“The Yoruba agbero”: Countering a Singular Narrative

In Lagos, agberos are responsible for collecting levies from commercial vehicles

One week into my vacation (which usually falls in May), I was in a car travelling down to Ibadan from Lagos.

The car made a stop at the entrance to a popular church camp along the highway to pick up a lady and a guy who were apparently new to the area.

While the driver was moving their luggage into the car, an agbero (levy-collecting transport worker) accosted him aggressively asking for his fare.

After the driver gave him some money, one of the passengers, a guy seated directly in front of me, loudly hissed, saying with a thick Pidgin English accent: "Na wah o, na so all these agbero just full Yoruba land. Yoruba people and agbero."

That statement irritated me because earlier that day, I had read several disgusting negative stereotypes being made about my ethnic identity on X.

"What did Yoruba people do again? Any small thing, 'Yoruba people this, Yoruba people that,' what is the colour of your problem?" I blurted out in exasperation.

The guy was surprised, he probably didn’t expect anyone to counter the words that fell from his lips.

In a display of mulishness, he repeated it, "Yoruba people too dey tolerate agbero."

To this I answered sharply, "So what do you suggest? We should pack all of them into a trailer and dump them in the lagoon? Where exactly are you from, if I may ask?"

The guy paused a bit, his reluctance to answer me was palpable.

This time around two other passengers interjected, asking him the same question.

Perhaps realising that he had no supporter in that car of seven passengers, he said, "I’m from Akwa Ibom."

"Are there touts in your state?" another passenger chimed in.

The guy began to stammer, then said, "Yes, we have touts in our state but not like in Yorubaland. If they do anyhow for there, my people no dey respect them, them go kill them even before the police arrive. Police sef fear my people."

At that point I smiled briefly and told the guy next to me in Yoruba with acerbic sarcasm, "How lovely. So this guy is recommending mob violence as a solution to agbero."

The rest of the exchange that ensued was amusing and at the same time, saddening, till the cynical guy alighted.

This narrative of Yoruba men being "irresponsible, lazy, enamoured with agbero (transport union fare collectors) and being addicted to betting and drugs" among others, is one that I’ve heard, read and have had some ignorant folks repeat even to my face.

And this negative stereotype of the Yoruba has been repeated so many times that it has taken on a life of its own.

It has become the dogma on the lips of the non-Yoruba bigoted trolls that creep out from the underbelly of social media.

These hateful tropes have been taken up by even educated people who are supposed to know better and think more critically. And that's why I think this misinformation needs to be refuted and challenged by rational people, no matter who is rehashing them.

It was Chimamanda Adichie who spoke about the danger of a "single story" which she said is created by showing "a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again."

She added, "The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story."

How is this defamatory single story created in the context of the Yoruba? Here's this:

1. You ignore all the other states of the South West that lack the culture of agbero and focus only on Lagos.

2. You lump transport union levy collectors together with cultists and drug-addled hoodlums and call them "agberos."

3. You blithely ignore the efforts of the government, law enforcement, NGOs and even faith based organisation that are working to tame the menace of street touts in Lagos and embarked on rehabilitation efforts.

4. You ignore the litany of editorials, studies and reports — penned by numerous Yoruba writers and scholars — that have evaluated the roots of the problem of thuggery and cultism and call for an end to it.

5. You pretend that there are no touts in your region or suppress any fact that indicates the level of power they wield over commuters and pedestrians while simultaneously exaggerating the same in the SW.

6. You refuse to see tens of thousands of Yoruba sons and daughters who are responsible, upright, educated, professional, and are neither addicted to gambling nor hooked on drugs.

And you know why? Because the human mind is a powerful focal lens. It can see only what it wants to see.

Just like an armed robber "refuses to see" the police or a police station until he is caught, a mind that has been prepped and configured with a "single story" about others will refuse to see anything that conflicts with that mindset.

Hate blinds

In addition to this, one thing about hate is that it blinds. It can blind you so much that you won't see anything good or noble about your target of hate, even if it's sitting on your laps like a Hippo.

You might have grown in a ghetto in a SW state and you saw things that reinforced negative stereotypes about the Yoruba, but I'm here to tell you that the specimen of people you saw cannot justify your hasty generalisation of the entire tribe.

Even at that, you can’t tell me that you didn't see examples that dissented.

Bimbo Ademoye, a Nollywood actress

Let’s even accept that these people in the ghetto communities were “factory-made” to have the same character, realities or thinking, is it fair to use the actions of 1,000 people to judge a million of people?

How could you look across the length and breadth of Lagos — or the whole of the South West — and claim that becoming a tout is the goal, rather than seeing that the hoodlum menace is a consequence of the failure of the Nigerian system?

If these people had access to sound education, social welfare, financial support and good upbringing, do you think they'd just wake up one day and want to become glue-sniffing louts at the bus stops?

You see, there’s nobody that can’t be successful in life if given the right opportunities and timing. Have you ever deigned to walk up to these agberos and "lazy" street guys and listened to their stories?

It's so easy to sit in your comfy space and judge the underdogs in society as lazy because they are not where you are today, but maybe if you listened to their stories you will realise that life doesn't come in black and white.

You will realise that people have different realities that pushed them to the streets, and there are many citizens who are victims of a failed system.

I know a guy, Tope, who ended up in the streets of Lagos sleeping under trucks and doing menial jobs after his mother died in 2008. He didn’t know his father until much later. He is a Yoruba guy so I guess he must be “lazy?”

What about Joseph? He lost his parents after secondary school and was abandoned in a rehabilitation centre in Patani, Delta State before he found his way back to Lagos and was rejected by the pastors of the church his mother pastored before her demise.

Having no other option, he became a street boy in Ketu, until help came for him. Today he works in a multinational company. Another “lazy” Yoruba agbero, right? Mind you, not every guy out there will have the same happy ending as he did. Reality isn’t Walt Disney.

So when a person looks at the menace of louts in a particular city, refuses to see the lack of education, the influence of drugs, the breakdown of the family, political machinations, or lack of vocational skills as the causes but then pins it on the lowest common decimal — ethnicity — it says a lot about the person’s intelligence, or lack of it.

Science tells us that each of us has a unique genetic identity.

Before you pin something on an innate identity such as ethnicity, perhaps you might want to think a bit more deeply and ask yourself: Is this issue rooted in the genes or does it stem from the influence of the environment?