The visible hand of a transport mafia in Lagos (Nigeria)

The (un)making of clichés

The National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) is a recognized union, an unofficial section of a political party, and a ‘parastatal’ organization transporting millions of passengers in Nigeria. These multiple functions are seen by academics and the public as a problem. Many researchers consider NURTW as a mafia because of its collusions with political parties, the police and civil servants, an increasingly dominant interpretation characterizing popular transport organizations in the African continent. This project is aimed at understanding divergent views of ‘informal’ transport organization in Lagos, the economic capital of Nigeria.

To do this, political scientist Laurent Fourchard works with photographer Andrew Esiebo to engage in a common fieldwork based on visual ethnography methods.  By associating photography and ethnography, we would like to explore the visible hand of an organization whose main functions are unseen, hidden, difficult to grasp or stigmatized. The project will document in particular three dimensions: 1) images of stigma and success associated with union members 2) the rules and the laws of an economic space which is said to be working on extortion 3) and the infrastructures of power in garages. Our approach will help to reconsider the images of garages as criminal spaces, to shed light on the front stage of the union that may use criminal practices in the backstage, and to expose the nature of public authority in spaces abandoned by the state.