The waste management sector in Lagos has consisted of a mix of informal workers (wastepickers and the “scavengers” who buy from them), for-profit enterprises, and the state government’s Lagos Waste Management Authority (LAWMA). As part of a public-private arrangement, the state government would contract formal businesses to collect and transport waste from residences and businesses to dumpsites. Since the early 2000s, Private Sector Participants (PSPs)—local small- and medium-scale companies—have done a majority of the city’s waste collection while informal workers began grouping themselves into more formal organizations as directed by the government. Under the arrangement, PSP operators had access to government-financed schemes that allowed them to take out substantial loans to purchase waste collection equipment, under the condition that they gradually pay back the loans from their business revenue. LAWMA’s responsibilities were to coordinate the PSPs, clean public areas, manage the transfer loading stations, and oversee the state’s 5 dumpsites (Olusosun, Igando, Epe, Badagry and Ikorodu).

Even before the association of recycling with environmental sustainability, informal workers performed the majority of recycling in Lagos, conducting their activities at dumpsites with the backing of their trade associations. Among the most prominent of these associations are: the Waste Recycling Association of Nigeria (WRAN), the Scavengers Association of Nigeria (SAN), and the National Association of Scrap and Waste Dealers Employers of Nigeria (NASWDEN). In 2016, the new Ambode-led administration started requiring members of these associations to pay taxes and fees to LAWMA in exchange for accreditation and operating rights. With rumors of more privatized management at government dumpsites, the idea behind the taxation was guaranteed job security and protections for paying member. For generations, small-scale recycling businesses have provided wastepickers with the income to purchase provide for their families. In early 2017, association executives counted over ten thousand waste pickers and scrap dealers across Lagos’ dumpsites, but this number is likely much lower due to ongoing restructuring and job loss in the sector. Informal waste workers have done more than just provide for their families, their recycling activities have prevented dumpsites from filling up too quickly.

The Cleaner Lagos Initiative – the new administration’s plan to completely privatize the city’s waste management – was unveiled without consulting the public or seeking approval from affiliated groups in the sector. The government has not shared much information with community groups either, and talks with LAWMA representatives and Ministry of the Environment (MoE) in early 2017 meant to explain the social impacts of the program did not elucidate the situation for the public. The government’s hands off approach so far has only further stirred public interest in the specifics of the initiative, and has many informal workers concerned about the plan’s impact on their livelihoods.

Soon after the appointment of a new governor in May of 2015, business as usual in the waste management sector would end. Shortly after taking office, the new governor sought to enforce a new organization of the waste sector under while claiming its merit’s in mitigating the city’s climate risks.. The issue was given priority by the new administration, and by August 2016, the Cleaner Lagos Initiative (CLI) was established through executive order and supported by a rushed Environmental Protection Law that granted oversight of the waste management sector to the MoE, LAWMA, and the Public Utilities Monitoring and Assurance Unit (PUMAU). The law makes these government departments responsible for particular aspects of waste sector management going into the future: MoE advises and mediates relations between the government and other stakeholders; LAWMA licenses and regulates waste collection and disposal activities; and PUMAU institutes a billing system which allegedly factors in the differing abilities of households and communities across the city to pay.

No government departments other than LAWMA have been directly involved with the initiatives implementation. Instead, a new cohort of private companies employed by the government will do it without having gone through the competitive public tender process. A few hundred PSPs from the old regime will have been under the new scheme, but their responsibilities and reach (and their incomes) have been significantly reduced. PSP operators are angered not only over the loss of business, but because many of them have no way to pay back the loans they had taken out to buy collection trucks under the previous arrangement. LAWMA’s reason for the drastic reduction of PSP operations is that these businesses lack the size as well as well as the technical and financial capacity to perform at the scale needed to meet the objectives of the CLI. Visionscape, an international waste management company with no prior experience in Nigeria, became responsible for collecting residential waste from across the city. The few PSPs that remain now only collect waste from commercial facilities, while LAWMA collects waste from public areas. The public pays for these services through a Public Utility Levy collected by PUMAU.

The initiative's planning has considered the needs of poor communities to some degree. Visionscape has kekes (auto rickshaws) and barges collect waste from communities that are more difficult to reach; and PUMAU’s new billing system will provide some rate relief to poor households, but household eligibility requirements or details on the reduced rates have not been well communicated. Environmental Protection Law states that these concessions are partly funded by a Lagos State Environmental Trust Fund set up in along with other parts of the CLI. However, the public does not yet know the whether this relief can be relied on.

The incongruencies between the plan’s goals and reality are now obvious. In the relatively short time since the CLI’s announcement, Visonscape’s presence in communities has been limited to a few public bin placements in central locations. One could even claim the situation has worsened as uncollected waste accumulates in several neighborhoods and PSP trucks sometimes lining up and waiting for days in order to offload their waste. While LAWMA claims that this waste collection backlog is due to weather complications caused by annual rains, wastepickers and truck drivers argue that these problems are due to the new management’s lack of experience. In any case, it is apparent that some kind of market capture has been going on. Why else would PSP operators from the former government boycott waste pickup in protest of their removal from the field, and why else would it have taken the government and Visionscape so long to smooth out the contract?

While Visionscape’s activities have yet to significantly reconfigure Lagos’ waste management processes, the company is covertly preparing its future. In early 2017, the company refurbished its waste collection vehicle maintenance depot in Ogudu (one of three proposed depots). Some have asked how these investments were funded before the company had collected any user revenue, or how the company’s financial projections could account for losses that had accumulated since the beginning of billed operations in July 1, 2018. In order to finance its operations, the company arranged an issuance of N50 billion (approximately US$ 140 million)  through a “green infrastructure” bond in August 2017. If the company doesn’t profit as much as its investors had intended, the government (the guarantor of the bond) could need to intervene with state fund in order to keep operations going. Strangely enough, subsidizing private sector operations with public money would actually be the same situation that LAWMA claims to have confronted with the PSPs under the previous government.

Another dubious aspect of the initiative has been the campaign to employ 27,000 community sanitation workers (CSW) from across the state. The scheme’s language was always confusing, and it was never made clear who the campaign’s target audience was, the needs it was addressing, who it benefits, and the criteria that would be used during the hiring process. The ads mostly emphasized that the initiative would provide formal work (with fair wages, benefits, insurance and pension guarantees) to a greater number of people. But in actuality, the CSW has only expanded the existing street sweeper configuration, except for a now the state has hired a few (mostly women) “highway managers” to clean the city’s streets and highways. Proponents of the CLI think that rebranding these positions with the title “community sanitation worker” and offering more benefits will lead to more a greater number of male applicants. But my question is why does there need to be more men workers in the scheme when women already hold a majority of the sector’s representation? According to LAWMA, the ongoing recruitment and training of CSWs is happening across all of Lagos, but clear signs of this and other aspects of the initiative have yet to be seen.

How does the state’s formalization of waste work consider the thousands of workers who depend on the informal waste sector to sustain their livelihoods? These workers have not been wholly included in the government’s plans. The hiring of CSW’s has not even been an inclusive part of the CLI since the positions require a secondary education, something that most wastepickers could never afford to have.The privatization of dumpsites has had the greatest impact on the city’s wastepickers. Even though LAWMA officials reassured the public that privatization would not happen, private companies were able to assume control of the dumpsite within months. Investigative findings into the conditions at the Olusosun dumpsite foreshadow just what corporate takeover could mean for the future of Lagos’ wastepickers. One should note that scavengers and truck drivers were eager to provide information and shares their stories during the investigation, while Revive staff were significantly more reserved. This makes sense given the unjust antagonism imposed by the company's privatization effort.

Shortly after a private agreement was made with state government officials, Revive (a private company) assumed management of Olusosun from LAWMA in early 2017. Since the takeover, waste trucks and other vehicles are now checked when leaving the premises, new surveillance cameras have been installed, and trucks departing with recyclable plastics and metal must leave the premises via a weighbridge that records the tonnage of their loads. Many wastepickers and scavengers on the dumpsite agree that these changes only work to improve the profitability of Revive’s operations. Before Revive, wastepickers at the bottom of the recycling chain would sell their recyclable to buyers (or scavengers), who would then sell these materials to companies for a modest profit. But now wastepickers are only allowed to sell directly to Revive, which pays them roughly have of what scavengers used to pay. And instead of being paid upfront, wastepickers must now wait until when Revive gets revenues from its corporate customers. Revive monopolizing Olusosun’s recycling marketplace has pushed scavengers from their position in value chain, meaning they (like the wastepickers) must also sell directly to Revive. The scavengers who remain do what they can to support themselves, while more and more wastepickers are returning to their villages in other parts of the country in response to terrible working conditions. This phenomenon seems to unfortunately fit into the narrative pushed by city administrators, who view unemployed “foreigners” (migrant wastepickers) as an obstacle to the city’s efforts to modernize. These officials don’t care about the poor, and the irony is that their actions only shift and intensify conditions of underemployment and poverty that had initially caused rural-urban migration. A more considerate approach might involve a comprehensive reintegration of the urban poor into the economy in a way that promotes livelihood security and the general welfare.

Workers now have fewer and fewer ways to voice their concerns since Revive began its operations, making protest difficult. The dumpsite’s Scavengers’ Association of Nigeria (SAN) was dissolved, and its 12 sitting executives were banned from entering the site and replaced with ones that are more sympathetic to Revive’s agenda. With the remaining workers, compliance is enforced through punishment in the form of detention cabins and extrajudicial lock-ups for disenters. Members of the infamously violent Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) repel all who resist the program. These acts of intimidation are all orchestrated by Revive management in order to maximize profit. After attempting to publicly engage the office of the Commissioner, the ousted Scavengers’ Association executives sought help from the state House Committee on the Environment. The House Committee ruled that the scavengers had been treated unfairly, and compensated the association executives with a conditional six-month contract to manage the Ikorodu dumpsite (instead of LAWMA). But this only puts the executive in the same position as Revive at the Olusosun dumpsite and West African Engineers at the Igando dumpsite. Renewal of the contract relied on the new management’s ability to upgrade the site’s infrastructure within six months from October 2017. This window of opportunity proved challenging for the 10 new managers. The upgrades required an enormous investment, much more than could be attained through fundraising and pooling resources.

Unlike in Olusosun….where LAWMA previously spent considerable sums of money building roads and other infrastructure that Revive now benefits from, the scavenger-managers at Ikorodu have to make heavy investments from a much lower baseline on a much smaller site, signaling a degree of precarity to their enterprise from the start (Sesan, 2018).

While the small group of executives involved seem to have the financial means to accommodate a move from Olusosun to the more remote Ikorodu, the 2,700 scavengers and wastepickers in Olusosun do not have the means to leave their established base. It’s just too costly and impractical for them to do so. The newly appointed executives at Olusosun have also reported that their decision to stay has been borne from necessity. As a result, the situation in Ikorodu only benefits around a dozen people while effectively excluding 3,000 in the process. This is hardly an example of inclusive development.  

The government’s failed response to the intensifying precarity of wastepicker and scavenger livelihoods has been just as problematic as Revive’s violations in Olusosun. LAWMA maintains that Revive, as the legal owner of the site, can fully dictate how informal workers use the site as well as how much they can be compensated. Workers have no legal options under this reconfiguration, despite all the ongoing injustice. LAWMA understands that Revive is a for-profit business, and assures that its responsibilities as a regulatory agency do not interfere with the company’s bottom line. The authority views informal workers as parasitic actors, when Revive is actually parasitizing the value generated by the informal waste sector. It should come as little surprise that these workers have no real place in government’s dream for a more modern, clean Lagos.

The government seems indifferent to the struggles of both wastepickers and lower-level scavengers, who must either choose between harsh and low paying conditions in their current situation or greater uncertainty and risk in a new work environment. Why? Because the government assumes that an organized private sector is the only way for the city to ascend to more “advanced” levels of modernity. This incorrect view endangers millions of informal workers who, without formal employment, sustain their livelihoods from a commons that the government and (its corporate partners) now want for itself. These workers deserve the ability to earn a decent living as part of the formal sector, and the state’s role should be to enforce greater restrictions on the formal sector while providing more opportunities for the informal sector to participate.

The city of Lagos can still demonstrate its commitment to the wellbeing of its most vulnerable citizens, who are under threat from powerful outside interests. However, as of now it remains unclear where the government’s allegiances truly lie.

Historically, informal waste sector workers have done the majority of recycling in Lagos – long before its importance came to the fore of global environmental consciousness – and conducted waste picking activities at dumpsites under the auspices of their trade associations. Among the most prominent of these associations are: the Waste Recycling Association of Nigeria (WRAN), the Scavengers Association of Nigeria (SAN), and the National Association of Scrap and Waste Dealers Employers of Nigeria (NASWDEN). Beginning in 2016, members of these associations were required under the new Ambode-led administration to pay taxes and fees to LAWMA in exchange for accreditation and operating rights. The idea behind the taxation was to guarantee job security and protections for paying members, which was particularly relevant given rumors of the privatized management of government dumpsites. For wastepickers, the income earned from their small-scale recycling businesses have provided food, shelter, education and economic opportunity for generations of their families over the decades. As of early 2017, association executives put the number of individuals working as waste pickers and scrap dealers across dumpsites in the city at over ten thousand (though, as will become evident later, that number is likely to have reduced significantly in light of the spate of job losses brought on by the ongoing restructuring of the sector). Apart from the obvious economic benefit to the families of these workers, their recycling activities have saved the state substantial sums of money by preventing the dumpsites from filling up as quickly as they should have over time.

The Cleaner Lagos Initiative – the new administration’s plan to completely privatize the city’s waste management – was unveiled without public consultation or buy in from the groups that have historically partnered with it. The government has not been transparent with social groups either: dialogue initiated by with representatives of LAWMA and the Ministry of the Environment (MoE) in early 2017 intended to clarify the details and broader societal implications of the initiative yielded little useful insight. The government’s hands off approach so far has only further stirred public interest in the specifics of the initiative, and has many informal workers concerned about the plan’s impact on their livelihoods.

Soon after the appointment of a new governor in May of 2015, business as usual in the waste management sector would end. Shortly into his tenure, the new governor sought to implement a new regime while citing the need for the city to mitigate climate change risks arising from existing waste management practices. The issue was given priority by the new administration, and by August 2016, the Cleaner Lagos Initiative (CLI) was established by executive order and backed by a hastily passed Environmental Protection Law which delegates oversight of the waste management sector to the MoE, LAWMA, and the Public Utilities Monitoring and Assurance Unit (PUMAU). The law stipulates that these government departments will be responsible for particular aspects of sector management going forward: MoE plays an advisory and mediating role between the government and other stakeholders; LAWMA licenses and regulates waste collection and disposal activities; and PUMAU is to be responsible for setting up and enforcing a billing regime which allegedly factors in the differing abilities of households and communities across the city to pay.

With the partial exception of LAWMA, none of these government departments are directly involved in the initiative’s implementation. Instead, implementation is being driven by a new wave of private companies contracted by the government to do the job without having gone through the process of a competitive public tender. A few hundred PSPs from the old regime will have been under the new scheme, but their responsibilities and reach (and their incomes) have been significantly reduced. PSP operators are angered not only over the loss of future business, but because many of them now have no means of paying the balance on the loans they took out to purchase waste collection trucks under the previous regime.

The reason given by LAWMA for the radical downsizing of PSP activity is that these enterprises are relatively small and therefore do not have the technical and financial capacity to operate on the scale required to achieve the objectives of the CLI. Thus, the responsibility for city-wide waste collection from residential premises has been transferred to Visionscape, a waste management company with a global presence but no prior experience operating within Nigeria. The few surviving PSPs have been relegated to collecting waste from commercial premises, while LAWMA is in charge of collecting waste from public areas, including streets and highways. These services are paid for by a Public Utility Levy charged to all customers and collected by PUMAU.

The initiative's design has demonstrated some intention of taking the needs of low-income communities into account. Visionscape has kekes (auto rickshaws) and barges pick up waste from hard-to-reach communities; and PUMAU’s new billing regime gives concessions and exemptions to households with low incomes (though there are few details pertaining to how the eligibility of households is determined or how reduced rates are communicated). According to the Environmental Protection Law, these concessions are partly financed by a dedicated Lagos State Environmental Trust Fund set up in conjunction with other components of the CLI. It remains to be seen, however, the degree to which the implementation of these proposals will reflect their intent.

The discrepancies between the plan’s stated goals and reality have already become apparent. In the two years since the announcement of the CLI, citizens have yet to see any manifestation of Visonscape’s presence in their homes and streets, save for a few public bins placed in certain prominent locations by the company. If anything, the situation seems to have deteriorated, with uncollected waste accumulating in neighbourhoods around the city and PSP trucks queuing at dumpsites for days to offload the waste they do manage to collect. There are conflicting accounts for why this is happening: while scavengers and waste truck drivers that work on the dumpsites cite a lack of experience on the part of the new management for the backlog in waste collection, LAWMA mostly attributes it to unavoidable seasonal complications caused by annual rains. In any case, it has become clear that some institutional wrangling has been going on: some of the PSP operators under the previous regime decided to boycott waste pickup in protest of their looming ouster from the scene, and it is taking longer than was originally envisaged to work out the kinks in the contract between the government and Visionscape.

While Visionscape’s activities so far seem to have had little to no visible impact on the city’s waste management landscape, the company has discreetly been preparing for future operations. In early 2017, the company completed the refurbishment of a high-tech maintenance depot for its fleet of waste collection vehicles at Ogudu, one of three such depots proposed around the city. The question arose as to how this and other investments were funded before user revenue had even been transferred to the company. Many also wondered how the company’s financial projections could accommodate the losses it has accrued since July 1 of 2018 when it was originally billed to start operations. In what appeared to be a savvy business move, the company issued a government-backed N50 billion (approximately US$ 140 million) “green infrastructure” bond in August 2017 to finance its operations. In any case, the possibility remains that the government, as the guarantor of the bond, will have to step in with state funds in the event that the enterprise turns out to be less profitable for investors than envisaged. If this proves to be the case, it would ironically be a reincarnation of the same problem that LAWMA claimed to face with the PSPs under the old regime: that of having to subsidize private sector operations with public money.

Another dubious aspect of the initiative has been the campaign to employ an army of 27,000 community sanitation workers (CSW) across the state. The language of the CSW scheme was always confusing; media advertisements never explained who the campaign would target, what need it is meant to fill, which communities or groups were meant to benefit from it, and the criteria for recruiting candidates to the advertised positions. The ads mostly promoted the formalized aspects of the scheme: decent wages, benefits, and protections such as insurance and pension guarantees for workers. But this is where the dream ended. In reality, CSW has done little more than expand the existing street sweeper scheme where workers (mostly women) are employed by the state as ‘highway managers’ to clean major streets and highways around the city. The rationale offered by the CLI is that rebranding these individuals as community sanitation workers and offering them better protections will expand the pool of interested applicants beyond women – the assumption being that men were reluctant to sign up to the previous version of the scheme because it did not appeal to them. Significantly, the CSW scheme is expected to be deployed across all the wards in Lagos, rather than in a few major locations as was previously the case. But despite claims of LAWMA’s ongoing recruitment and training, citizens have yet to see substantial evidence of the plan in action.

How does the state’s formalization efforts consider the thousands of informal workers who have historically been dependent on the sector for their livelihoods? These workers have clearly been missing from the new waste management architecture envisioned by the government. Even the CSW component of the CLI can be considered an elitist working class initiative: positions are only open to those who have undergone some level of secondary education, a requirement which automatically disqualifies many informal workers who show up on the dumpsites with only a pair of hands and a willingness to work.

The impacts of the ongoing upheaval on informal workers are perhaps best reflected in the operation of the city’s dumpsites since their privatization. Despite repeated assurances by LAWMA officials in early 2017 that rumours of an impending private takeover were untrue – management of the dumpsites was abruptly taken over by a cohort of private companies just a few months later. Investigative findings into the state of affairs at the Olusosun dumpsite since the corporate takeover revealed hostilities between Revive and the traditional occupiers of the dumpsite were apparent. Revive staff members were reserved in their offering of information, while the scavengers and truck drivers were eager to engage and have their voices heard. The watepickers at Olusosun clearly feel wronged by the company's privatization effort, which has worked to undermine their once viable livelihood strategy there.

In early 2017, the private company Revive took over the management of Olusosun from LAWMA following a closed-door agreement with the state government. Since the takeover, checks are now conducted on waste trucks and other vehicles leaving the premises, new surveillance cameras are installed; and trucks carrying recyclable plastics and metal must leave the premises via a weighbridge that records the tonnage of the load they bear. The problem with these improvements is that the only beneficiary seems to be Revive. For almost every other group working on the dumpsite – waste pickers, scavengers, waste truck drivers, petty traders – the changes ushered in by the new management has come at a steep cost. The security cameras and checks, for instance, are there to make sure that no one apart from Revive staff and contractors take recyclables out of the premises to sell. Indeed, the entire set up seems designed to divert profits towards Revive: this is definitely the feeling among many waste pickers and scavengers on the site. Prior to the advent of Revive, the valuable recyclables painstakingly retrieved by the waste pickers at the bottom of the value chain hierarchy was sold on to the next tier of workers – “buyers”, or scavengers – who then sold the goods directly to companies that recycled the items into new products. Recycled plastics, for instance, were sold by waste pickers to scavengers at N20 per kilogramme, and the scavengers sold on the plastics to their corporate customers at N30 per kilogramme, making a profit of N10 per kilogramme.

With the coming of Revive, the equation has changed completely. Wastepickers are prohibited from selling to scavengers and must sell their goods directly to Revive, which pays only N10 to the waste pickers per kilogramme of plastic. Moreover, wastepickers no longer get paid their due upfront as was the case when they sold to scavengers; they now have to wait, sometimes for weeks, to get paid from the proceeds Revive makes from selling in bulk to corporate customers. As such, scavengers have been edged out of their former place in the value chain, and Revive now operates a monopoly in place of the vibrant, inclusive marketplace that was once Olusosun. Scavengers can, in theory, sell directly to Revive, but it must be at the rock-bottom prices that the company buys from waste pickers, making it difficult for the scavengers to sell at a margin. The result is that the dumpsite is now bereft of both scavengers and waste pickers: the relatively few scavengers who remain try to eke out a living while holding out hope for positive change in the near future, while waste pickers who cannot bear the harsh working conditions have reportedly left in large numbers to go back to their villages elsewhere in the country.

This dynamic unfortunately aligns with the position that several administrations have held regarding unemployed “foreigners.” Migrant waste pickers are considered an obstacle to the government’s megacity aspirations and are told that they should return to where they came from. Little consideration is provided by the government, which acts to simply relocate (and in some cases aggravate) the problems of underemployment and poverty that had initially caused the high rates of rural-urban migration in the first place. A more constructive approach would involve a comprehensive economic reintegration plan geared towards the general welfare and job security.

Since Revive began its operations, protest has been difficult. Many of the outlets for workers to voice their concerns have been systematically shut down. The Scavengers’ Association of Nigeria (SAN) headquartered on the dumpsite was disbanded, and 12 sitting executives were banned from entering the site and replaced with ones that are more sympathetic to Revive’s agenda. With the rest of the workers compliance is enforced through both formal and informal means: a detention cabin manned by the police is stationed on the premises, and there have been reports of extrajudicial lock-ups of dissenting scavengers and waste picker. Members of the alleged OPC (Oodua People’s Congress), infamous for their violent actions, drive out anyone who does not conform to the new program. All of this has been allegedly arranged by the management of Revive, in a bid to tighten their hold on opportunities for profit from the site.

Interestingly, executives of the Scavengers’ Association that had been ousted from Olusosun by Revive seeked redress on the matter from the state House Committee on the Environment behind closed doors, after attempts to publicly engage the office of the Commissioner fell through. Following the House Committee’s ruling that the scavengers had been treated unfairly and were therefore eligible for compensation, the association executives were awarded damages in the form of a six-month conditional contract to take over management of the Ikorodu dumpsite from LAWMA, according them concessionaire status similar to that held by Revive at Olusosun and West African Engineers at Igando. Renewal of the contract is contingent on the new management – which essentially comprises ten members of the former SAN executive – being able to upgrade the infrastructure on the site appreciably within the six-month probationary period.

The six-month trial period took effect in October 2017, and the scavengers-turned-managers viewed the window as an investment opportunity. However, this seemingly fortuitous opening posed several challenges, the most notable of which being the scale of investment required: the ten-man management team pooled personal resources together to raise the funds needed to upgrade the site, which in any case had only a fraction of the waste-holding capacity present at their former base in Olusosun. Yet another implication of the new arrangement at Ikorodu concerns the scavengers and waste pickers – about 2,700 of them – that are down the ladder from the elite management class. While the small group of executives involved appear to have the financial means to sustain the move from their former bustling space at Olusosun to this remote part of Ikorodu, the latter is simply too far from the centre for most scavengers who had already established their base at Olusosun. The result is that, while the scavengers are free in theory to transfer to the dumpsite now under the management of their erstwhile representatives, many of them find the option impractical. Indeed, this is the sentiment expressed by members of the newly instituted executive at Olusosun: many of them have stayed behind at the site not out of choice, but because they see no viable alternatives on the horizon. At best, the Ikorodu “solution” can be seen as a deal that provides some form of compensation for about a dozen people but manages to exclude nearly 3,000 in the process – hardly the definition of inclusive development.

More troubling than the apparent violations committed by Revive at Olusosun is the response (or lack thereof) of government actors to the precarious position that the waste pickers and scavengers on the site have suddenly found themselves in. When approached regarding drastic reductions in wastepickers incomes under the new regime, LAWMA’s responded that since legal ownership of the dumpsite has been transferred to Revive, the company has every right to dictate the terms under which the informal workers on the site can operate. This arrangement leaves the workers with no legal recourse or protections, even when it is clear that their rights are being trampled upon and their voices being systematically silenced. LAWMA’s sympathies clearly lie with Revive: the authority recognizes that the company is in the business to make a profit and makes certain that its regulatory role does not infringe upon the profit-making potential of the company. At the same time, the authority sees informal workers as parasitic actors who take every opportunity they can get to prey on themselves and the government. It should come as little surprise that these workers have no real place in government’s bold new vision for a cleaner Lagos. As we saw in the Olusosun example, even an arrangement that seemed to accommodate the needs of dispossessed scavengers turned out, upon closer inspection, to be a poorly conceived palliative measure that presents huge challenges for an elite class of scavengers and exacerbates the economic disparity between them and the mass of lower-level scavengers on the site.

The government seems oblivious to the struggle of this majority who have little choice between sticking with harsh conditions on familiar territory and striking out in a new work environment with uncertain prospects. In fact, it is clear that the government only views the organized private sector as the legitimate avenue achieving its vision of a megacity worthy of international acclaim. This view is not just inaccurate and incomplete; it is dangerous for the millions of informal workers who, in the absence of formal employment opportunities, resourcefully eke out a living from the fringes that the government now wants to obliterate. Rather than being edged out, these workers need to be given protections within the framework of the CLI that will enable them to co-exist profitably with formal operators. To this end, the state needs to re-envision itself as a mediator between the formal and informal sectors, enforcing boundaries for the former and enabling participation by the latter.

It has been said that the true test of any government lies in the way it responds to its most vulnerable citizens. There is still an opportunity here for Lagos to demonstrate its commitment to the wellbeing of every last citizen, especially when it is under threat from powerful outside interests. Will the government rise to the challenge?

(This account has been largely informed by the research of Dr. Temilade Sesan - Centre for Petroleum, Energy Economics and Law, University of Ibadan)