They Eat Our Sweat examines the corruption complex in Africa in the context of transportion. Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria, Agbiboa shows that corruption is driven by the imperatives of urban economic competition.
The title of Daniel Agbiboa's They Eat Our Sweat is decidedly lacking in ambiguity or ambivalence, as befits its subject matter: the infamous level of corruption in Lagos, as experienced by people in the transport business. "They" are police officers and touts who lurk at junctions, demanding and receiving bribes from drivers of minibuses, motorbikes, and tricycle taxis. "Our sweat" is their meager earnings. The fact that city employees like the police are colluding with informal sector actors brings home an idea at the core of the book: the order and disorder in African cities derives from "collusions and collisions between state and non-state actors" (p. 138). Writ large, this argument rejects simplistic explanations of the city's corruption.
