Dr. Muhammad Jameel Yushau

At 2:45am everyday the first email at HKS comes to your inbox. HKS Daily is a catalogue of information about activities at the Kennedy School. If you miss it for a day, you could miss countless opportunities about conferences, breakfast with guests, working groups, lectures by presidents, governors, mayors and other leading policy makers from different parts of the world.

When I checked this morning, I saw an event posted by the Building State Capability Project. It was a book talk entitled “They eat our sweat: Transport labour, corruption and survival in urban Nigeria.” The theme was from the title of a book by Daniel Agbiboa, an Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University Center for African Studies. I registered immediately.

I love original research. Daniel’s work is an excellent example of that. The book, which I look forward to reading, was based on his research work at University of Oxford, where he worked with the late pan-African scholar, Professor Abdulra’uf Mustapha. It was a research project that used participant observation to study the informal transport sector in Lagos. As a student of public policy, this attracted my attention even more. Many policies are designed without an in-depth understanding of the social, cultural and even political implications of such policies.

Nigeria’s General Murtala Muhammad , Africa’s Son who contributed to the Liberation of South Africa And Republic of Namibia.

A governor or minister might see informal transport sector as a nuisance to a modern city. He might bring consultants to hurriedly analyze the problem and come up with a solution. Every person would like to see his city looking like San Francisco, Paris or Dubai. What we tend to forget is that there are thousands of lives that could suffer in our attempt to look modern. Where do we put those people who work as drivers and ‘conductors’ if we don’t have an alternative industry that will absorb them?

To understand this, Professor Daniel went to the field. He became a bus ‘conductor’ for two months working with a driver, starting early in the morning and absorbing the difficulty that comes with such endeavor. He used his research to understand the difficulty of survival within the informal transportation sector.

Left Dr MJ Yushau and the Professor conductor, middle

He provided a critique to those who use CPI to evaluate countries as corrupt, when ordinary people in those countries have completely different realities. “Informal transport not only provides a sector for examining corruption, but also a prism through which to interrogate the binary framing of formality/informality and understandings of the borders (or lack thereof) between the two.” Says Daniela Schofield in a review of the book published on the blog of The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Takeaway: Developing public policy needs in-depth thinking and proper planning. Building infrastructure is only one part of the story. Managing the effect of policies on people is a much harder task