‘Struggle’ Economy & City Life

In her preface to the important volume, Money Struggles and City Life, Jane Guyer (2002: ix-xvi) raises interesting questions about the ways in which those of us who live and work in urban Africa witness what de Certeau (1984) describes as the ‘practice of everyday life’, which ‘encompasses systems of employment, provisioning, and meaning-making of impressive magnitude and relentless resilience’ (Guyer 2002: ix). In reflecting on the ‘domain of human struggles and achievement’ – particularly in Ibadan and other urban centres in southern Nigeria – within which ‘chronic uncertainty is pervasive’ (ibid.: x), Guyer argues that ‘(c)ase studies have to be a source both of data for analysis and of witnessed documentation of the realities of life’ (ibid.). In this chapter, I take up the task that she commended to African(ist) scholars in the ‘context of the intellectual and empirical challenges’ of 1990s Nigeria by focusing on an otherwise marginal phenomenon, albeit one that reflects the deep crisis of urban life in Africa in the post-structural adjustment era – an era which still bears not only the structural, economic, including fiscal, and social disasters imposed by Structural Adjustment Programmes, but also dramatizes the consequences of authoritarian rule with its attendant lack of urban planning.