ABSTRACT
Since 1999, Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital and Africa’s largest megacity, has attracted international attention not for its chaos but instead as a possible model of effective urban renewal and city governance in Africa. Yet this buoyant story of Lagos’ transformation conceals the changing geography of risk, insecurity, and radical uncertainty in which the city’s informal workers weave their routine existence. Drawing on eight months of in-depth interviews and content analysis of original court records (affidavits and counter-affidavits), this chapter analytically explores how a popular but de facto group of commercial motorcyclists (okada riders) in Lagos are appealing to state laws as weapons of resistance against urban renewal decisions that threaten their spaces of manoeuvre and survival, and, therefore, their right to the city. Such “legalism from below” constitutes a radical departure from popular narratives of subaltern resistance as “quiet encroachments,” which are non-collective, unassuming, and illegal in nature.
