“It is as though the riders burst from the soil like yam shoots after the first rains. What is happening is not just an urban nuisance, but also security failure. First-degree security failure, actually, and it belongs to the government.”
By Bamidele Johnson
I hope the next Lagos State governor is a son of a bitch.
I mean that with precision, not malice. I mean someone who grins like a parish priest and snarls like an irate rottweiler; someone who would, if the city’s survival demanded it, break his or her granny’s kneecaps and feel only moderately bad afterwards. A real bastard.
He or she should, of course, be visionary, change-making, dynamic, people-oriented and all the other adjectives that governance congnoscenti slap on PowerPoint slides and self-important explainers. But first, emphatically, non-negotiably, a son of a bitch. Lagos needs a bonafide, unsentimental nasty piece of work, who wields an unlubed dildo of consequence.
Why? Because Lagos has become dangerously lawless, as the last governor and the incumbent took surrender for tolerance and indifference for compassion. Nowhere is that surrender more visible, more commonplace and brazen than in the city’s capitulation to the okada. Every few months, another neighbourhood is occupied. One day, there are 20 riders loitering at a junction. A few weeks later, 200. They sprout under bridges, beside schools, outside estates and around bus stops. Sebiotimo, a sizeable amala and gbegiri operation in my hood, had them sprout like mushrooms after a tropical downpour.
It is the way they have grown everywhere else. Quietly, seemingly organically, as though nobody planted them and nobody is tending them. Blink and there are 40. Blink again and there are 200. Soon enough, they seem to outnumber the residents. That is what appears to have happened at Fagba Railway Crossing in Iju and street immediately off it to the left leading to the Lagos State Abbatoir in Oko Oba. To say 30 okadas per square metre is no hyperbole. They are like a rash
Bizarrely, we all are incurious. Where are these people coming from? Who is funding them? An okada now costs well over a N1million. The ones we see are not products of Pentecostal miracles. Somebody is buying them. Somebody is supplying them. Somebody is financing an industry worth billions of naira, sustaining what is, by any reasonable definition, a parallel urban economy operating entirely outside the state’s line of sight. Somehow, nobody seems to be following the money or even picking up the trail.
Consider the asymmetry. If 200 unfamiliar young men suddenly appeared in a hood driving new SUVs, law enforcement agencies are not going to say they are Boyz n the Hood. They would be on them, asking pointed questions about sources of funds. But 200 motorcycles arrive, anonymously financed, mysteriously supplied, operationally coordinated across multiple neighbourhoods concurrently, and we feel no jolt.
Nobody seems to know. Nobody seems to have seen them come. Nobody appears capable of an explanation. It is as though the riders burst from the soil like yam shoots after the first rains. What is happening is not just an urban nuisance, but also security failure. First-degree security failure, actually, and it belongs to the government.
It was the government that banned okadas from major roads in 2022, generating political pantomime that used up acres of newsprint and no little airtime before lousy enforcement brought back the riders with a vengeance. It is the administration’s security architecture, which appears unable to account for who is financing fleets of motorcycles appearing overnight in residential neighbourhoods, that should be asking hard questions about this.
Who are these young men? Where do they come from? Who recruits them, organises them and puts them on the road without any form of licensing? In a city that has experienced genuine security crises, in a country where ungoverned spaces are reliably colonised by people with interests far darker than ferrying commuters, these are not paranoid questions, but the minimum due diligence of a functioning state.
Still, diligence requires a government that is paying attention. Available evidence does not suggest that government attention is in this direction. The motorcycles are supposedly banned from many of the roads they occupy. The law exists. The signs exist. The announcements exist, but enforcement does not.
Every so often, the government stages one of its drama productions, a few bikes seized, stern warnings issued, photographs taken, a spokesperson deployed to explain that the state will take no shit from nobody. The riders vanish briefly and return in greater numbers. Meanwhile, the police remain delightfully eccentric in their policing priorities. Drive a shiny Honda through a checkpoint and you may be stopped to have your blood group verified. However, motorcycle carrying three adults, two goats and a bedside refrigerator may glide past without attracting the faintest interest. The state, in other words, is alert to the law-abiding and indifferent to everyone else.
I know, and I say this before someone explains it to me, that many riders are simply trying to earn a living. Nobody disputes that. But every city on earth has people trying to earn a living, and the question is not whether the riders have needs. The question is whether the government of Lagos State has enough self-respect to enforce the rules it makes. If it does not, the rules are no better than suggestions. There is no governance in a city that governs by suggestion.
It is either the ban exists or it does not. It is either the state is in charge of its streets or it is not. It is either somebody in Alausa knows where these riders are coming from, who is financing them and what the supply chain looks like or nobody knows and nobody cares.
Neither answer is reassuring. One suggests incompetence, while the other suggests dangerous indifference. The next governor need not restructure the universe or banish poverty in his first 100 days. He needs to prove that when Lagos makes a rule, it can enforce; that the state, at the minimum, knows what is happening on its own streets. At this point in Lagos’ trajectory, that would look like a revolution. That is why we need a big, bad SOB.