Voice of the Garage: A Conversation With Lagos's Most Unlikely Union Leader

Everyone at Ojuelegba bus park calls him Baba Rasaki, though his government name, which appears on NURTW correspondence and the occasional newspaper mention, is Lawal Rasaki Adewunmi. He has been a fixture of Lagos's informal transport economy since 1991, when he started as a fourteen-year-old conductor hanging off the side of a danfo, shouting destinations to passers-by for a cut of the day's fares. He is, by his own cheerful admission, barely literate in formal English, a fact he has turned into something close to a badge of honour. "Grammar does not move a bus from Ojuelegba to CMS," he says. "Negotiation does. I learned negotiation on the road, not in a classroom."

Baba Rasaki's rise within the transport union hierarchy was gradual and, he insists, entirely accidental. He became a driver at twenty, then a bus owner by his late twenties through years of saving conductor earnings that most of his peers spent as quickly as they came in. By his forties, fellow drivers at his park had started bringing him disputes to settle informally — a fare disagreement, a territorial clash between rival park factions, a driver accused of cheating another on a vehicle-sharing arrangement. "I didn't ask to be the one people came to," he says. "They just kept coming, and eventually the union gave me a title to match what I was already doing for free."

Negotiating With a Government That Rarely Listens

The role that has brought Baba Rasaki the most public attention is his position representing a cluster of park unions in periodic negotiations with Lagos State transport authorities over levies, route allocations, and the government's recurring efforts to formalise danfo operations under newer transport schemes. He is blunt about the tension inherent in his position: he genuinely supports efforts to modernise and regulate the sector, having seen firsthand how chaotic and dangerous unregulated routes can be, but he is equally committed to protecting the livelihoods of drivers and conductors who cannot afford the costs that formalisation often imposes.

"Government officials come to meetings with PowerPoint slides about 'efficient transport corridors,'" he says, not without some amusement. "I come with the actual knowledge of which roads flood in July, which junctions the touts control, and which drivers will simply refuse a new route no matter what paper says. Both kinds of knowledge matter. The mistake government makes is thinking only their kind counts." He has, by his own count, sat through over forty formal negotiation sessions with state transport officials over the past decade, outlasting at least four commissioners.

"A park without a strong voice at the table gets regulated the way people regulate cattle — for the convenience of the regulator, not the cattle."

Baba Rasaki is realistic about the union system's reputation, acknowledging openly that NURTW structures across Lagos have long been associated with extortion, violent turf disputes, and the kind of unofficial levies that drivers resent paying but fear refusing. He insists his own park has largely cleaned up such practices under his watch, though he is careful not to claim the entire system has reformed. "I cannot speak for every park in Lagos," he says. "I can only tell you what happens at Ojuelegba, and invite anyone who doubts me to come and ask the drivers themselves."

What Thirty Years on the Road Have Taught Him

Despite his standing, Baba Rasaki has never stopped driving occasionally, insisting that a leader who loses touch with the actual road loses the right to speak for the people on it. He drives his own bus at least two days a week, "to remember what a fuel price increase actually feels like in my own pocket, not just in a meeting." His three children have all finished secondary school, a fact he mentions with visible pride, and his eldest, now at university studying law, has told him she intends to specialise in labour rights — a decision Baba Rasaki jokes he will take full credit for, "even though I have never once told her what to study."

At fifty, with a slight limp from a motorcycle accident years ago, Baba Rasaki says he has started, reluctantly, grooming a successor within the union, a driver in his thirties he considers sharp enough to eventually take over the negotiating table. "I will not do this job until I die," he says. "But I will also not hand it to anyone who has not first spent real years shouting bus stops in the rain. That is where the authority to lead this garage actually comes from."