Book Review: They Eat Our Sweat
Book review of They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria, by Daniel E. Agbiboa (2022)
They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption, and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria by Daniel E. Agbiboa (2022). New York: Oxford University Press.
In Africa, preventing corruption has long been a priority for policymakers and international donors. However, despite numerous efforts, the results have typically fallen far short of expectations. This raises a fundamental question: do we fully understand the mechanisms that enable corruption to persist? In They Eat Our Sweat, Daniel E. Agbiboa explores this issue through a study of the informal urban transport sector in Lagos, Nigeria’s megacity.
The book begins by examining dominant economic and political-science approaches that frame corruption as a matter of illegality. The author argues that this perspective—rooted in Weberian conceptions of modern bureaucracy—has reinforced a conventional distinction between two forms of corruption: grand corruption, linked to elite state capture; and petty, everyday corruption. More recently, scholars have increasingly challenged this dichotomy, a shift that Agbiboa describes as the “anthropological turn” (14) in corruption studies. The central argument suggests that rather than being separate phenomena, grand and petty corruption are deeply interconnected and exist on a continuum. Drawing on extensive research conducted in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia, Agbiboa advocates moving beyond the traditional opposition between elites and non-elites. His work highlights how corruption often manifests at the margins of the state through routine negotiations and bargaining processes involving ordinary citizens.
Given this perspective, if corruption is embedded in everyday practices and is observable at all levels of society in the Global South, should researchers analyze it from a culturalist perspective—as a phenomenon rooted in local cultures? Agbiboa distances himself from such an interpretation and instead proposes viewing corruption through the lens of social norms. He argues that corruption should be understood as a set of attitudes and practices that, while often deemed immoral, are nonetheless perceived as socially acceptable. He clarifies, “When a society is systematically corrupt, it becomes optimal to participate in corruption despite the presence of anti-corruption policies and legislation. This way, corrupt behavior becomes the pragmatic norm” (3).
One of the primary objectives of They Eat Our Sweat is to demonstrate that corruption can be better understood as a collective-action trap, resulting from the state’s weakness and its inability to prevent the subversion of essential functions and missions. Through this lens, Agbiboa details the political history of postcolonial Nigeria, showing how successive regimes, whether military or civilian, have all professed a commitment to eradicating corruption while simultaneously perpetuating it. Additionally, the book examines how the management of Nigeria’s wealth, especially oil revenues, has shaped elite corruption. The author emphasizes that the private appropriation of public resources and institutions has undoubtedly weakened the Nigerian state, undermining its ability to protect civilians and effectively combat the Islamist group Boko Haram.
This analysis of elite corruption practices is complemented by an exploration of so-called “corruption from below.” Through Critical Discourse Analysis, Agbiboa examines how people culturally and socially rationalize corruption through language and popular idioms. Echoing Africanist studies, the book provides several examples of how individuals use food-related and cannibalistic metaphors to express the dynamics of political power imbued with clientelist practices. For instance, we learn that “stomach infrastructure” (90), a popular Nigerian expression, reflects a particularly visible practice during electoral campaigns where candidates distribute food in order to attract a potential political clientele.
Agbiboa thus emphasizes that corruption typically resides in gray areas, where politics and economics, legality and illegality, and formality and informality intersect. He illustrates this viewpoint through an analysis of Lagos’s informal urban transport sector; drawing on formal and informal interviews, field observations, and archival sources within a mobile ethnographic approach, Agbiboa explores the daily lives of danfo (minibus taxi) and okada (motorcycle taxi) operators, who serve as the primary transport providers for Lagos’s urban population. By examining this sector as a space of local entrepreneurship, Agbiboa emphasizes the precarious conditions that these workers face, primarily men without fixed incomes or social protection, who engage in a constant struggle for survival. He also reveals how bribery shapes interactions between transport operators, law-enforcement agents, and trade unionists.
They Eat Our Sweat grounds itself in transport workers’ daily experiences and pays close attention to their “point of talk” through an original analysis of slogans commonly painted on danfo minibuses. Agbiboa considers these inscriptions to be a form of popular artistic expression, reflecting the workers’ worldviews and their micro-resistance strategies against violence, uncertainty, and power asymmetries. One particularly striking slogan, “Monkey De Work, Baboon De Chop” (135)—literally, “Monkeys work and baboons eat”—serves as a popular allegory criticizing the extortion practices that transport operators face, particularly from police officers.
Furthermore, the book examines the central role of transport unions as key intermediaries, exerting both political and economic influence in Lagos, as in many major African cities. Agbiboa underscores the dual nature of the powerful National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW): while it does advocate for and protect transport operators, it also exploits them by imposing daily bribes. The author traces the history of the NURTW, founded in 1978, and examines how it has asserted control over transport routes through its reliance on agberos. These working-class young men, ubiquitous in bus stations and stops, sustain themselves by overseeing urban transport operations—regulating passenger flow and enforcing their authority over bus and taxi drivers through intimidation and violence. Agbiboa explains that the dominance of transport unions and agberos over mobility spaces, and over the informal transport sector more generally, also grants them the capacity to disrupt the economy through protests and violent demonstrations: “They are both agents of order and specialists in violence” (107). However, the union’s ability to impose widespread externalities on society is not the only factor explaining its influence; Agbiboa also underscores the deep ties between local political parties and the NURTW, which has become a key player in electoral mobilization.
While this embeddedness of politics and economics helps explain the inability of local governments to impose their authority over urban space, They Eat Our Sweat also highlights how such enmeshing constitutes a major obstacle to reform. Agbiboa shows how political efforts to redefine and modernize urban mobility in Nigeria face obstruction not only by the protesting power of agberos but also by the resistance of informal transport workers. In this context, the final chapter focuses on the mobilization of okada operators against the Lagos State Road Traffic Law of 2012, which restricted their circulation. Agbiboa draws on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “right to the city” (1996) and illustrates how these workers, perceiving the measure as a violation of their rights, exercised agency and demonstrated remarkable collective action by mobilizing legal avenues.
They Eat Our Sweat significantly contributes to the anthropology of work. Through its rich empirical data, the book immerses the reader in the daily realities of marginalized workers who sustain Lagos’s urban transport system. While the author meticulously depicts the precarious conditions facing these workers, his analysis extends beyond mere observation. Indeed, Agbiboa reveals that these workers are not simply passive victims of domination and corruption. Rather, when confronted with uncertainty and insecurity, they engage in meaning-making and deploy tactical strategies that ultimately position them as active participants in a social system shaped by corruption.
Working against conventional assumptions, the book calls for a shift in perspective on corruption, arguing that “corruption from below” is deeply connected to “corruption from above.” As Agbiboa states, “corruption is everywhere and nowhere” (206). Yet, as the book concludes, a pressing question remains: if corruption is a collective-action trap, how can society dismantle it? One can only hope that They Eat Our Sweat, by offering its fresh perspectives, will ignite a crucial debate on this issue.
Reference
Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writings on Cities. Oxford: Blackwell.
