They arrived in trailers. Some said they were accompanying cattle. Now they are riding brand-new motorcycles through Lagos, Ibadan, and Abeokuta — bikes and tricycles most Nigerians cannot afford to buy. The question of who paid for those machines is not one any government in the southwest seems eager to answer.
By the Newstexts Editorial Board | August 2, 2026
THE PATTERN NOBODY WANTS TO NAME
For several years, southwest Nigeria has witnessed a demographic shift in its commercial motorcycle and tricycle transport sector — the okada and keke marwa markets — visible to anyone who uses these services regularly, but almost entirely absent from frequent official discourse.
More than 85% of the riders are not Nigerian. Many do not speak Yoruba. Some do not speak English. Their Hausa, when examined, is not the Hausa of Kano or Sokoto but the Hausa-adjacent languages of the Sahel — Fulfulde, Zarma, Bambara — code-switched into enough functional Hausa to navigate northern Nigerian transit routes before arriving in the southwest.
Many entered Nigeria through Sokoto, Zamfara, or Kebbi, using routes that have been documented by security analysts as the primary entry corridors for irregular migrants from Niger, Mali, and Chad.
Some came explicitly with herdsmen convoys. Others arrived in the commercial trailers that carry cattle southward supplying buyers and slaughter markets. When the cattle were delivered, the people who had accompanied them did not leave.
Instead, they dispersed. And many of them ended up on two and three wheels in the commercial transport economies of Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, and Ekiti.
THE ECONOMIC ANOMALY THAT DEMANDS AN ANSWER
Here is what makes this story more than a migration concern and something closer to a security emergency: the economics do not add up.
A new okada Bajaj, TVS, Haojue — a commercial motorcycle of the kind used for urban transport — costs between N1,100,000 and N2,500,000 naira in today’s market, while a lower-spec lesser known Chinese brands are available at around N600,000.
A keke Marwa or keke Napep, the three-wheeled motorised tricycle, like TVS King (Deluxe Plus/iTouch priced between N3,500,000 and 4.3 million naira for outright purchase and more on hire purchase terms.
These are not trivial sums. For Nigerian youth with formal education and employable skills, raising this kind of capital to start a transport business requires months or years of savings, cooperative contributions, or family loans. Many cannot manage it.
Yet foreign nationals — men who arrived in Nigeria without documentation, without a formal employment history here, and in many cases without any verifiable identity — are operating these machines, in some cases multiple machines, within weeks of arriving in southwestern cities and in sufficient numbers to constitute a fleet.
THE QUESTION THIS RAISES IS STRAIGHTFORWARD: WHO BOUGHT THEM?
A man who walked or rode in a trailer from Niger or Mali does not arrive with N1,100,000 naira in his pocket. Someone provided capital. That capital came from somewhere, for some reason, in the service of some objective. No state government in the southwest has publicly investigated this question with any rigour, and that silence is itself a fact worth examining.
WHAT STATE GOVERNMENTS HAVE DONE — AND WHY THEY HAVE DONE SO LITTLE
Lagos State has the most documented record of action, and even that record is thin. The state has periodically banned okada operations in certain high-traffic areas, most recently expanding those bans to six local government areas in 2022. The official rationale was road safety and traffic management. The nationality of operators was not a stated concern. The bans removed some riders from certain routes. Others simply relocated to unbanned areas or changed the times of their operations.
Oyo State, under Governor Seyi Makinde, has spoken about the need to regulate commercial transport but has not moved toward any systematic screening of operators by nationality or documentation status. Ogun and Osun have been quieter still.
THE POLITICAL LOGIC BEHIND THIS INACTION DESERVES HONEST EXAMINATION.
Commercial motorcycle and tricycle operators are a significant electoral constituency. They are numerous, organised into unions, and mobilisable during campaigns. Politicians court their union leaders. Their votes and their ability to move people to polling stations are understood, in southwest political calculations, to be meaningful.
The inconvenient reality is that some of those union members — and some of those votes, or more accurately, some of that logistical muscle — belong to people who should not be in Nigeria at all, let alone operating in a regulated commercial sector.
Raising this issue publicly means potentially alienating union structures that political actors on all sides have cultivated. It also invites accusations of xenophobia that are uncomfortable in a state with Yoruba cultural traditions of hospitality and a commercial elite that benefits from cheap, abundant transport labour.
So, the inaction is not accidental. It is calculated. The political cost of confronting the issue is immediate and certain. The security cost of ignoring it accumulates slowly and can, for now, be attributed to other causes.
THE SECURITY IMPLICATIONS: WHAT IS ALREADY VISIBLE
The security concerns around undocumented foreign nationals dominating a large sector of urban transport are not hypothetical. They follow logically from the facts.
Commercial motorcycle operators have unparalleled access to the geography of any city they work in. They know routes, back streets, shortcuts, and dead ends better than almost anyone.
They move between neighbourhoods at all hours. They carry passengers of every social class, occupation, and profile, including people whose movements, schedules, and addresses represent intelligence with security value.
In the wrong hands, this positional knowledge is extraordinarily useful — for kidnappers mapping target movements, for armed gangs pre-positioning for operations, for anyone who needs to understand a city’s human topography quickly and cheaply.
THE KIDNAPPING ECONOMY
The kidnapping economy in the southwest, which barely existed a decade ago, has grown substantially. The modus operandi in many documented cases involves prior surveillance of victims — knowledge of routes, timing, and vulnerability points that requires either extensive local reconnaissance or inside information from people with legitimate reasons to be watching. Commercial transport operators are among the few categories of workers who can conduct this kind of observation without arousing suspicion.
This is not an accusation against all non-Nigerian okada riders. It is an observation about structural vulnerability.
When a security-sensitive economic role is dominated by people whose backgrounds cannot be checked, whose loyalties are unknown, and who have no documented stake in the stability of the community they serve, the risk profile of that sector rises for everyone.
The southwest has also seen a documented increase in what security agencies describe as “logistics support” for criminal operations — motorcycle escorts for kidnap vehicles, communication relay riders, and advance scouts.
The profiles of those arrested in some of these operations have, in several cases, included individuals who could not account for their Nigerian identity with documentation.
THE COLLAPSE OF THE IMMIGRATION AGENCY
To understand how this situation reached its current scale, it is necessary to understand what has happened to the Nigeria Immigration Service over the past two decades.
The NIS has suffered from chronic underfunding, a recruitment and promotion system that rewards political loyalty over professional competence …
and a mandate that successive federal governments have treated as a bureaucratic formality rather than a genuine security function. Its border posts in the northwest are understaffed, under-equipped, and in many cases structurally unfit for purpose. Several border crossing points exist as physical structures with no functioning staff presence, no biometric equipment, and no means of cross-referencing arrivals against any national or international database.
The Buhari administration’s decision to open land borders between 2015 and 2019 — and then close them in August 2019 ostensibly to curb smuggling, a policy reversal that was itself inconsistently enforced — left the immigration framework in a state of managed confusion that irregular migrants and their facilitators exploited systematically.
The ECOWAS free movement protocol, which allows citizens of member states to move within the region without visas for up to 90 days, was designed for documented regional integration. It has instead become the legal loophole of choice: enter through a formal crossing with any ECOWAS state identity document, claim the 90-day visitor window, and then dissolve into the interior before the window expires. The NIS has no functioning system to track overstays. There is no deportation infrastructure capable of processing the scale of violations even if they were identified.
The result is an immigration agency that can, on its best days, count arrivals. It cannot, in any systematic sense, manage them.
THE ECONOMIC DIMENSION: DISPLACEMENT, NOT JUST SECURITY
Beyond the security question is an economic one that affects ordinary Nigerians directly. The commercial transport sector in the southwest, particularly okada and keke marwa, has historically been an entry-level economic lifeline for young Nigerians. Young men without formal employment — school leavers, artisan apprentices between jobs, men managing family financial emergencies — have used transport work as a way to generate income while building toward other opportunities. It is not glamorous work, but it is work, and it has sustained millions of households.
The mass entry of foreign operators into this sector, funded by external capital at a scale that Nigerian operators cannot individually match, is a displacement story.
When a young man from Mushin or Abeokuta finds that the transport union in his area is now dominated by people whose names he cannot pronounce and whose language he does not understand — people riding new machines he cannot afford — he does not frame it in policy terms. He feels it as a personal and economic loss.
That feeling is legitimate. The structural dynamic driving it is real.
And the fact that no politician has yet found the courage to address it in economic terms — as a labour market distortion driven by unregulated foreign competition — means it festers as ethnic and regional grievance instead.
WHAT CAN STILL BE SALVAGED
The situation is not beyond remedy, but the window for orderly intervention is narrowing.
First, state governments in the southwest need to require documentation from all commercial transport operators as a condition of union registration and licence issuance. This is not unprecedented — Lagos has regulatory frameworks for transport that can be extended to cover nationality verification. The political will to enforce it, not the legal mechanism, is what is missing.
Second, the federal government must urgently recapitalise and reform the NIS, with specific attention to biometric border management in the northwest. The ECOWAS free movement protocol cannot be withdrawn, but its 90-day window can be enforced with functional overstay tracking. This requires investment. It also requires a political class willing to prioritise national security over the convenience of ignoring the problem.
Third, the sponsorship question must be formally investigated. State security services, the Department of State Services, and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission all have the jurisdiction and, in theory, the capacity to follow the money behind the fleet of new machines that appeared in southwestern cities. The investigation has not happened. It should.
Fourth, Nigerian youth displaced from the transport sector deserve a policy response, not just a security one. The conversation about border management must be linked explicitly to a conversation about economic protection for Nigerian workers in their own country.
Fifth, public discourse needs to be freed from the fear of being labelled xenophobic for raising legitimate questions. There is nothing xenophobic about requiring that people operating commercial services on Nigerian streets be who they say they are and be legally present in the country. Every serious nation enforces this. Nigeria can too.
THE RISK OF WAITING
What is at stake in the southwest is not merely a transport policy question. It is a question about whether the southwest’s cities — Lagos, Ibadan, Abeokuta, Osogbo, Ado-Ekiti — will, over the next decade, remain places where Nigerians control their own streets, their own economies, and their own security.
The precedent from elsewhere is not encouraging. When a sector of a city’s economy is captured by an externally funded, undocumented, unaccountable workforce, reversing it becomes progressively harder. Unions form. Political relationships develop. The newcomers are no longer merely present; they are institutionally embedded.
The longer the southwest waits to ask the hard questions, the more expensive the answers will be.
The okada rider who cannot name his local government area in Nigeria, who cannot identify the governor of the state he operates in, who arrived in a trailer three months ago and rides a machine that costs more than most Nigerians earn in a year — he is not a problem for another day.
He is here now. And the silence around his presence is the most dangerous thing about him.
