In a previous post, I talked about street vendors in Lagos. You may be surprised that street trading has been banned in the state. This is one of the first things I heard when I had just arrived here. How come street trading is banned, and you see street vendors all over? It’s an indicator that regulations in Nigeria are both clear and ambiguous.
It is clear that street trading has been banded. But the definition of street trading is ambiguous: what does it mean exactly? My Lagos Business School colleague Uchenna Uzo explains: “the definition is open… maybe it’s selling in the traffic as opposed to selling in the streets… or maybe it’s selling on the pavement in quiet streets as opposed to selling in a way that stops traffic in a neighborhood area…” What’s clear is that the regulation is not specific enough about what’s allowed and what’s not.
This is one instance of regulation ambiguity, but likely not the only one. In an informal conversation, an expat was telling me about how bureaucracy works: “There’s always a way to get things done here, but you need to find what that way is.” His example was: “Nobody really knows how taxation works. We had 10 opinions on one same issue.” And at a smaller scale, I’ve experienced this same frustration dealing with visas: on the two occasions I’ve applied for a visa to enter the country, I’ve had to re-apply: I was requesting the wrong visa, even if it was the one I had been advised to get. As my colleague Josep Valor likes to say, “such is life in the big city…!”
At the end of the day, regulations in any country are somewhat open-ended, aren’t they? It’s just that in some cases the opening may be too wide…