Petroleum, Liberalization, and Deindustrialization

Nigeria is growing quickly, both economically and in terms of its population; it is assumed currently to have well over 160 million people. Nigeria has also experienced rapid urbanization; Lagos, the former administrative capital and now the commercial hub, has more than 15 million inhabitants. While the country was once a successful peasant cash crop export economy with cocoa, palm oil, and groundnuts as its main staples, petroleum has replaced agriculture as the principle source of state income since the early 1970s, with production on average reaching more than two million barrels a day. Centralization of control has generated a prosperous middle class, and a great deal of foreign investment also in areas outside of petroleum—for example, in shopping malls and housing estates—has been directed mainly toward servicing this sector. Heavy indebtedness from the 1980s onward has resulted in foreign involvement (IMF and the World Bank), home-gown “structural adjustment,” and slow liberalization. A large, often state-supported manufacturing sector, originally believed to be evidence of “development,” has been allowed to collapse. This includes the textile industry, the largest of them all. While in the mid-1990s it still contained some sixty thousand unionized members in major factories in the northern cities of Kaduna and Kano and in the coastal city of Lagos, it has now been reduced to less than a third of that size. The collapse is a direct result of the liberalization of foreign trade and the massive import of textiles, primarily from China and India. The spinning, weaving, and printing of “African prints” within Nigeria are still important enterprises, and they have provided some element of protection against this onslaught from abroad. But the failure of the state to improve infrastructure, above all electricity supply, and to secure the borders against illicit imports has left the industry at the mercy of these external forces.

Self-Employed Artisans in Nigeria’s Informal Economy

While the collapse of manufacturing, especially in large towns, is conspicuous, the overwhelming majority of the Nigerian people eke out a living in the “informal economy,” notably as traders, craftsmen, and service providers, along with occasional wage workers, most of whom are apprentices. “Informality,” as conceived here, encompasses entrepreneurship in small-scale operations with small capital investment and low levels of formal training. These self-employed artisans—for example, tailors, carpenters, automobile technicians, fitters, welders—with one or a few apprentices epitomize an important form of informal economy producers who typically are found in mid-Africa and who have little in common, for instance, with the “outsourced” wage workers who populate the informal economy in South Africa (Fajana Reference Fajana2008; Hlela Reference Hlela2003). Scattered and sometimes mobile locations are common, but operations of various sizes can also be clustered in marketplaces. A substantial number of workers, particularly women, work from home. In most of these ventures relations to the state in the form of registration and taxation may exist, but they may also be evaded. In the workshops labor relations are highly paternalistic. As distinguished from the large-scale industry employing wage labor, these establishments mainly ignore labor laws, and in fact this disregard can be seen as a main criterion of their informality.

All of these structural features of the informal economy are commonly seen as obstacles to organized collective action for political purposes (Bonner & Spooner Reference Bonner and Spooner2011b). In this study we see how informal workers expanded their ambitions with a determination to overcome their limited forms of organization and enter the political arena. We have chosen to draw attention to the case of tailors, for various empirical reasons, as discussed below. There is certainly scope for wider studies involving what is happening among other sections of the informal economy.

Data and the Study Context

The article is based primarily on interviews conducted mostly in Lagos in February and March 2012 with tailor-organizers, the textile labor union, and staff members of FIWON. These were preceded by discussions in Abuja and Lagos with leaders of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC—the national federation of labor unions) and the Joint Action Front (JAF), the civil society part of the Labour‒Civil Society Coalition (LASCO), both of which played major roles in the January 2012 fuel-subsidy uprising. In particular, we discussed the role of informal organizations and other popular participants in the events. Our interest in Nigeria’s textile industry and its labor union, however, is longstanding (see Andrae & Beckman Reference Andrae and Beckman1998). We also draw on our previous studies of the relations between the labor unions and the tailors, and in particular the attempt by the textile workers union, NUTGTWN, to recruit tailors as members in the textile industry city of Kaduna, the location of its headquarters in the north (Andrae & Beckman Reference Andrae, Beckman and Lindell2010a, 2011b, 2012).

When we began our studies of tailors, the Kaduna tailors were just in the process of joining the numerous local marketplace- and neighborhood-based organizations into a full-scale hierarchical structure at the Kaduna State level. Simultaneously, NUTGTWN was attempting to recruit tailors to become members in a situation in which a large and well-organized industry was closing down. As the membership of the textile labor union diminished, so did its ability to influence politics, both at the national and the state levels. The labor unions were therefore anxious to enlarge their membership.

Our attention was drawn to the role of NUTGTWN in Lagos as a leading force in promoting a policy for a nationwide coalition between the workers and tailors within the national labor union context (Textile Worker 2010b). The labor union was also found to play an important part in backing the formation in Lagos in June 2010 of FIWON, according to reports from a “Summit” held by the NLC in December 2009 and confirmed by interviews with NLC officials in 2012. Historically Lagos, the capital of Nigeria until 1991, has been one of the major locations of the Nigerian textile industry, and thus has played an important role in the development informal economy sectors. All this motivated us to contribute the present account to the ongoing studies of institutional forms and relations of informal economy sectors (e.g., Bonner & Spooner Reference Bonner and Spooner2011a, Reference Bonner and Spooner2011b) and to the studies of organizing in the informal economy recently edited by Ilda Lindell (Reference Lindell2010, Reference Lindell2011). We have discussed the political implications of developments in the informal economy in the Nigerian context in earlier studies (e.g., Beckman Reference Beckman, Harriss, Stokke and Törnquist2004, Reference Beckman, Törnquist, Webster and Stokke2009; Beckman & Ya’u Reference Beckman, Ya’u, Beckman and Ya’u2012).

The Lagos Tailors: Two (or More?) Organizational Traditions

Tailors in Lagos, as elsewhere in Nigeria, normally operate as self-employed producers serving final markets. They may have one or a few apprentices and more rarely paid employees. Occasionally they operate as cooperatives, often with members related to each other by family ties. Tailors do their work inside the markets or are scattered in workshops throughout the neighborhoods, above all in commercial areas.^{Footnote 2} Unlike societies such as South Africa, where consumers get much of their clothing from shops, in Nigeria tailors provide the main part of the nation’s garment production. While some cheap clothing, especially knitwear, is imported, the main source of external competition has for a long time been from used clothing, often imported illegally and in bulk from Europe. The existence of tailors in Nigeria and in West Africa in general—and there are many—is quite remarkable in view of the expansion of factory-based garment production globally. They have continued to compete effectively with imported finished clothes or printed materials on the basis of local tastes and a specific clothing culture.

Tailors in Lagos, like those in Kaduna, have for a long time been organized into professional associations, particularly inside markets, where a guild structure was likely operating even in precolonial days. Associations are important in maintaining professional standards and regulating the reproduction of skills, particularly in determining what apprentices are supposed to know (and pay for) before they can be allowed to set up shops on their own. In times of industrial closures, the associations are often used to protect the relevant artisan skills in the face of redundant factory workers who claim that they know the trade. Apart from maintaining standards, associations often have some social functions, like contributing money in cases of the bereavement or hospitalization of members (Andrae & Beckman Reference Andrae and Beckman2011).

Politically, however, their reach has primarily been local. Their interactions have mostly been with the local government on matters such as registration, the collection of taxes and fees for premises, signboards, and a whole range of other local business-related matters. In Kaduna we were able to observe the efforts to create a functioning organization at the state level, with a hierarchical representation from branches to zones and a formalized constitution. It was only in 2009 that a reconstituted state-level tailors union in this city made it an explicit goal to move into national politics and to reach out to tailors in general.

In Lagos, which is a city several times larger than Kaduna, there are currently two dominant tailors’ unions: the Nigerian Union of Tailors (NUT) and the Lagos State Tailors and Fashion Designers Association of Nigeria (LASTFADAN). According to Aremu Oloyiwola, the national publication relations officer of NUT, the latter broke away from the former about a decade ago over a disagreement about who should be their state president (interview, Lagos, March 5, 2012). In more recent years divisions have related partly to competing membership claims and disagreements about which one is officially recognized by the state government. What interests us most, though, is how both relate to the textile labor union (and labor unions in general), to FIWON, and to the state, including the government at the national level.

Our meetings in February and March 2012 with the state-level executives of NUT and LASTFADAN, as well as visits in the field arranged by NUT, suggested that both organizations are concerned with negotiating with the state over the allocation of space for production and the protection against harassment and highhanded collection of taxes and fees. They are both determined that their members should be able to receive marketing support and credits from the state-level Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN) or the Bank of Industries (BOI), and they also aspire to getting contracts for school uniforms and other public attire (e.g., military uniforms). The latter is a bone of contention, as both organizations are aggrieved that the state places these public orders with less professional (probably better “connected”) tailors of its own choice rather than channeling them through “recognized” tailors’ organizations for fair distribution among members.

At the Lagos State level governments have encouraged the unification of the scattered local tailors’ associations. A “Flag Off Ceremony” for small-scale industries was organized by the state government in 2010. However, only tailors officially affiliated with LASTFADAN participated in (or were informed of?) this official meeting, bringing along twelve previously separate associations, according to a glossy pamphlet that was produced for the occasion. LASTFADAN makes a major issue of being the only officially recognized state-level tailors union. But NUT officials also maintain that they have close links with the State Ministry of Commerce and Industries. In NUT’s view, LASTFADAN is only a minor, breakaway body of a few disgruntled tailors. LASTFADAN makes the same claim about NUT.

NUT is in the process of developing a national body, which from an early beginning is said to have been formally established in 1989‒90. So far it seems to draw its members mainly from the southwest, where Osun State has a particularly strong representation. It has its headquarters in Ibadan, which works closely with the Lagos State office, from which it draws a number of “national” officers (interview with Oloyiwola, March 5, 2012). In late 2011 the dynamic chairman of the Kaduna State Tailors Union (interviewed in Lagos, Feb. 21, 2012) was selected to be its “representative of the North,” which was seen as a breakthrough by the national officers. Also LASTFADAN, although explicitly a Lagos-based organization, indicated that it aspires to extend its national coverage. In both cases the organizations’ efforts to reach out nationally have been affected by their relations to the trade unions and the newly formed organization in the informal economy, FIWON.

Both formal and informal producers have been hard hit by the current industrial crisis and affected by foreign competition, and both have been clamoring for state protection. The failure of the state to provide infrastructure affects both, and increasingly tailors see access to a national organization as a precondition for their making an impact. There is also growing discontent with the absence of systems of social protection in the informal economy, like insurance and pensions, features that have been negotiated for wage workers (although not very successfully in the Nigerian case), with certain contributions from the state. A 2004 “Pension Act and National Health Insurance Scheme” completely left out informal economy workers, according to reports from the NLC Summit in 2009 (Vanguard 2009). These are major issues of mobilization for FIWON and its formation as an overarching federation of sector-based informal organizations.

Federation of Informal Workers of Nigeria (FIWON)

Since its founding in June 2010, the Federation of Informal Workers of Nigeria (FIWON) has sought to mobilize traders and artisans. Their large numbers (in the millions) are seen as a potential power base for intervening nationally. The agenda is to build a national structure of informal sector groups organized at the state level. According to the “Mandate” published in its “Profile” document (FIWON 2010), FIWON aspires to be “the primary negotiating and bargaining medium with Government and its agencies at all levels, the Private sector[,] . . . and Local and International Development Agencies.” The substance of its agenda is to challenge the state at different levels to accept and extend to the informal economy the ILO standards for employment, workers’ rights, social protection, and representation. This includes promoting “continuous vocational education and training, occupational health and safety, eradication of child labor, reduction of HIV/AIDS, [and] access to credits on reasonable terms.”

FIWON specifically sets itself the task of playing a role at the political level alongside the labor unions, as reflected in the final point in the formulation of its mandate: “To partner with industrial unions on sectoral issues, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) as well as the Trade Union Congress (TUC) of Nigeria on policy, social, political and constitutional and developmental issues including campaigns for credible elections.” The NLC was established in 1978 by a military federal government with the purpose of regulating trade union activity, which had been highly competitive and, above all, highly dependent on foreign funding. While foreign links were banned, the state failed to establish a compliant “development” body, and conflicts between unions and the state continued. In 2003 trade union legislation was liberalized, allowing for more than one center. Only some senior staff associations left the fold of the NLC, forming the TUC. The NLC has been accommodating to the new body, inviting it to be a partner in most of its actions, especially in confronting the state. Another organization, the Labour‒Civil Society Coalition (LASCO), predates the formation of the TUC and serves as an “alliance” between trade unions, primarily the NLC, and organizations in civil society. It includes mostly membership-based human rights groups that identify with labor as their natural partner in confronting the state. FIWON, although not qualifying naturally as a civil society group, in turn provides the NLC and its partners with links to the workers in the informal economy.

With backing from the NLC, as articulated at their 2009 summit, the initiative for the formation of FIWON came from the Nigeria Automobile Technicians Association (NATA), an organization of the many auto repair technicians who occupy pavement areas and empty lots throughout Nigeria’s towns and cities. As an organization of informal entrepreneurs, NATA has been outstanding in its national coverage and its organizational expertise, going back to the time before the amalgamation of labor unions in the NLC. Although at that point NATA was not allowed to be part of the new labor organization since it did not represent formal wage workers, it still prides itself, according to David Ajetunmobi, its current national general secretary, on its heritage from that time (interview, Lagos, March 1, 2012). When we visited FIWON in February 2012 its national president had been drawn from NATA. The inaugural meeting of FIWON was facilitated by a grant from the German-based Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Foundation, which has supported its activities through project grants.^{Footnote 3} Another contributor, according to Gbenga Komolafe, the FIWON general secretary, has been the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy (interviews, Lagos, Feb. 20, 25, 28, 2012; March 1, 2012).

The national secretariat of FIWON is housed in Lagos in the building of NUTGTWN, the textile workers union. It keeps a skeleton staff, including a general secretary, an assistant general secretary, and a secretary. Before his association with FIWON, General Secretary Komolafe worked with The Solidarity Center, a Washington, D.C.–based NGO concerned with monitoring and supporting trade unions and labor organizing around the world. He was also earlier employed by the TUC and in this capacity worked in cooperation with the NLC, whose work with informal organizations he saw as rather half-hearted and unsuccessful. However, his work with the NLC involved working with David Adjetunmobi of NATA, an association that underlines the connection between organizing efforts of labor and artisans.

All those involved with the establishment of FIWON (the NLC, NUTGTW, and FIWON’s own staff) are aware that the organization has set itself a formidable task. Komolafe complains that its activities have been hindered by bureaucratic delays in its formal registration with the state and a shortage of funding. Apart from the odd project grant from international organizations, it has had to subsist on membership fees as its main economic base. Despite these obstacles, however, at the time of our meetings it claimed to comprise one hundred and four member organizations from seventeen states.

According to press reports and FIWON’s leaflets, one of the organization’s main areas of complaint is fuel and electricity prices. Although it has engaged in a number of initiatives—as, for example, the effort to establish a Domestic Workers Union—in practice its main focus has been on challenging the state in the provision of “social protection.” This is an area in which the needs of informal producers differ from those of industrial workers. It is also currently a priority area of international donors and supporting institutions, led by the ILO and the U.N. An ambitious project encouraged and supported by Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung was the drafting of a “Senior Citizens Welfare Bill” to be submitted to the National Assembly and to which FIWON contributed its critical views. In addition, in February 2012 a strategy meeting of thirty-six delegates to FIWON from different parts of the country discussed the drafting of a “Bill for an Act to Provide Social Assistance to Vulnerable Nigerians” as well as plans for grassroots lobbying actions in the various constituencies to promote it. Informal “workers” themselves were to present copies to the federal legislators demanding their support, to be followed up by a national march if necessary.

The two tailors’ organizations in Lagos have so far joined FIWON at the local level, although NUT seems to have given more weight to expanding its own national organization. Unlike LASTFADAN, NUT has also developed close relations to the textile workers union, NUTGTWN.

Tailors and the Textile Workers Union

NUTGTWN, the union of the textile workers, was in the past one of the most influential unions, both in the NLC, whose president from 1999 to 2007 was its domineering former general secretary, and on the national stage, where its former and current general secretaries represented the labor movement on important government committees. The textile industry had suffered major blows from the cheap imports of Asian goods and the massive (illegal) importation of used clothing from Europe. In order to expand its falling membership, the textile union was one of the labor unions that interacted systematically with the informal economy. In earlier work (Andrae & Beckman Reference Andrae and Beckman2011) we documented this effort in Kaduna in particular, the site of the union’s headquarters and formerly the flagship city of the textile industry. However, the textile workers union in Lagos State was the first to formalize such links through an alliance with NUT in 2005 (Textile Worker 2010b), and at the time of our discussions in March 2012, the president, Alhaji Halilulaj Sanni, and the “lady president,” Alhaja Saidat T. F. Oshodi, who share the leadership of the NUT Lagos State Council, were both members of the state executive of NUTGTWN. The Lagos State offices are located at the NUTGTWN Lagos secretariat and its monthly meetings are held there. In early March 2012 we participated in one of these meetings.

Some of the advantages of joining the trade unions were obvious; for instance, they offer organizational advice and include NUT in educational seminars. The leaders of the tailors are also represented at trade union congresses. The NUTGTWN held its triannual national congress, called the National Delegates’ Conference, in Asaba soon after our visit, and the March meeting of the NUT Lagos tailors that we attended was preoccupied with preparations for this event. In that sense NUT sees itself as part of the textile workers union. The “lady president” spoke enthusiastically about NUT’s affiliation and the administrative support that NUTGTWN was providing for the building of the tailors union (as also reported in the Textile Worker 2010c). Much depended on the personal commitment of Ismail Bello, the national educational officer of the union, who is based in the Lagos office. In particular, the “lady president” spoke of the textile workers union as a role model that provided NUT with many of its own organizational features and routines. With strong input from the Lagos office, NUTGTWN has held a series of conferences with tailors in different regions of Nigeria on the subject of a possible merger of the organizations at the national level. The pros and cons of full amalgamation or just cooperation (“alliances”) have been seriously probed and hotly discussed, as reflected in reports from these meetings (e.g., NUTGTWN and FES 2010). The question is still an open one, according to Bello (interviews Lagos, Feb. 20, 21, 24, 2012; March 5, 2012).

Working closely with the textile labor union was not the only option available to the tailors. In Kaduna, for instance, it was clear that tailors were divided over how to organize themselves, especially as the textile industry was obviously in decline and interested in recruiting members. In 2009 concerted efforts by the textile workers’ office in Kaduna and a few enthusiasts among the tailors led to the establishment of a “Tailors Unit,” a virtual branch of the labor union with its own separate chairman and encompassing as members all important leaders among tailors. The labor union’s motives in inviting the tailors (after years of refusing to allow them to join, since the late 1979s) and the hesitation of some of them to join has been discussed elsewhere (see Andrae & Beckman Reference Andrae and Beckman2011). Our previous studies suggest that tailors and textile workers have substantial common interests at the level of production. This is especially true in terms of access to infrastructural services such as electric power, a necessary input in the operation of sewing machines and workshop lights and also a resource whose unreliability is one of the chief reasons for the inability of Nigerian industry to compete with Asian imports. Workers and tailors also have common interests in protecting themselves against the vagaries of globalization, preventing smuggling, and regulating trade and tariffs.

As we have seen, however, the Lagos tailors were also divided and the division is unlikely to remain confined to the separate organizations of NUT and LASTFADAN. The fact that FIWON itself is housed in the premises of NUTGTWN does not prevent the FIWON leaders from taking a highly critical view of the role of the trade unions—more so of the NLC than of NUTGTWN, at least in the context of the January 12 uprising. FIWON’s critique of the trade unions is echoed by the LASTFADAN leadership, even if less explicitly than by FIWON General Secretary Komolafe. Rather expectedly he identified with those who voiced disappointment over the trade unions’ calling off the uprising at a point when it seemed to have come close to toppling what was widely seen as a corrupt and illegitimate government (interviews, Lagos, Feb. 20, 25, 28, 2012 ; March 1, 2012).

Ultimately, in the views of the FIWON staff, it was a matter of building organized strength and creating a loud and clear independent voice within the informal economy. Although trade unions would serve as role models in some respects, they were seen as potentially dangerous in others, especially when asserting that they would be able to speak on behalf of small, self-employed producers and traders. The textile workers union had been deeply involved in the efforts to organize in the informal economy, as we have seen. It continued to offer valuable support. But the ability of tailors and others to assert themselves as an independent force, influencing the state, depended more, according to the FIWON leaders, on their own organizing competence and their ability to transcend the limitations traditionally associated with artisans’ associations, turning into effective players in national politics. In this respect, the January 2012 uprising provided the tailors and their informal economy allies in FIWON with unexpected opportunities as well as disappointments.

The January 2012 Uprising as a Stage for Alliance Politics

The weeklong nationwide popular protest and general strike that broke out in January 2012 led to unprecedented mobilization in the informal economy in most major cities of Nigeria. Although Nigeria is one of Africa’s major oil producers, none of the four local oil refineries was working at the time, and what was consumed locally was therefore imported. The importation of fuel for the local market has developed into one of the most lucrative businesses in Nigeria, and it is often claimed that the election campaign that brought in the Jonathan regime was funded primarily by oil imports. In any case, the difference between the local, regulated petrol station price and what is obtained in the world market is often called a “subsidy” by national leaders and international observers, although word “subsidy,” as we will see, is widely and legitimately questioned by Nigerians as the appropriate term.

This price difference, whatever its cause, has long worried international finance institutions involved in Nigeria, including the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. They want the local petrol price to follow the world market for oil in order to avoid any “distortion” in the use of local resources; that is, they want a “liberalization” of the oil trade. The hike in world market prices in 2011 made the difference between the local and the world market price particularly great, increasing the number of advocates for “subsidy removal” within the federal establishment as well. The leadership of the Central Bank, although short of popular credibility in this respect, calculated what other things (services, infrastructure, etc.) could be paid for if the “subsidy” were removed. The Nigerian people, however, as represented by labor and civil society activists, hung on fiercely to the stipulated local price, which it considered the only significant benefit that it was collecting from the federal government. The quality of social services was generally perceived as having declined sharply since the early days of independence, while the political elite had been making fortunes. We followed the January 2012 events through current online reports of the Nigerian press from January 9 to January 16, but we build our account primarily on our interviews in Abuja and Lagos with representatives of the leading organizations.^{Footnote 4}

The popular protests and the national mass action were led by the labor unions under the NLC and the TUC. At the Lagos end, their civil society partners in the Labour and Civil Society Coalition (LASCO)—that is, the Joint Action Front (JAF), itself a coalition of a wide range of membership-based, mostly socialist groups—had been preparing for a likely “subsidy” removal. The federal government had given a clear indication of its commitment to this course of action in its first budget after the spring 2011 elections. Popular support for the uprising was massive, suggesting that at last the “North African Spring” in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya had reached Nigeria. As in these cases, many more actors claimed ownership of the uprising, including an “Occupy Nigeria Movement,” originally inspired by developments in Wall Street and the City of London, that was now traveling a crisis-ridden world.

The actual composition of participants in the uprising in various places will have to be disentangled in due course. Certainly large sections of the unemployed and unorganized were mobilized everywhere. It is also clear that a number of artisans and traders from the informal economy of Lagos, including tailors in both NUT and LASTFADAN, closed their shops and went into the streets protesting alongside the more strongly organized groups based in the formal economy. We believe that the enlarged numbers of informal economy organizations played a significant role in the mobilization, suggesting that this segment of the population, by far the largest, may in fact not only become more organized than it has been in the past, but also more politically effective. Thanks to FIWON, notions of “decent work” and “social protection” have reached the informal economy of Nigeria, even if, as elsewhere, local realities, including the priorities of the political elite, continue to lie with self-enrichment.

The January 2012 uprising underscored the fact that informal economy organizations, like those of tailors and automobile technicians, have moved beyond their immediate concerns with basic “professional” interests. In particular, we believe that the formation of FIWON has already had an impact in expanding the political world view of its member organizations, contributing not only to the commitment to the uprising of the tailors’ associations, as in our case, but also to the general political awareness in the informal economy. The recent presenting of the “Bill to Provide Social Assistance to Vulnerable Nigerians” to members of the National Assembly also suggests that the informal economy is becoming more salient as a constituency that has to be acknowledged by the politicians.

The constraints to effective, long-term organizing by small-scale, largely self-employed artisans and traders are well known. As self-employed entrepreneurs, they know that they will forgo the opportunities of earning a living while on “strike.” In the case of the tailors, the January 2012 uprising helped in moving them beyond their role as exclusively a local interest group to become political actors at the national level. They demonstrated in the streets, joining forces with other organizations. FIWON played an active role in mobilizing the necessary political commitment for the protest meetings and marches. Both the union-affiliated NUT and the separately organized LASTFADAN participated enthusiastically in the demonstrations. Both were disappointed when the protests were called off by the NLC after only one week, despite the undoubted sacrifices that the self-employed participants had to make.

Of course, the workers in the informal economy had their own motives in challenging the state on the rise in fuel prices. Costs of production and reproduction, as well as costs of personal transport and general costs of living, were at stake. Apart from added costs of movement of goods and people, there are costs connected with private power generation not only in workshops but also in the households in a situation of highly erratic public electricity supplies. The implications of these costs for “national development” are considerable. Like the labor unions and civil society organizations, FIWON as an organization was prepared for resistance and had educated its members on these matters in the months before the announcement of the price rise. In the resolutions of its Central Working Committee on January 4, informal organizations were exhorted to join the planned actions against the policies announced on January 1 in “indefinite mass actions through protest marches, sit-ins, lock outs and boycotts until our demands are met” (FIWON Reference Hlela2012). Apart from demanding a cancellation of the sharp rise in the fuel price, FIWON joined the organizers, NLC and JAF, in their broader political critique of the measures of the Jonathan regime that motivated the call for action. They demanded a reduction of government salaries, critiqued fuel imports and the activities of petroleum marketers, and demanded the construction of more refineries. To this was added, as a final point, a call to the federal government to “wake up to its responsibilities of providing quality public services to Nigerians and begin to make provisions for those completely left out in the margins of society . . . through a genuine programme of social safety nets as is the practice in several other African countries.” During the actual street protests Komolafe, the general secretary, was active in addressing the crowds from the rostra erected in different parts of Lagos. Organizations in the informal economy became a visible force in the protest movement.

The alliance across the formal–informal divide asserted itself. When tailors closed their workshops they did so as part of the NLC action, at least in the case of the members of NUT who joined the textile workers under the same banners, clad in the same caps and uniforms, and singing the same campaign songs. NUTGTWN, the textile workers union, had come out fully in support of the political protest and national strike, although the leaders were less prepared than those of the tailors to voice their disappointment when both sets of actions were called off after the first week. This was a decision made at the national headquarters of the labor movement that individual industrial unions were unwilling to question.

Names and Acronyms

Bank of Industries (BOI): A key Nigerian public development institution, the successor to NIDB, the Nigerian Industrial Development Bank.

Federation of Informal Workers’ Organizations of Nigeria (FIWON): Newly formed organization (founded in 2010) dedicated to advancing the interests of informal workers; based in Lagos in the offices of the Nigerian textile workers union (NUTGTWN).

Joint Action Front (JAF): An activist group consisting of the civil society part of LASCO.

Labour and Civil Society Coalition (LASCO): A jointly run organization of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and a group of civil society organizations, activated primarily by the NLC during its campaign over increases in petrol prices.

Lagos State Tailors and Fashion Designers Association of Nigeria (LASTFADAN): One of the main Lagos-based tailors associations.

National Union of Textile, Garment and Tailoring Workers of Nigeria (NUTGTWN): The once powerful (but increasingly less so) union of the textile workers; national headquarters in Kaduna, local headquarters in Lagos.

Nigeria Automobile Technicians Association (NATA): A longstanding organizer of roadside mechanics but not considered a proper union, largely because of its self-employed character; a driving force behind the founding of FIWON.

Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC): Established in 1978 by the military government as the sole representative of labor with headquarters in Lagos; originally made up exclusively of industrial unions but now based in Abuja and embracing more unions since the liberalized 2003 union legislation; works with the TUC (formed by some of it senior staff associations) but maintains its dominant position within the labor movement.

Nigerian Union of Tailors (NUT): An association composed primarily of informal economy workers; based in Lagos but claims to recruit members nationally; closely associated with the Lagos branch of NUTGTWN.

Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN): A national-level agency established in 2003 to support small- and medium-scale entrepreneurs; focuses more on entrepreneurial development than on labor issues.

Trade Union Congress (TUC): A breakaway national labor center facilitated by the liberal reform of union legislation in 2003; works with the NLC.

Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO): a partly U.S.-based organization of researchers and activists with a strong influence on the ILO and its informal economy activities.