A year ago, on my way to an important appointment in Ikeja GRA, I ditched the car and booked a motorcycle ride using a Ride-hailing service called O’ride. The short hop from the A5 to Ikeja GRA might be less than 4 kilometres, but the traffic was going to guarantee that I would be late if I stayed in the car.
It was my first time using the service, and my experience served as an important contact point with the reality of how Nigerian governments see tech-driven innovation. The 20-minute ride brought me face to face with one of Nigeria’s worst structural inefficiencies and provided the sort of insight into my country that not even a university dissertation could provide.
Nigerian governments function as protection rackets?
5 minutes in, we were flagged down by another biker wearing an O’ride helmet who informed us that just ahead, hidden out of sight behind a bend in the road was a team of uniformed Lagos State government officials stopping and confiscating O’ride motorbikes.
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Grateful for the tip, my rider turned around and took a different route. I remembered seeing a news item where the management of O’ride met up with a team from the Lagos State Government and the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW), ostensibly to iron out any misunderstanding between both. When I put it to my rider, he let out an irritated hiss and went on to inform me that regardless of whatever was in the papers, the reality on the street was still very much cat-and-mouse.
For no apparent reason, the state government was determined to throttle a legitimate business. From a common-sense point of view, if the government was actually interested in solving problems as against being insufferable bullies, it would have seen the obvious value in buying into the O’ride model.
As against regular okada, which came with their implicit safety and security risks, O’ride required its riders and users to wear safety equipment, and all trips were documented and tracked in real-time – what was not to like? Why not collaborate with this foreign investor and task them with integrating NURTW into the ride-hailing fold?
The answer of course, is that it is much easier to instead do nothing but extract rents and shake individuals and corporates down for money. The Lagos State Government, like its peers across Nigeria and at the centre, does not see itself as a stakeholder in the economy, but as an emperor whose existential purpose is to collect tributes and be feared by its loyal imperial subjects.
Nigeria governments do not govern. They rule. The difference is unmistakable.
Thugs as Nigerian government enforcers
As a corollary to this point, it is perhaps not surprising that governments across the country choose to use street thugs and layabouts as hired muscle and enforcers. Who knows how to run protection rackets and extract illicit rents from business people better than street enforcers after all?
As the Nigerian state continues on its seemingly inevitable path to enthroning MC Oluomo and his likes as the next generation of decision makers someday, it seems to have benefitted from some cultural cross pollination with the most popular son of Oshodi himself. Quite what this means for those of us who see tech-driven innovation as our future and our continent’s biggest hope for fundamental change, I cannot say.
What does seem certain though is that no matter how we spin it, our government clearly does not understand or rate innovation and improvement. In the typical style of a motor park tout from Oshodi, it has its hand stretched out before those of us who actually work for a living shouting “Owó mi dà!”
It once briefly seemed like Nigeria might be on the cusp of a tech-led breakout to become Africa’s 21st century innovation hotbed. Now, we are merely regressing to the mean.
