVD).eresultantfearofcontagionineverydaylifeforbadeintimacies and the usual gathering of Lagosians, from public spaces (e.g. motorparks) to sacred grounds(churchesand mosques). etentativemood duringthisperiod was palpable in the unwillingness of many Lagosians to be interviewed by a random stranger. I was a
danfo
conductor in Oshodi during these dicult Ebolamonths and recall many occasions when a poor passenger would pay for two ex-tra seats—one to his le, the other to his right—so as to reduce the chances of bodily contact with fellow passengers. In an eort to prevent EVD in the motorparks of Lagos, the NURTW called on all operators to practice social distancingby stopping the overloading of passengers, a practice that increases the chances of contagion. e call was surprisingly heeded, calling into question the hopelessly lawless picture that is oen painted of informal workers.
Ta lo fe ku?
(Who wantsto die?), one driver in Oshodi said. In sum, the Ebola months in Lagos aectedthe quality of social interactions. As one journalist neatly sums it up: “Once ratedin a United Nations survey as the ‘happiest people’ in the world, Nigerians seemto have lost their natural good humor and increasingly more people are scared of shaking hands with or hugging other people, especially strangers, for fear of get-ting infected with the virus” (Punch 2014b). At that time, of course, few people
or

:  
43could have foreseen that another viral disease, COVID-19, would tear across theentireworld,threateningallthatisnormalanddisruptingdailyroutinesandsocialpractices in every corner of the globe.e politicized and violent nature of the NURTW presented its own challengesas I navigated crowded bus stations and junctions—spaces where collective fearhas become a way of life for many. In Lagos, as in much of Africa, bus stationsare commonly seen as spaces of danger and intimidation and bastions of crim-inals, drug dealers, prostitutes, and withcra (Stasik & Cissokho 2018: xiii–xiv;Ademowo 2010). Yet, at their core, motor parks, and the markets that surroundthem, are microcosms of social life, which facilitate the unceasing ow of goodsand passengers (Beck 2013: 426). Conversations with some union touts werefrankly quite intimidating, and some rival union gangs did not particularly ap-preciate my constant presence in the motor parks and terminals of Lagos. iscreated considerable fear and anxiety within me, as I was uncertain about whosetoes I was stepping on at any point in time. As my eldwork unfolded, it be-came increasingly clear that I was becoming too familiar with a maa-like worldwhere people could suddenly disappear without trace, and that keeping me outenabled those implicated, the NURTW and law enforcement agents, to maintain“a unied front that hid theinternal politics that areinevitably part of mutualities”(Ba¨hre 2014: 578) in Lagos’s transport sector. As the old adage goes, “knowledge ispower,” and the NURTW maintains control of transit spaces, in part, through itsopacity. is explains why, despite its enormous political clout, the NURTW hasmanaged to escape scholarly gaze. But does one abandon urgent research simply because a predatory trade union and a complicit state government do not wanttheir extortion racket to be documented and exposed?
e Road Ahead
e rest of this book is organized in six chapters. Chapter 1,
Corruption and theCrisis of Values
, has two parts. In the rst, corruption wide, I examine the de-nitional challenge of corruption, with particular attention to confusion over whatis private and what is public, what is legal and what is illegal. e chapter ndsits purchase in the critical examination of “culturalist” research and approachesto corruption and the state in Africa, particularly the common but problematicamalgamation of Africa’s political failings or decits under the concept of neopat-rimonialism (e.g. patronage, rent-seeking, and clientelism). In the second part,corruption close, I explore the political economy of oil, elite corruption, and theeconomic crisis in Nigeria since independence in October 1960, especially thesystematic plundering of state wealth and the resulting crisis of values in every-day life, typied by the magical scramble for money among included politiciansand excluded Nigerian youth eager to make money by any means (e.g. “419ners”
or

44
   
and “Yahoo” boys). e analysis in this chapter extends to the checkered story of post-1999 institutionalist eorts under civilian rule to ght corruption and repairNigeria’s tarnished international image. is chapter shows how economic crisisandmaterialacquisitivenesshavecoalescedtoentrenchthe“survivalofthefattest”in the Nigerian psyche.at corruption is, rst and foremost, a “language” that is inscribed in daily liferemainsanobviousbutoenoverlookedfactinthecorruptionliterature.Drawingupon critical discourse analysis, Chapter 2,
e Language of Corruption
, analyzesthepopularsemiologyofcorruptioninAfrica.Itexamineshowcorruptioniscom-monly scripted in corporeal metaphors of eating and bodily uids (literally andmetaphorically), conrming the generality, banality, and commensality of cor-ruption on the continent. By paying attention to the local language and idiomsused to imagine and articulate acts of bribery and corruption, we gain a moregrounded and sophisticated understanding of the corruption complex and, cru-cially, popular reactions to it. Foregrounding corruption as “food for thought,”this chapter reclaims the ambiguous and multivocal power of language in how wethink and talk about corruption. In so doing, it sheds new light onto what countsas corruption in the value acceptances of everyday people, thereby advancing ourknowledge of the meanings that people everywhere ascribe to corruption or itsrough equivalents in other languages.Chapter 3,
e Politics of Informal Transport
, examines the role of the infor-mal urban transport (“paratransit”) sector in Africa, as a groundwork for the restof the book’s attention to the micropolitics of transportation and road exploita-tion in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital. is chapter argues that an analysisof the organization and politics of informal transport provisions aords a uniquewindow onto the precarious unfolding of urban life in Africa, including issues of “transport poverty,” the stigmatized identity of drivers and conductors, the extor-tionate powers of politicized transport unions in cahoots with state governments,and how plans to modernize public transit systems across the continent generally ignore the motley array of unregulated carriers that have become the fulcrum of Africa’surbanfabric.eparadoxinthischapterisnotlost:whileAfrica’sinformaltransport workers are oen regarded as criminals, they are actually daily victimsof corruption themselves.If corruption is a constitutive element of everyday life, then it behooves usto understand what exactly that everyday life is. Despite their centrality to theimagination and popular experiences of informal road transport workers, thereare, surprisingly, few studies on the ubiquitous and aphoristic slogans paintedon passenger vehicles as a window onto the political economy of everyday life inurban Africa. Chapter 4,
e Art of Urban Survival
, explores what an interpreta-tive analysis of vehicle slogans can tell us about the everyday spaces of maneuver,survival,andopportunitiesofroadtransportworkers,includingtheparticularcir-cumstances which may have informed the driver’s choice of a particular slogan.
or

:  
45is chapter explores how popular culture manifests itself through these slogans,as a means to interpret the everyday experiences of marginalized transport work-ers in Lagos as well as an expression of their “social theory.” rough a textualanalysis of minibus-taxi slogans in Lagos, we are able to relate to the precariouslifeworlds of operators, including their daily encounters with agents of corrup-tion and fear on dangerous roads. Seeing
danfos
as mobile bodies of meaning, thechapter nds that
danfo
slogans not only provide unique windows onto the ex-ploitativelaborofinformaltransportworkersinLagos,butarealsoeectivemeansthrough which these marginal men carve out meaningful temporalities, stand outin a cutthroat business, and expand their capacity to aspire and become.Chapter 5,
Nigeria’s Transport Maa
, focuses on the origins and changingdynamics of the dreaded NURTW’s tax collectors—the
agberos
or motor park touts—and the intimidating and violent tactics they deploy to extort illegal feesof all sorts from transport operators in Lagos. Situating the emergence and reachof
agberos
withinthewidespreadcrisisofthestructuraladjustmentprogram(SAP)of the 1980s in Nigeria, this chapter directly relates the transformation of
agberos
,from callers of passengers to violent extortionists, to their adverse incorporationinto the NURTW as tax collectors and political thugs, which altered their initialrole in the road transport sector. Eorts by the Lagos State Government to ridthe roads of
agberos
since 1999 are inspired by its controversial neoliberal urbanrenewal project which responds to the logic of the market rather than the needsof the Lagos subaltern. Yet, the role of “big politics” (in form of the unholy al-liance between the NURTW and the state government) helps explain the botchedattempts to remove
agberos
from the roads. e chapter also pays attention to theways in which political agency is exercised at dierent levels, that is, both withinthe NURTW and toward transport workers and state agents.Chapter 6,
e Paradox of Urban Reform
, critically examines the impact of theLagos State Road Trac Law of 2012, introduced by the Lagos State Govern-ment to restore “sanity” to Lagos roads, on the spaces of livelihoods of informaltransportworkers,withparticularattentiontomotorbike-taxi(
okada
)driversandtheir associations. On the one hand, the chapter explores the corrupt and brutalmanner in which law enforcement agents in Lagos (for example, “Kick AgainstIndiscipline”) have enforced the Trac Law. On the other hand, it examines how and why the largest association of motorbike-taxi drivers in Lagos—the All Nige-rian Autobike Commercial Owners and Workers Association (ANACOWA)—isappealing to state laws as a weapon of combat against the Lagos State Govern-ment and its agents. is chapter sheds light onto the way in which informaltransport workers and their associations exercise agency and their “right to thecity” in a collective attempt to intervene in the corrupt and unequal processes of neoliberal urban legislation. Further, the chapter shows how urban reform canreproduce rather than address corruption and precarious existence in everyday life.
or

46
   
e concluding chapter,
Learning from Corruption
, advances some nal criticalreections on the broader theoretical and empirical implications of the ideas pre-sented in this book, particularly the need to go beyond the essentialist, culturalist,and functionalist explanations that constrain dominant approaches to corruptionin Africa and the global South generally. e conclusion oers an approach tocorruption “from below” that is not detached from but inextricably linked to cor-ruption “from above.” In this dialectical perspective, corruption is a multi-facetedphenomenon located in “gray zones” between the legal and the extralegal, andshaped by mutualities between formal and informal actors and rules. Such mutu-ality is at work in the collusion and collision of the NURTW and the Lagos StateGovernment,armingcorruptionasaneectivearenaforexploringthefaultlinesof statecra, urban political engineering, and the pursuit of daily survival.
or

1
CorruptionandtheCrisisofValues
Dening corruption is an extremely dicult undertaking, since the very word“corruption” evokes vastly dierent meanings and connotations. While corrup-tion exists in all polities, the form it takes, its extent, and its political and socio-economic functions vary enormously across time and place. In a thorough review oftheempiricalliteratureoncorruption,MonicaPrasadandassociatesdistillthreemajor observations about how and why corruption persists. First, corruption per-sists because diminished state capacity forces average citizens to partake in it tomeet basic survival needs. is they call the “resource challenge.” Second, cor-ruption persists because of the unsettled debates over what is corrupt and whatis not corrupt, what is private and what is public. is they call the “denitionalchallenge.” And third, corruption persists because of counteracting moral pres-sures, such as the interrelated pressures associated with looking aer one’s ownethnic group (tribalism) or with patrimonial client networks. is they call the“alternative moralities challenge” (Prasad et al. 2019: 98).is two-part chapter analyzes the relationship between political corruption,economiccrisis,andanti-corruptionreforminpostcolonialNigeria.erstpart,“corruption wide,” critically scrutinizes the denitional and alternative moralitieschallenge of corruption. e second part, “corruption close,” examines elite cor-ruption in Nigeria since independence in October 1960, especially the systematicplunderingofstatewealthandtheconsequentemergenceofacrisisofvaluesinev-erydaylife.eanalysisinthischapterextendstothecheckeredstoryofpost-1999institutionalist eorts to combat corruption.
Corruption Wide: Complicating Our Understanding of Corruption
Corruption is widely dened as “behavior which deviates from the formal du-ties of a public role because of private-regarding (personal, close family, privateclique) pecuniary or status gains; or violates rules against the exercise of cer-tain types of private-regarding inuence” (Nye 1967: 419). is public-oce view rests simply and squarely on the illegality of corruption. “Illegality” here denotesthat there are rules governing the conduct of public-oce holders and the pro-cess of selection to public oce (eobald 1990: 16; Underkuer 2005). ere
They Eat Our Sweat
. Daniel E. Agbiboa, Oxford University Press.© Daniel E. Agbiboa (2022). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861546.003.0002
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are three essential elements of the public-oce conception of corruption: (a) pay-ments to public ocials beyond their salaries; (b) an action associated withthese payments that violates either explicit laws or implicit social norms; and(c) losses to the public either from that action or from a system that rendersit necessary for actions to arise only from such payments (Glaeser & Goldin2006: 7).Despite its popularity, the public-oce view is fraught with diculties thatsit awkwardly with our purposes. To start with, the questions raised by MichaelJohnston y-odd years ago remain relevant today: “Which norms are the onesthat will be utilized to distinguish corrupt from noncorrupt acts? If the de-nitions are public-centered, then whose evaluation of the public’s interest is tobe operationalized?” (1970: 6). Another objection notes that the very conceptof public oce is basically “Western.” In the developing world, it is argued,public oce as an institution and the ethos surrounding it remains weakly established. In this light, nepotism, patronage, and minor forms of bribery dis-guised as gi-giving, far from attracting opprobrium, are generally socially ap-proved (eobald 1990: 3). e division between public and private—the basisfor common denitions of corruption—does not carry the same moral weightin all societies (Ruud 2000: 291). To the extent that public ocials in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia oen nd themselves committed to upholdingtwo contradictory sets of values—on the one hand, those of the modern bu-reaucracy, which they have sworn to uphold, and, on the other hand, thosefoisted on them by their traditional, cultural setting (Anders 2009)—they be-come “polynormative” (Olowu 1988: 219), and in many cases this translatesinto “normlessness” (Riggs 1964). Further, in many African states, loyalty to thefamily or ethnic kinsmen overrides individual rights or personal accountability.e civil servant, in this context, may become engaged in corruption in a desper-ate eort to generate the additional resources he or she needs to meet obligationsto members of their family members or ethnic group (Alam 1989: 445; Wrong2009). Studying Malawi, Gerhard Anders (2009) points to the co-existence andinteraction of multiple sets of contradictory rules that a Malawian civil servant isrequired to negotiate on a daily basis, including the ocial rules, kinship rules,and the unocial code of conduct.e understanding of corruption as illegality is simultaneously too narrow andtoo broad in scope, since that which is illegal is not necessarily corrupt, and thatwhich is corrupt is not necessarily illegal. As such, an overly legislative approachto corruption ignores the sociocultural forms that corruption takes (Olivier deSardan 1999; Routley 2016; Baez-Camargo et al. 2017) as well as changes in cor-ruption across both time and space (Pierce 2016). is may explain why, despiteboasting higly sophisticated accountability organs and anti-corruption legisla-tion, a country such as Uganda is still consistently ranked in the bottom third
or

     
49of countries perceived to be the most corrupt in the world. Uganda’s formalanti-corruption bodies score 99 out of 100 points in the Global Integrity 2009index; yet the country is consistently ranked among the most corrupt in theworld. If corruption is the “secret of law” (Nuijten & Anders 2007), that is tosay, corruption and law are not opposite but constitutive of one another, it fol-lows that an approach that purely reads traditional state-centered
état de droit
asthe only panacea for corruption is grossly inadequate (Torsello & Venard 2015: 3;Bocarejo2018:S49).Althoughlegallyculpableandwidelyreproved,practicesthatfallwithinthegamutofthecorruptioncomplexarenonethelessseenbythosewhoparticipate in them as legitimate, and oen as not being corrupt at all (Olivier deSardan 1999: 34).Consider Janet Roitman’s study of the “ethics of illegality” in the Lake ChadBasin, which comprises Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, and Chad. While unregulatedeconomic activities and violent modes of extraction are commonly viewed as “il-legal,”
Bedskin
drivers and road bandits (
coupeurs de route
) also imagine thesepractices as “licit” and “rational behavior” (Roitman 2006: 251–61). Similarly, EricBa¨hre’s study ofCape Town’s taxi associations show that taxi ownersgenerally em-brace illegality and informality as being vital to doing business (Ba¨hre 2014: 576).In their study of the educational sector in the DRC, Kristof Titeca and Tom deHerdt found that formal state-backed rules and agreements only played an in-direct role in governing the system, even if all actors in the educational sectorsystematically refer to these rules and agreements (2011: 214). ese African casestudies nd armation in ethnographies of corruption in South Asia and SouthAmerica, which show that people generally see corruption as a “legitimate way of goingaboutdoingthings”(Kondos1987:17).InIndia,VeenaDasndsthat,whilepeople openly admitted that their actions (such as tapping electricity from high-tension wires) violate the law, they nonetheless “have a completely lucid answer toallegations of corruption levelled at them by bureaucrats—what is the poor mantodo—heisonlytryingtoearn
rozi-roti
(incomeforfood), heissomehowfeedinghis wife and children. Surely that cannot be illegitimate?” (2015: 340). Similarly,in her ethnography of corruption among Columbia peasants (
campesinos
), DianaBocarejo (2018: S53) nds that
campesinos
accept the law neither as “xed” nor asan a priori legitimate set of discourses and practices.How do we make sense of the above pervasiveness of an “ethics of illegality”in the Global South? One rather incomplete explanation that has been adducedtime and again is that the full panoply of laws and administrative apparatus inmany developing countries is “copied entirely from the West” (Scott 1969: 319; cf.Anders2009).OnlyafewAfricancountrieshaveproposedalternativestandardsof
 e Afrobarometer (2015) reported that 69 percent of Ugandans think that the government isperforming badly or not doing enough to crack down on corruption in the public sector.
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public service morality. Instead, many of these postcolonies have each “striven toensure that their public bureaucracies conform to the ethical standards and codesinheritedfromtheirerstwhilecolonialmasters”(Olowu1988:216).Socialsciencestudies (of corruption) are not immune from this Western-centric critique. DavidSillsandRobertMertonhavealreadycalledattentiontothedearthofsocialsciencematerials from non-Western cultures:
esocialsciencesthemselvesareprimarilyproductsofWesterncivilization,andAfricans, Asians, and other non-Westerners who work in social sciences [myself included] generally use the theory and methods of the Western social sciences astheir framework… Certainly a major challenge for the social sciences—if not forall of the sciences—is to nd ways of incorporating the basic ideas of African,Asian, and other non-Western thought into the Western paradigm. (cited inSchatzberg 2001: 25)
e Shadow State
In much of the Global South, the public/private bifurcation that underpinsWestern-centric understandings and explanations of corruption have little daily utility. Developing regions have remained “decidedly ‘non-Weberian”’ (Khan2012b:10),despiteattemptsatimprovingformalenforcement.Africa,forinstance,is commonly seen as a place where formal rules have little constraining eect onpolitical conducts which are generally viewed as governed by the expectation that“constitutional rules or administrative regulations can, and probably ought, to beevaded” (Jackson & Rosberg 1984: 425). e dominance of informal institutionsin the so-called developing world has been cast in light of the “weakness” of thestate to enforce formal institutions (Khan 2012a; Robbins 2000: 425).William Reno (1995) famously used the concept of the “shadow state” to de-scribe personalized rule in Sierra Leone, where the “real” state is constructedbehind the façade of formal statehood. Such a dualistic understanding articulateswith the distinction between
pays légal
(a legal structure) and
pays réel
(where realpower is wielded) (Bayart 2000), or the bifurcation of “ocial” and “practical”norms (Olivier de Sardan 2008). Viewed in this perspective, the “indigenous” isperceived to be implicated in “the corrupt.” e crisis of governance is situatedwithin the irreconcilable clash between, rather than the hybridity of, “African-traditional” and “Western-modern” forms of governance, a clash that is theninterpreted as the root cause of corruption in Africa,
tout court
(Routley 2016). As
 eproblemofthisviewpointisitstendencytoreifythedichotomybetweenWesternstateinstitu-tionsandAfricansocietyratherthansharpenourfocuson“thelivesofpeopleinthemidstofprocessesthat restructured state institutions all around the globe” (Anders 2009: 150). e very assumption of a
purely
western paradigm is dubious (Comaro & Comaro 2015).
or

     
51Jean and John Comaro puts it, “In Africa, the epitome of post/colonial misrulein European eyes, metaphors of malfeasance—kleptocracy, neopatrimonialism,clientelism, prebendalism—have long been the accepted terms, popular andscholarlyalike,forindigenousmodesofgovernance”(Comaro&Comaro2006:6–7). e continued delinking of Western and African elements, colonial legaciesand traditional practices, and the local and the international, persists because “itenables claims to be made based on the value attributed to association with oneside of the dichotomy or the other” (Routley 2016: 5).e image of “shadow” has long been a favored discursive trope (particularly among Western scholars) to imagine and articulate contemporary African reali-ties.estudyofAfricaisawashwithproblematicimagesofdarkness,blackholes,and phantoms (De Boeck, Cassiman, & Van Wolputte 2009: 36). In addition toReno’s inuential “shadow state” concept, Western scholars of Africa have writtenabout shadow economies and shadow networks (Dueld 2002), twilight insti-tutions (Lund 2007), shadow cities (Neuwirth 2006), global shadows (Ferguson2006), and shadows of war (Nordstrom 2004). e danger with these popularrepresentations is that “the notion that ‘real’ meanings, events, and entities aredeferred to other domains may lead to the reication of those other, unavailablesites. is facilitates all sorts of mystications” (Ferme 2001: 6). Oen, the word“shadow” has been headlined by these authors with little sensitivity to its racistundertones and the sensibilities of the millions of Africans of whom they write.Looking at these titles, one cannot help but recall the words of the late Kenyanwriter Binyavanga Wainaina, in hisnow renowned satireofWestern writingaboutAfrica titled: “Howto WriteaboutAfrica.” Wainaina (2006) beginsthispiecewith:“Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title.”Criticizing the state deciency argument for its weak explanatory power and“pernicious Eurocentrism,” Paul Robbins calls for an alternative approach by ex-aminingcorruptionnotas“theabsenceofrules”butas“thepresenceofalternativenorms.” Studies of corruption, he argues, must transcend the absence of strongstate institutions to critically examine “the presence of diering institutions which vie for legitimacy and trust amongst diverse players within both the state and civilsociety” (2000: 426). Other Africanist scholars have likewise challenged the ideaof state failure, rejecting a priori views about what the state should look like. e“Weberization” of the African state, they argue, precludes an understanding of “real governance” in Africa (Olivier de Sardan 2008: 2; MacGaey 1991). e un-derstandingofAfricanpoliticsasdeviantevokesculturalprimordialism(Meagher2006), that is, a generalized notion of corruption as “the form of politics” in Africa(Bayart 1993: 89) or the state in African as “naturally corrupt” (Szeel 1998). Itis exactly this essentialism and cultural determinism that Olivier de Sardan con-demned when he said: “Should one therefore impute corruption in Africa to somekind of ‘African culture?’ Nothing should be more absurd. e notion of culture isextremelypolysemic.”Instead,hearguesinfavoroftheavoidanceof“bothofthese
or

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opposed and symmetrical stumbling blocks: an explanation of ‘culture,’ or the de-nial of any ‘cultural factor’ whatsoever” (1999: 44). While the notion of “shadow state” has become ingrained in studies of African politics, it is problematic to as-sumethatocialnormsinvariablyfalloutsidethepurviewofrealgovernanceandarethusirrelevant.AsOlivierdeSardanpointsout:“Fortheresearchersandactorsalike, the ocial norms are part of the denition of the situation. ey cannot bedispensed with under the pretext that the level of adherence to them is scant, noris it possible to focus on the practices as if it were the case that the ocial normsdid not exist” (2008: 7).
Beyond the Cultural Turn
Analysts of corruption in Africa (e.g. Bayart, Ellis, & Hibou 1999; Bayart 2005;Chabal & Daloz 2006) take various positions that essentialize rather than explainculture. But let my position be clear: the idea of culture is uid and relational, andthere is no overarching value system that induces the deportment of African peo-ple.TwokeydebateshaveshapedculturalistanalysesofcorruptioninpostcolonialAfrica. On the one hand, scholars have argued that corruption is a consequenceof the endurance of “traditional” social practices and logics in a modern con-text (McMullan 1961; Bodruzic 2016). Advocates of this school of thought oenpointtothepredominanceofpatronagepoliticsandpatrimonialismintheAfricanpolity, including primordial traditions of gi giving (Ekpo 1979) and the cultureof supportive values (Le Vine 1975). On the other hand, scholars observe that cor-ruption in postcolonial Africa is the result of a historic rupture that formed withthe importation of the colonial state (Ekeh 1975; Mamdani 1996). In the rst few pagesof
isPresentDarkness
,StephenEllis(2016:4)wrote,“[…]weneedtostudy the colonial experience of Indirect Rule if we are to understand the origin of laterpractices of organized crime and corruption.”e resort to culture in interpreting corruption conjures up the specter of ex-pediency, which has become an “easy explanatory trap” for many African leaders(Ocheje2001).Forexample,underGhana’sKwameNkrumah,corruptionwaspo-litically constructed as “indigenous forms of ‘African’ resistance to the abstractformalism of the state” (Hasty 2005b: 295). Syed Alatas criticizes approaches thatuseculturalpracticesforthepurposesofcorruptionratherthanbeingthecauseof corruption(1968:96–97).Followingareviewoftheculturalaspectsofcorruption,Johann Lambsdor (1999: 13), the inventor of the Corruption Perception Index,notedthatculturecanonlyexplain“acertainfractionofthelevelofcorruption…”Michael ompson and colleagues enumerate three crucial ways in which cultureis misused in corruption debates. First, culture can be invoked as an “uncausedcause” when an individual is said to have acted corruptly “because his culture toldhim to” (2006: 332). Such explanation fails to address the prior question of what
or

     
53caused the culture to be like that (Lamour 2012: 159). Second, culture is invokedas “an explanation of last resort” (ompson, Verweii, & Ellis 2006: 322). In otherwords, having exhausted other explanations of corruption, we conveniently turntocultureassomesortof“residualcategory”(Lamour2008:228).ird,cultureisoen invoked as a “veto on comparison” (ompson, Verweii, & Ellis 2006: 323).For example, in his ethnography of corruption and culture in the Pacic Islands,Peter Lamour (2008: 228) describes how he routinely experienced a “blocking”character: “To say ‘corruption’ is part of a culture is not unlike saying ‘back o:this is none of your business.”’
Revisiting Neopatrimonialism
No discussion of the relationship between corruption and culture in modernAfricawillbecompletewithoutalook,ifcursory,atneopatrimonialism,aconceptoen deployed as a one-size-ts-all explanation for political failings in Africa, es-peciallyinrelationtoissuesofcorruption(Mkandawire2015:563;Pitcher,Moran,& Johnston 2009; deGrassi 2008). e concept of neopatrimonialism is oenevoked as a general explanation for a range of practices that are seen as typical of African politics, such asdespotism, clannish behavior, ‘tribalism,’regionalism, pa-tronage, ‘cronyism,’ ‘prebendalism,’ corruption, predation, and factionalism (Bach2012: 221). While neopatrimonialism is not easy to dene, a “conceptual muddle”as Aaron deGrassi (2008: 112) calls it, Jean-François Medard (1986) used the now viral concept as an explanatory model for the contradictory nature of the state inAfrica,inwhichbureaucraticprocesssitscheekbyjowlwiththepatrimonialman-agement of public resources. Perhaps the most authoritative formulation comesfrom Christopher Clapham, who denes neopatrimonialism as “a form of organi-zation in which relationships of a broadly patrimonial type pervade a political andadministrative system which is formally constructed on rational-legal lines. O-cials hold position in bureaucratic organizations with powers which are formally dened, but exercise those powers… as a form of private property” (1985: 48).InpostcolonialAfrica,neopatrimonialismisusuallyinterpretedfromtwointer-related perspectives, the society-centric and the state-centric. e society-centricperspective describes “practices and norms in African society that prevents theembrace and sustained application of ‘rational’ policy choices capable of pro-moting economic development and political liberalization” (Olukoshi 2005: 182).Richard Marcus (2010: 117) refers to this approach as “cultural representation inthe political process.” e state-centric perspective locates the problem of neopat-rimonialism in the state itself, pointing to the ways in which the state encumberssociety on account of the predatory and personalized politics which it nurtures(Olukoshi 2005: 184). is perspective has given rise to essentialist narratives of Africaas“asocietywithnosenseofthepublicgood,onethatcondonescorruption
or

210    founded essentially on coercive exchanges, plunder and consumption” (Mbembe& Roitman 1995: 335).Despite its centrality to everyday corruption, there is a dearth of research onthe informal transport sector in Africa. is book foregrounds the road transportsector in how people routinely encounter the translocal state and come to think of and socially navigate its generalized informal functioning (Blundo & de Sardan2006), which cuts deeply into the very structure of people’s lives. e book’s fo-cus on the endemic crisis encountered by informal transport workers stresses theprecarity that is involved in the everyday attempt by minibus- and motorbike-taxidrivers to reclaim economic agency and assert their right to a city they call
EkoIle
(“Lagos home”). For every single driver that I encountered during my eld-workinLagos,transportinfrastructures,intheformofcheckpoints,busstops,and junctions, constituted a locus for bribery and coercion, giving rise to fear, populardiscontents and disillusionment with the NURTW-state mutuality. e vast bulk of transport workers in Lagos saw their driving work as a blessing and a curse, asboth aspaceofagency andasourceoflimitation.evoicesandlivedexperiencesof commercial drivers in Lagos point to how informal workers in Africa are in-creasingly exploited and immobilized through infrastructures that “facilitate theowofgoods,people,orideasandallowfortheirexchangeoverspace…”(Larkin,2013: 327–28).Across African cities, transport infrastructures are key sites of corruption, co-ercion, and complicity that not only reveal the “negotiated nature of statehood”(Titeca & de Herdt, 2011), but also the symbiotic relationship between space and(in)justice. Mustafa Dikeç calls this “the spatiality of injustice and the injustice of spatiality” (2001: 1792). In
Mobility Justice
, Mimmi Sheller shows how the gover-nance and control of movement are inherently shaped by power and inequality,and gives rise to unequal patterns of mobility (2018: 32). In a similar vein, HagarKotef and Merav Amir argue that “control over movement was always central tothe ways in which subject positions are formed and by which dierent regimesestablish and shape their particular political orders” (2011: 63). is argument isconrmed in the study of “roadblock politics” in the Central African Republic(CAR), which shows how control over roadblocks along strategic transit and trad-ingroutesconstitutedafundamentalsourceof“logisticalpower”andan“objectof struggle” (Schouten 2019). at study found that armed predation at roadblocksin the CAR is central to the political and nancial power of “entrepreneurs of im-position,” to wit, rebel militia groups and state security operatives. e “politicsof pillage” that governs roadblocks in the CAR makes it dicult for local peopleto go to farms and markets, thus eroding their livelihoods (Schouten & Kalessopo2017: 12). If “a study of automobility is also necessarily an exploration of the com-plicated ways that consumption, mobility, stasis, scarcity, and excess all intersectalong West Africa’s bumpy and multidirectional roads” (Green-Simms 2017: 4),
or

:    211then localizing corruption within the “system” of transportation in Lagos, as thisstudy has done, allows for both specialized and comprehensive analyses of the po-liticaleconomyofeverydaylife.Moreover,mobileethnographershavelongarguedthat being “on the move” is a powerful way to “venture into” people’s lives and“to understand their social and cultural reality” (Neto 2017: 141). erefore, thisstudy has treated movement along the fast and slow lanes of Lagos as a privilegedsite of research and observation of corruption, complicity, precarity, and socialnavigation.Evidence presented here suggests that it may be more constructive to reroutecorruption as a “collective action-social trap” problem rather than the more conventional “principle-agent” mode of thinking. On the one hand, collective actionargues that if corruption is the social norm in any society, individuals will opt tobehave in corrupt ways, because the costs of acting in a more principled mannerdwarfsthebenets,atleastattheindividuallevel.Ontheotherhand,theprinciple-agent theory approaches corruption exclusively as an agent problem (Booth & Commack 2013). In this perspective, corruption is said to occur when principalsare unable to monitor agents eectively, and the agent betrays the principal’s in-terest in the pursuit of his or her own self-interest (DFID 2015: 15). In Lagos, acommercial driver who is reluctant to oer water (bribe) to quench a thirsty po-lice ocer when pulled over is commonly derided by his own passengers as
oponu
(an ignoramus or a very stupid person), a “Good Samaritan,” or a “JJC,” short for“Johnny Just Come” (a naïve newcomer to Lagos). As a result, almost every driverinLagoshasbecomeuentintheo-coded“languageofcorruption”andskilledinbribe negotiation. ese capabilities constitute a precondition of daily survival inLagos,asthefailuretodecodethe
rules
ofcorruptioncouldresultinsubstantialde-lays,trumped-upcharges,vehicularandbodilyharm,oreven(social)death.eserules fall under what Elinor Ostrom (2005) calls “work rules” or “rules in use” andwhat Peter Hall (1993: 281) calls “standard operating procedures.” Although these“work rules” are unwritten, ordinary practitioners of Lagos (e.g. road transportworkers) are generally familiar with them; they know “how the system works andhow to work the system” (Dougherty 2000).More than simply the pursuit of private gain, involvement in corruption inLagos chimes with broader concerns or benets that reinforce the struggle for
 While living in Panama, Elizabeth Dougherty describes her encounter with a policeman whopulled her over to give her a ticket. As the ocer approached her car, she took all the money saveUSD5.00 out of her wallet and stued the rest under her car seat. Aer a lengthy interaction with thepoliceman during which she pretended not to speak Spanish and to not understand his demand forbribe. e frustrated policeman got into her car and “He told me to drive down the road to a largely abandoned parking lot in order to explain to me how to make this exchange. ‘Look,
thisishowitworks
.I stop you and give you a ticket. en you give me money so you do not have to waste your time goingto the police station to pay a larger ne than the money you are paying me. Understand?’ I told him Idid and handed him the $5.00 in my wallet, saying how sorry I was that this was all the money that Ihad, whereupon he got out and walked away” (Dougherty 2002: 198; my emphasis).
or

212    survival. On the one hand, drivers and conductors are compelled to pay bribesat roadblocks—manned by violent motor park touts and gun-toting, woefully un-derpaid policemen—not simply to avoid physical harm, which is serious enough,but to prevent their family from dying of hunger. “I have mouths to feed,” saidan
okada
driver who had just paid his onerous N1000 ticket fee. “If I don’t set-tle them [
agberos
and police ocers], they won’t let me work. My family will gohungry. en what kind of a man am I?” So, in Lagos, drivers are not only “dy-ing of corruption” (Holmberg & Rothstein 2011) but also performing corruptionto avoid “social death.” is equilibrium of mutual expectations—that is, the view that one disadvantages oneself by not engaging in corruption—supports the ar-gument that, “Whoever practices corruption auto-legitimates his own behavior,by presenting himself, for example, as a victim of a system in which he is boundto this kind of practice to avoid wasting time and/or an insupportable amount of money, being penalized or condemned to inactivity” (Olivier de Sardan 1999: 29).So,whileroadtransportworkersinLagosresentcorruptionandaregenerallyinfavor of stamping it out, the pursuit of survival and the avoidance of shame forcemany to partake in the corrupt practices that they denounce.Some African case studies (for example, the DRC) argue that commercial taxidrivers do not see corruption as “morally problematic” (Alexandre 2018: 570).Others (such as Ghana) claim that “many people do not see anything wrong with[petty corruption] and do not think about it as corruption” (Lindberg 2003: 135).InLagos,nothingcouldbefurtherfromthetruth.Duringmyinterviews,informaltransport operators routinely lamented the “evil” of extortion, with many callingfor a revolution to address this crisis of corruption that they see as endemic ratherthan episodic. A distinction, a necessary one, must be made between people’s involvement in corruption as a survival tactic and their personal views about thesystem.AsBoRothsteinputsit,“culturalvaluesandactualpracticesarenotalwaysconsistent” (2018: 40). For example:
Respondents in the Afrobarometer survey for eighteen sub-Saharan Africancountries were asked their views on scenarios in which an ocial either “decidesto locate a development project in an area where his friends and supporters live”;“gives a job to someone from his family who does not have adequate qualica-tions”; and “demands a favor or an additional payment for some service that ispart of his job.” Between 60 and 76 percent of the 25,086 respondents consid-ered all three examples of corruption to be “wrong and punishable,” while only asmall minority view such actions as “not wrong at all.” Furthermore, only about20 percent deem these actions “wrong but understandable.” (Rothstein 2018: 39)
On the other hand, the cash bribes collected around the clock by the
agberos
aredistributed along a convoluted nancial chain that serves to keep the union-statecoalitionswinning.iscashdistributionshowshowtheinformaltransportsector
or

:    213inLagoshasbecomeabigbusinesstoallthosewhofeedoit.Anobviousbutover-lookedelementofthismutuallyreinforcingunion-staterelationshipisthefearandinsecurity that compels both sides. Given this “ordered corruption” (Blundo 2006:260), the issue of who is actually running things is oen unclear, as “complicitiesofallkindsbetweensupposedantagonistsareoennecessaryinordertomaintainanysemblanceoforder”(Simone2016b:5).isreinforcestheideaofthe“corrup-tion complex,” which involves practices that are oen connected to corruption butmayormaynotbeillegalassuch.Nowonder,then,thatanevidencepaperoncor-ruption by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) concludedthat corruption is a collective (rather than purely individualized) challenge: “It involves a variety of interactions, dynamics and linkages between multiple actors,organizations and institutions at dierent levels” (DFID 2015: 79).e Africanist scholar Giorgio Blundo (2006: 260) reached a similar conclu-sion from his ethnographic inquiry into the social world of public procurementin Senegal. He found that corruption functioned “across networks and alliances,which tend to structure themselves and become permanent.” Commonplace cor-ruption, he notes, derives from a triangular and complicit system composed of “corrupting contractors, corrupted ocers, and intermediaries, giving rise to realchains of complicities.” In Lagos, we have seen that in return for helping rig elec-tions, the state government allows the NURTW to control the roads and motorparks. is suggests that instead of placing corruption
in
context, we need to seecorruption
as
a context of action and meaning (Vigh 2009: 5). Unless corruption’sreal but perversely counterintuitive networks, pacts, and coalitions are taken se-riously, “success stories” will continue to be “depressingly thin on the ground”(Hough 2017). is study shows that anti-corruption policies have “hardly hadan impact on levels of corruption ‘on the ground”’ (Rothstein 2018: 39), precisely because “on the ground” realities of corruption have never truly penetrated “topdown” anti-corruption cleanups.Insum,thisbooktakesanempiricallygroundedapproach—ananthropologicalapproachifyoulike—tocorruption,whichgroundscorruptioninthedailyformaland informal encounters of mobile subjects with the state and the union, and inthe state-union mutuality. Drawing upon a combination of documentary sources,ethnographic interviews, and cumulative observations on the bottlenecked anddangerous roads of Lagos, the study argues that corruption is not embedded inNigerian “culture” but is in fact shaped by popular eorts to manage precariouslives in transit by bending the rules. In place of a culturalist approach to corrup-tion, this study oers a more pluralist perspective that considers how informaltransport workers have developed normative systems to t their own needs ratherthan following the rules or breaking them. Challenging the conventional distinc-tion between grand and petty corruption, this study argues that both typologiesare deeply intertwined and continually imbricated in the texture of everyday ur-banlife.us,itoersanapproachtocorruption“frombelow”thatisnotdetached
or

214    from but rather inextricably linked to corruption “from above” in the Lagos trans-port sector. Furthermore, it analyzes precarity and popular agency in the contextof neoliberal urban reforms that reproduce rather than address corruption, inse-curity, and radical uncertainty. is is not just a book about corruption but alsoabout Lagos, its transport system, and the society surrounding it.
or

They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria Daniel E. Agbiboa

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They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria Daniel E. Agbiboa

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