Review: Daniel Agbiboa, ‘Mobility, Mobilisation and Counter/Insurgency’ and ‘They Eat Our Sweat’
Mobilising Corruption and the Mobility of Insurgency in Africa
Review of Daniel E. Agbiboa’s Mobility, Mobilisation and Counter/Insurgency. The Routes of Terror in an African Context (University of Michigan Press, 2022), 248 pages, and They Eat Our Sweat. Transport, Labor, Corruption and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 2022), 288 pages.
Abstract
The many challenges that Africa faces have exercised the minds of scholars, policy makers and commentators. These challenges are complex, their root causes contested, and suggested solutions endlessly debated. The two books under review tackle two of Africa’s seemingly intractable problems: corruption and security concerns that manifest themselves in terms of armed insurgency. The first is concerned with sweat while the other is about blood: who sheds them, for what purpose and who benefits from the ensuing miseries? Nigeria is the country of study; the methodological approach is ethnographical, while the discussion is framed around mobility, mobilisation and transportation.
Reviewed by Gabriel O. Apata
A Yoruba saying holds that if one is not chasing something, something must be chasing one. Meaning that one is either a prey or a predator. This analogy speaks to the idea of pursuit and flight, both consisting of movement towards survival and capture. Between these bookends lie modes of living and of dying, both social and actual (Patterson, 1982; Mbembe, 2021). Mobilisation is a form of assembling, preparatory towards movement, while mobility is utility or facility that is geared towards action. At some point sweat is wrung from the brow and at another blood is shed. A cannibalistic fetishism of ritualised eating (of sweat) and shedding (of blood) follows. Thus, the materialism of existence and survival expresses itself in terms of corrupt practices, while the second is motivated by the pursuit of religious ideology whose instrument of capture or killing is couched in terms of mobility. The first embraces aspects of modernity, while the second tacitly rejects it. In this second sense, corruption is imbricated in the flowering of certain religious insurgencies in Africa such as Boko Haram. Thus, corruption and violence intersect at the point of mobilisation and mobility.
This brief summary lays out the main themes that these splendidly researched books by Daniel Agbiboa address: They Eat Our Sweat and Mobility, Mobilisation and Counter/Insurgency. The two books analytically examine two seemingly radically different problems, but which might as well be continuous with each other. This is because, as already mentioned, both intersect at the points of mobility, mobilisation and transportation. The first title concerns corruption, urbanism and how transport systems in Africa contribute to living and dying. The second book examines the emergence and operations of the insurgency religious group, Boko Haram. By examining the concepts of corruption and insurgency through the tropes of mobility and transportation, the author charts a path less travelled by scholars working in these subject areas. In both cases, Nigeria is the country of focus.
We begin with corruption, which has become synonymous with Africa while Nigeria is regarded as its standard bearer. But why so? Explanations vary. One is that African corruption is genetic, and grows like a disease from within, such as cancer in the marrow (Banfield, 1967). A second is the cultural explanation which shifts slightly away from the genetic model. Corruption is not in the blood, but rather a cultural practice. But it beggars belief that a concept as elusive as corruption could be explained by an even more elusive concept like culture. In any case, Agbiboa shows how these explanations collapse under rigorous interrogatory analysis and puts to the sword several sacred cows. Here he makes three critical points. The first problem is one of definition. Corruption is too ubiquitous, too diffused, too ambiguous, too complex to be pinned down. Second, he attacks the near consensus agreement among scholars that corruption is the appropriation of public assets for private gain and indeed questions the public and private distinction. Third, he is critical of the distinction between grand and petty corruption (Mbaku, 2007; Rose-Ackerman).
What then is corruption in an African context? If one sentence sums up Agbiboa’s main thesis it is this. ‘Corruption is everywhere and nowhere’, he writes (206). In other words, corruption is both a contested concept as well as a social process that meshes the legal with illegal practices or breaks down social barriers. ‘It is [where] the intersections of the formal and the informal, the urban and the political, the spatialization and the materialization of power, exclusion, and inequality in cities’ (206). Thus, corruption is a hybrid concept, a mix bag, indeed a baggy monster of a term. African corruption therefore is unlike Plato’s nature that can be carved out at the joint because there is joint to be carved out. What we have is rather a circular process of social interactions. If corruption is a cultural practice and each culture has its own unique set of practices, then this relativist conception precludes any objective assessment of the term. How can an objective assessment of corruption be produced within these liminal spaces which in turn begs the question of who decides what is corrupt and by what standard?
Thus, Agbiboa points out that there appears to be no term in any indigenous in African language that translates into corruption. I have myself made this point in my own modest offering (Apata, 2019), where I argue that corruption is a universal phenomenon which is often applied to Africa as a culture specific problem. A racialised or ethno-national narrative is then generated which invokes a neo-genetic explanation that is rendered in the medical language of pathologies and disease. My conclusion is that African corruption is a Western invention both as a Foucauldian dispositif and praxis.
In sum, there really is no theory of corruption; there are merely explanatory models that seek to account for what is a complex problem. To approach corruption from the top – in terms of grand corruption - misses the important facet of the way that the concept works at the bottom. By collapsing the distinction between grand and petty corruption, Agbiboa invests petty corruption with a significance that extends beyond its perceived pettiness. He then goes on to explore the sociology of everyday life in a way that illuminates the way corruption works in practice. He visits the teeming metropolis of Lagos, where he conducts a study of the way in which people negotiate their ordinary day to day lives within the transport system. Diving into the deep end of the melee and the rough and tumble of Lagos transport life the author harvests rich ideas about the way in which corruption works from ground level. A roadblock or checkpoint becomes a staging post not only for regulating traffic but for facilitating bribery. Motorists pay police bribe at every turn; the police share the proceeds with their superiors, who pay commission to those at the top. Each eats the sweat of the other in a food chain that rises all the way to the top. Those at the top create unbearable living conditions for those at the bottom, who resort to means of survival that includes paying their way with their sweat through life, thus feeding those at the top. The traffic of corruption much like the wheel of a vehicle turns in urban city life.
The colloquial language of chop is brought into the conversation and stretched a good deal to encapsulate the corruption discourse. The idiom of chop is pervasive across Africa and ranges in meaning from to have sex – chop the girl - to cut down a tree – chop the tree. But its most persistent usage is to eat, which connotes both metaphoric and literal meanings. Agbiboa runs through many more of this ‘linguistic anthropology’, which serves as the cue for Bayart’s (1989) ‘politics of the belly’ that drives ‘the rush for spoils.’ The rush for spoils is linked to notions of primitive cannibalism, of the occult and witchcraft. Bayart of course is mistaken. As Agbiboa himself points out, the metaphor of eating which describes corruption is not peculiar to Africa. In any case, this is where Marx could usefully have been brought into the discussion. And here’s how.
The introduction of motorbikes as taxis in Nigeria began an important phase in Nigeria’s history of transportation, mobility, and mobilisation. But it also ushered in a new dimension in corruption and criminality. Called okada in the south and achaba in the north, they are driven mainly by young men, previously unemployed, mostly disaffected, largely disenfranchised from the political system. Stuck in a rut, with nothing to do and with time on their hands, many turned to motorbikes which they used as taxis. Chameleonic in character, these young taxi drivers can change in an instant to a mob, easily mobilised into a group, a crowd, an army of thugs to be used as instruments of political action, as the need arises. This makes them versatile and easily adaptable to changing social circumstances. As Agbiboa points out, the work they do is dirty as they can be used to do other people’s dirty work. Although some own the motorbikes or other vehicles (buses- danfos, molues) that are used as taxis, many work for owners to whom they return agreed revenue. In order to meet the daily target of takings, they speed through traffic, weaving dangerously around corners and small spaces (because ‘time is money’), causing accidents, chaos, injury and death.
Marx enters the picture in the sense that Agbiboa’s notion of eating other people’s sweat re-articulates Marx’s commodification of labour. In short, Agbiboa’s sweat is Marx’s idea of labour, while transportation becomes Marx’s means of production. The metaphor of chop or to eat which invokes condescending notions of African occult or witchcraft can then be read as Marx’s commodity fetishism. The owners of these taxis fit Marx’s owners of the means of production who, through the exploitation of labour (sweat) consume (eat) the products of other people’s labours. This Marxian dimension would have enriched the discussion. Yet, having identified the problem, how do we solve it? Agbiboa does not quite address this question. But perhaps his thesis does quite require a solution. His is an attempt to explain and analyse the problem.
Agbiboa extends his discussion to cover the nature of Africa’s metropolitan or urban cities and the role that transportation plays in sustaining life in these places. Africa has the fewest number of cars, so people rely on some form of public transport. However, these public transports are not all run by the state but by the private or informal sector in what he calls the ‘paratransit’ system. What transpires is the mixture of the private and public that creates a hybrid or blurred lines of the public and the private. Equally, we see why the distinction between the formal and informal sectors collapses.
To end this part of the discussion, there is a tendency to regard transportation as a mere means to an end, a telos towards which everything points. This means of getting from one point to another is regarded as preparatory to that end, which makes the end the more significant point. To a certain degree, this is an error. Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that ‘the medium is the message’ is relevant here, in the sense that mobility or transportation is an entire experience all of its own, something embedded within social processes, and not mere facility. Agbiboa locates corruption as praxis that obtains within social processes, which defies easy compartmentalisation. It is mobile and moves in much the same way that the motorbike can weave seamlessly through urban jungles both in the open and through the dark crevices of the city. And just like the motorbike can be a source for good or evil, what is labelled corruption could also be a source for good and evil.
Now we come to the second book which deals with security and the Boko Haram insurgency that has been waging war against the Nigerian state and people. In much the same way that he researched corruption in Lagos, Agbiboa employs the same methodology in his research into Boko Haram. Here he forages deep into the forest in which the group operates (both literally and figuratively), digging into the roots of the group’s ideology and mode of operation. The outcome of this research is a detailed account of the way in which the group was created, how it is mobilised and how it executes its ideological quests.
To start with, the term Haram comes from the Arabic which means something forbidden. The word harmattan for instance – an ill-wind that blows no good - is derived from this stem. However, there is confusion as to what Boko Haram really means. Agbiboa’s attempt at clarification merely produces its own slight confusion. For instance, he claims that ‘the “Boko” in Boko haram refers not to western education (as all western media repeat unthinkingly) but to the westernised lifestyles…’ (66). This is slightly misleading. First, the Hausa word for school is makaranta; but a distinction is made between two kinds of makarantas (schools). There is makarantan Allo which refers to an Islamic centre of learning while makarantan Boko refers to Western institution of learning. Although Agbiboa correctly points out that Western civilisation or modernity is the culture which Boko Haram rejects. But the various Western style institutions of learning – makarantan Boko – are regarded as vectors of Western civilisation and modernity, which explains the group’s attack on schools. Therefore, to claim that the ‘Boko’ in Boko haram refers not to Western education is to exclude a facet of the group’s grievance, even though it is the case that it is the entire Western modernist structure that the group is intent on overthrowing. But this idea is not new.
When the British first arrived in Nigeria, Northern Muslims rejected the introduction of Western culture and systems of administration, including education and Christianity. Through the policy of Indirect-Rule, the British allowed the local Emirate rulers to rule directly according to pre-colonial indigenous systems of politics and jurisprudence but caveated under British administrative oversight. Grudgingly and over time they accepted certain aspects of modernity that they found materially beneficial but held on to the guiding principles of Islam. In the 19th century, the great Jihadist Usman Dan Fodio had fought holy wars against Northern Emirs whom he regarded as engaged in practices that he deemed to be anti-Islamic. Thus, the emergence of the Boko Haram insurgency is a recrudescence of the old-style jihadi movement that flourished under Dan Fodio. The story turns full circle.
As mentioned above, the proliferation of motorbikes as taxis in Nigerian cities have altered city life. The achaba - as it is known in the north - ostensibly a means of transport has been turned into weapons of war, or the preferred vehicle for insurgency groups. Agbiboa traces its recent history, particularly in the North of the country. Certain leading political leaders such as the governor of one of the Northern State of Bornu – the founding State of Boko Haram - Ali Modu Sheriff (2003-2011) saw this group as a useful political instrument for the propagation of his political ideology. The ideology was Islamic, and the push was for the islamisation of the state, based on Sharia jurisprudence. To this end, Sheriff formed a holly alliance with Mohammed Yusuf, the founder of Boko Haram and upon this agreement mobilised the group which he provided with motorbikes. The army of Boko Haram soldiers was born.
Thus, the motorbike became more than a mode of transport, morphing into a weapon as deadly as a rocket launcher. They are swift, speedy, dynamic, difficult to pin down and take up little space, making them easily concealable after an attack had been executed. The poor roads and rough terrain pose no challenges for them; they ride over them like rally riders. It is therefore fair to say that without these motorbikes the effectiveness of the insurgency group would be severely curtailed. However, not only the motorbikes but, human beings and animals too, have been used as weapons. The suicide bomber takes his own life and many in the process, which is shocking enough, but also shocking are the animals used as weapons. Strapped with bombs they are sent to kill. Here we also find that roadblocks and checkpoints function as gatekeepers that deny passage to those with legitimate business to transact while letting through those intent on causing harm.
The Boko Haram as a group fits Deleuze and Guattari’s (2020) description of the ‘war machine.’ The war machine is a ‘collective body’, an assemblage that is nomadic in invention, dynamic in operation, (speed, stealth etc.) and stands outside or as exterior to the settled or stable entity that is the state. As they put it, ‘The war machine invents speed and secrecy’ (413). Machiavelli had warned his Prince to beware of the adoring crowds who could one day turn against him. Deleuze and Guattari have also shown how the war machine can turn on its own kind. This is precisely what happened to Governor Sheriff when the Boko haram turned on him and his political class as they began to intensify their murderous campaign against the police, army and other political leaders.
Also, the relationship between an insurgency group such as Boko Haram and the Nigerian state is reminiscent of Althusser’s (2014) relationship between the ideological state apparatuses (ISA) and repressive state apparatuses. Both the ideological and repressive apparatuses are pitted against each other in recurring conflict. The first constitutes part of the private domain while the second constitutes the public. The state functions largely through repression or what Foucault would describe as power and control. For Althusser, the State’s repressive regime employs violence as means of repressing the group, which in turn uses violence against the state. Again, a cycle of violence ensues.
In conclusion, the point of these books is this. Human beings move; vehicles move; weapons and ballistics move. Each is an instrumentation that carries the potential for death and destruction. Insurgency groups have found objects and movement a highly effective mix in their campaigns of terror. Therefore, in order to better understand their operations we need to do it through the concepts of movement and mobilisation. Equally, corruption entails a form of transaction that is trafficked on the highways and low roads of the metropolis. What is petty eventually feeds into what is grand in the traffic of corruption and it various practices.
These two books open fresh perspectives on the corruption and insurgency debate in Africa. The strengths of the discussion lie in the ethnographic research that supports the books’ main theses. Closely argued, the theme of nomadism is replete in these books in that the author invites the reader to view corruption as nomadic, elusive, dynamic, constantly shifting into new spaces. Corruption is a mobile concept that turns much as the wheels of the motorbike. In this ritualised, routinised and repetitive loop in the context of everyday urban life where sweat is wrung from the brow and consumed or eaten by others. As for the Boko Haram insurgency, the wheels have turned full circle in a historical sense. These two volumes do make a useful contribute to the discussions on corruption and security in Africa.
References
Althusser, (2014) On the Reproduction of Capitalism. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. London: Verso.
Apata, Gabriel (2019) “Corruption and the Post-Colonial State: How the West Invented African Corruption.” Journal of Contemporary African Studies, Vol.37 (1). Doi/10.1080/02589001.2018.1497292
Banfield, Edward (1967) The Moral Basis of a Backward People. New York: Free Press
Deleuze, Giles., Guattari, Felix (2020) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London, New York: Bloomsbury.
Mbaku, John (2007) Corruption in Africa: Causes Consequences, and Cleanups. Lanham MD: Lexington Books.
Mbembe, Achille (2021) Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press
Patterson, Orlando (1982) Slavery and Social Death. A Comparative Study. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press
Gabriel O. Apata is a research scholar and writer whose works cut across the humanities and social sciences. His interests include Philosophy, Sociology, Aesthetics, Religion, Post-colonial Studies, African history and politics and Diaspora Studies.
