The motor park, also known as ‘garage’ in Nigeria, is a terminus, a place, where journeys begin and end; and in the context of the Nigerian reality, it can also be a temporary home for certain of its numerous agents such as bus touts, stranded passengers/commuters/travelers, petty thieves, mad men/women, street children and other undefined vagrants and the homeless.
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| Mararaba Motorpark. (Source: DailyPost) |
At most times of the day the typical motor park in Nigeria is a beehive of activities, as cars, minibuses, and large buses load and unload passengers, with some of them travelling only within the city while others are involved in long-distance journeys. It is a public space where other kinds of
economic transactions take place beside transportation business, including itinerant trading or
hawking and vocational services such as shoe cobbling. It is peopled by beggars, itinerant preachers, junkies, and others whose activities are wrapped in mystery. It is also a place where the unpredictable can happen. For example, in a report published in the Leadership Newspaper (September 17, 2012: 2) two women suspected to be human traffickers were arrested by a vigilante group at the Etim Edem motor park in Calabar Municipality. The suspects were reportedly chasing two underage girls in the park in an attempt to re-capture them after the girls had escaped from their custody. The underage girls, according to the report, were held by the motor park officials who, also, apprehended the women after the girls had narrated how they were picked from their parents’ house in the South East and brought to Calabar on the pretense that they would be employed as sales girls in a supermarket. An incident like this is not uncommon in motor parks across the country.
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| Scuffle between a Commuter, a Conductor and a Police Officer (Source: The Gurdian) |
Indeed, because of its unpredictability as a site of regular drama, motor parks have regularly featured as spaces for sensitization and campaigns, with commercial drivers and commutters as potential targets, particularly where the focus is on a road safety, public health (HIV/AIDS) and peace education. The various turpitudes of modern society can be found in motor parks, including prostitution and drug abuse.
The motorpark is also often desrcibed as a site of sleaze and poverty because many of those who work in Nigerian motorparks such as drivers, bus touts, traders, etc belong to the lower social class in society. They are people that are mostly affected by poverty. This allegation often neglect the success of the booming market that always adjoin notable motorparks as well as the success of leaders of the Unions who are Socialites of a sort. The focus is often on the petty traders and the other very low income earners on the motorpark.
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| The motorpark-market traders (Source: Jujufilm.com) |
Concerning day-to-day management, the motorparks are among those public spaces that are supposed to be under the jurisdiction of local government authorities, but the reality is that they are firmly controlled by members of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) and, sometimes by the officials of Road Transport Employers Association of Nigeria (RTEAN). The NURTW membership, broadly defined, include individuals (mainly male), who are involved in the use of different modes of transport such as motorbikes (motorcycles), buses, cabs, tankers, long trucks, and
tricycles - for conveying passengers and goods from one destination within the country to another.
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| Members of NURTW on duty (Source: African Examiner) |
The need for coordination and orderliness prompted members of the sector to form two associations, namely the Road Transport Employers Association of Nigeria [RTEAN] and the National Union of Road Transport Workers [NURTW]. The RTEAN predates NURTW, but it is less active than the NURTW, which was registered as a trade union in 1978. NURTW is an affiliate of the Central Labour Organisation [CLO], now known as the Nigerian Labour Congress [NLC]; while the RTEAN is less known, the NURTW has grown overtime, with its membership burgeoning on daily basis. Presently, it boasts of over “1.5 million membership throughout the federation” (Olubomehin 2012:9). All professional commercial drivers are automatic members of the Union; drivers operating motorbikes, taxi cabs, tricycles, buses (both intra and inter-state services), trailers and lorries that engage in the
conveyance of passengers and goods.
The motorpark space is public space with diverse angles and narratives that define its nature, from politics, economy, health, linguistic, etc
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