The daredevils who keep Lagos moving

The fabric of Lagos, Nigeria, is delicately strung together: The megacity spills from the mainland onto several islands in a lagoon that brushes against the Atlantic Ocean. It covers an area of about 1,300 square miles, and many Lagosians navigate the sprawling landscape on the back of a motorcycle taxi, or okada. Their daredevil drivers, called riders, zigzag through congested streets, dodging potholes and pedestrians as both rider and passenger—or, in some cases, multiple passengers—try to stay upright and unharmed. Public transportation here can be inefficient, and roads can be difficult to maneuver on foot. Okadas “solve a crucial problem that the government has been unable to solve for years,” says photographer and National Geographic Explorer Victor Adewale, who was born and raised in Lagos.

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Some see okadas as a menace. Local officials claim riders are responsible for a large portion of Lagos’s traffic accidents, and robberies are often committed by people on motorcycles. To improve road safety, bureaucrats have banned commercial motorcycles from bridges, highways, and many other parts of the city.

In 2019, the government launched the Bus Reform Initiative, which has deployed hundreds of new buses along dozens of routes across the region. That hasn’t decreased the population’s appetite for okadas, which are still widely used to ferry commuters to neighborhoods the buses can’t reach. “Everybody you see on the streets is riding in defiance of the ban because they don’t have another option,” Adewale says. Traditionally, the motorcycles have been the cheapest choice for passengers—some rides cost the equivalent of less than a U.S. dollar—and have provided a reliable living for those who drive them in a city where wages can be hard to come by. “I am still riding because my job as a mechanic is not bringing in the income I need on time,” says Oluwafemi Ipadeola, a friend of Adewale’s father who has driven okadas for over 20 years to pay for his children’s education. Fares are beginning to rise as riders factor in the risk of getting caught.

Enforcement of the ban is uneven, but residents still operating okadas are vulnerable and face harassment from police, who frequently arrest riders and demand extortion payments in exchange for confiscated motorcycles. “People pay as much as 90,000 naira [$57] to get their motorcycle back,” Adewale says. “Sometimes they don’t get it back. Sometimes they have to watch it get crushed.” The government has impounded and destroyed thousands of okadas, a devastating blow. The motorcycles are expensive—up to 33 times the median annual salary in Lagos—and riders frequently buy them in installments.

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Riders haven’t taken the ban lying down. Numerous protests have led to clashes with police, and at least one okada union has filed a lawsuit against the government, seeking both a repeal of the ban and lost wages.

Adewale’s opinion of okadas has changed over the years. When he was a boy, his father, who rode okadas for 25 years, used the same bike to take the family to church and the market, and to drop off Adewale and his brother at school. His whole family rode on the back of the motorcycle, which was a marker of lower social class. At the time, he felt ashamed and would get off the okada a short distance from school so his classmates wouldn’t see him. But that shame has now evolved into pride as Adewale has watched the riders navigate these new challenges: “They refuse to be erased from the city.”