Producing Precarity: Selective Enforcement in the Lagos Transport Industry

• In Event: Subnational Comparative Political Economy

Abstract

Why do states often only selectively enforce their own policies? Existing explanations attribute selective state non-enforcement to low state capacity, or to the state's interest in providing concessions to the infringing population. Alternatively, I suggest states may selectively enforce certain policies in order to privilege certain special interests who benefit from the exploitation of infringing populations. Under this logic, selective enforcement ‘produces precarity’ in the population violating the policy, which can be exploited to coerce, control, and subject them to displacement and extrajudicial violence. I illustrate this logic in the case of Lagos, Nigeria's summer 2022 `okada' motorcycle taxi ban, in which authorities outlawed the state's popular and omnipresent motorcycle taxis (locally, ‘okada'). This ban was passed universally, but enforced only in some areas. I exploit a unique feature of the governor's announcement of the law, which delineated select geographies in which the government intended to actively enforce the ban. I show, using original geo-located datasets based on satellite imagery counts of motorcycle taxis before and after the ban, 96.1FM Lagos traffic radio updates scraped from Twitter, as well as four other original observational datasets, that the state’s selective enforcement of the okada motorcycle ban is not well explained by differential state capacity, or an interest in conceding to okada riders. Instead, I show that the decision to pass – but only selectively enforce – a ban on okada in Lagos was made in order to aid exploitation of okada riders by powerful, mafia-like transport unions on which the Lagos state government relies for financial and political support. In particular, I argue that selective enforcement was driven by an interest in displacing illegalized okada riders towards union-led motorparks in Lagos, where unions are able to use the precarity produced by the ban to extract high fees from the riders, who are left without legal or real recourse to protest. Relying on several months fieldwork in these motorparks in Lagos, as well as stakeholder interviews with well over fifty okada riders, union officials, and government agents, I suggest that selective enforcement with the intention of producing precarity was the Lagos government’s strategy for intervening in third-party internal power struggles and politics, and a low-visibility means of putting its thumb on the scale of extra-state politics. I further show, using randomization inference on a detailed road network of Lagos, how geospatial patterns of selective enforcement of the ban served to repress and aid exploitation of the riders, in favor of these socially extractive unions, with implications for studies of corruption, repression, and the concrete role of special interest groups in enforcement patterns in Nigeria.

Author

• Melissa Jane Pavlik, Yale University