In his rich and detailed examination of corruption practices in the transport sector of Nigeria, Daniel Agbiboa offers an account of the postcolonial state from below. They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labour, Corruption and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (published by Oxford University Press in 2023) is set in Lagos – a megacity that relies heavily on road transportation connecting the different creeks and water bodies. Through an ethnographic exploration of the sector and the multiple actors embedded in it, Agbiboa theorizes the corruption complex – a bouquet of corrupt practices (fraud, gift giving, misuse of power, graft) and a term borrowed from anthropologist Olivier De Sardaan. The key protagonists in his account are tax collectors or touts, mobile policemen who regularly engage in acts of petty corruption against the informal transport workers.

In the introduction and chapter one, he discusses the conceptual and theoretical framework borrowing from existing multi-disciplinary scholarship on the post-colonial state, corruption, and urban studies. Borrowing De Sardaan’s concept of the ‘moral economy of corruption’ Agbiboa seeks to complicate the prevailing notions regarding the phenomenon. The social embeddedness of corruption that acquires moral currency in society he contends, cannot merely be investigated through the binaries of legality and illegality or as consequences of a dysfunctional, weak state. By anchoring his intellectual inquiry in the social fabric– Agbiboa rejects Eurocentric explanations of the emergence and persistence of corruption in the Global South. Corruption for Agbiboa, must be understood in its complexity and omnipresence in society. Relatedly, he borrows from Akhil Gupta’s work on the Indian state to theorize the state as localized, multi-sited and produced through discursive everyday practices. One of the strengths of this account is its simultaneous anchoring in the rich empirical data and the linkages to the wider political economy of the urban.

The methodological choices made by Agbiboa are tied to the questions he poses. A critical ethnography of the state involves understanding the sense-making practices of the locals as they engage in and frown upon corrupt practices. Every act of taking bribes and engaging in corruption by his interlocutors, is understood by triangulation exercises involving interviews, his own experience as a transport driver and participant observations.

In chapter two, Agbiboa takes the linguistic diversity of the continent into account as he explores these elements in the broader discussion about corruption. This greatly helps contextualize what corruption means in local contexts, gleaning from the conversations locals have about the phenomenon. The critical discourse analysis brings to bear the use of the idiom of eating to think and talk about corruption. This echoes the title of the book where Agbiboa encourages his readers to consider the ‘eating of sweat’ as a re-articulation of the commodification of labour of workers in the urban informal sector.

In chapter three, Agbiboa elucidates the broader informal transport system and its parts as they link to the political economy of everyday life in Africa. Providing much-needed mobility to large segments of the working population, it exemplifies a microcosm of social and political behaviour that has ramifications for the growth of cities. Agbiboa further identifies the multiple actors who are responsible for the overall functioning of the para-transport business, making sure to weave the logic of practice and daily functioning with struggles, and adverse impacts on health as well as positing this sector as a site of ‘indigenous entrepreneurship’. Informality, however, doesn’t preclude the possibility of collective action on account of the similar class positions of the actors. He describes instances of expressing solidarity with transport workers when accidents take place, joining neighbourhood associations that provide a sense of solidarity and other forms of protection (financial, material). Here too, however, the presence of union touts and instances of extortion complicates the simplistic solidarity narrative of union-based collective action.

Using an interpretive approach, chapter four creatively examines the slogans inscribed on the paratransit vehicles (minibuses or danfos) as a way to understand urban life. The slogans embody a sense of the actors’ everyday lives, and struggles, and reflect deliberate choices made to deal with their precarious existence. Agbiboa complements the analysis of the actual slogans with unstructured interviews of owners, drivers, and passengers – enabling a contextualising of the inscriptions. One can’t quite understand the iwa or character of the slogans without examining them in relation to the worlds of those who chose them. The choices are interwoven with everyday struggles exemplified in the multiple examples he cites. Here Agbiboa brings together theoretical insights from Lefebvre’s ‘production of space’ and De Certeau’s notion of ‘everyday practices’ as being tactical and deliberate, to explore the danfo – the minibus as a pivotal element of the everyday, strengthening the analytical impact of the chapter. Beyond aesthetics and creativity, these slogans offer an insight into the dangerous, precarious lives of those riding in the minibuses daily- often as talismans to guard against evil. This chapter brings to the fore, the acute precarity and informality that works as a throughline in the lives of the owners, passengers and drivers in the transport sector of Lagos. Finally, this chapter discusses tout-police cooperation – a nexus but importantly, a set of constant collusions between state and non-state actors, often overlooked in the scholarship that binds order and disorder in cities in Africa, as Agibiboa suggests.

Chapter five makes two important claims substantiated with rich evidence from the field – one, that the informal sector is regulated and ubiquitous, and second, that the formal and informal economies are co-constitutive and interlinked in practice. The functioning of the state can be then understood through the examination of the interlinkages and the actors that relationally produce the sector through everyday practices. The agberos or representatives of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) extort money from drivers at different junctions in the city, often physically assaulting them if they refuse to pay. Agbiboa describes the inter-worker and intra-organisational dynamics of the NURTW – infamous for being the most violent and politicised trade union in Nigeria. The relationship between the union and the government can be best characterised as representing blurred boundaries between parts of the state but reinforces both key claims about the informal sector he seeks to make in this chapter.

The penultimate chapter six tackles the broader question of the feasibility of urban reform and challenges in African cities. In a series of interlinked sub-sections, Agbiboa examines the post-1999 urban renewal campaign in Nigeria, the exclusion of the urban poor from the strategies, fallouts of policy implementation and the applicability of Lefebvre’s ‘Right to the City’ in the case of Lagos. Here he asks pertinent questions – Who is the ‘world-class city’ for? Who has the ‘right’ to it? What entails the making of such a city?  The transport workers, drivers, and owners interviewed as part of this study constantly refer to their labour as being simultaneously constraining and empowering; as a site of violence perpetrated by state and para-stratal agencies as well as of creativity and agency. It is this paradox that underscores the importance of the methodological approach adopted by Agbiboa in this careful and rich study.

Despite its stimulating and ambitious analysis, however, the account has a few limitations. Reading through the empirical chapters it often feels like Agbiboa could have incorporated the ‘voices’ of his interlocutors in the narrative to enliven the insights presented in the book. In places where he draws from field vignettes, they seem disjointed from the broader theoretical claim being made. Secondly, the links between corruption and informality in the specific empirical context of the transport sector are often left ambiguous by the author.

On the whole, the book offers valuable evidence in thinking about corruption complexes in cities of the Global South more broadly, but also in terms of specific empirical contexts. The book lays out a promising line of inquiry for studies engaging with the topic of corruption making it an essential read for anyone broadly engaged in the subject across the social sciences.

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Priyanjali Mitra is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Chicago working on issues of informal labour, gender and urbanization in the Global South. Previously, she worked in the development sector for five years with organizations such as Oxford Policy Management (OPM) India, Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and the International Labour Organization (ILO), Thailand.