VITAL OBITER
The Diary of a Roving Counsel

There is a particular kind of Nigerian sentence that deserves its own chapter in the grammar books.

It goes something like this: “After a thorough review of our business, we have made the difficult decision…”

You already know what follows. Someone, somewhere, is about to lose a livelihood. And the company doing the losing-for-them would like you to know it agonised over this. Deeply. In a boardroom. Possibly over coffee.

Uber said it this week, on its way out of Nigeria, after twelve years of teaching a country how to summon a stranger’s car with a thumb.

Twelve years. Long enough for a child to be born, learn to walk, and start secondary school. Long enough, one would think, for a company to know precisely who it employed. Or didn’t.

And this, dear reader, is where your Roving Counsel puts down the satire for a moment. Because the joke, once you look closely, is on someone who cannot afford it.

Back in 2017, a group of drivers walked into the National Industrial Court and asked a simple, almost quaint question: are we your employees, or merely your very obedient friends?

The court, in the finest tradition of courts everywhere, looked at the evidence, found it wanting, and declined to answer. Though not before dropping a rather large hint that the law might, in fact, side with the drivers.

A hint. In 2018.

We are now in 2026, and the hint has not yet grown up into a ruling.

Which brings us to the present moment, where a company can announce its departure from a nation of 240 million people with the emotional precision of someone cancelling a gym membership. And offer, in place of severance, a “goodwill payment.” A phrase so beautifully vague it could mean anything from a month’s salary to a firm handshake and a biscuit.

One driver, a Mr. David, mentioned to a reporter that he had bought his car specifically for this platform.

Gone, in the time it takes to open an email.

Now, some will say: but Counsel, this is simply business. Companies come, companies go, capitalism is not sentimental.

To which I say, quite right. And neither, apparently, is the Nigerian state, which has spent nine years failing to decide whether a man who drives for a living is a “worker” deserving of protection, or an “independent contractor,” which is legal Latin for you are on your own, good luck, God bless.

Uber is hardly travelling alone on this road out of the country. Shell went. Procter & Gamble went. GSK went. ShopRite went. Diageo, Sanofi, Microsoft’s development arm. The exit lounge has been rather busy since 2020, and the departures are beginning to read less like isolated business decisions and more like a very long, very expensive vote of no confidence.

Here is the part that isn’t funny at all.

This exit lands exactly as school gates reopen, in a country where the majority of children are educated privately because the public option long ago gave up the ghost. And where, according to the last honest count, roughly half the population is living in poverty deep enough to have a name and an index.

A driver’s income was never “extra” in that arithmetic. It was the whole equation.

So here is your Roving Counsel’s obiter, offered strictly in passing, as is tradition.

A country cannot keep outsourcing the protection of its families to the goodwill of departing foreigners.

Family instils the values. Community reinforces them. The state’s one job in this chain is to secure the ground families stand on. The international community, further back still, sets the standards everyone signs and few enforce.

Four institutions. Each with a task.

Uber checked out overnight.

The families it leaves behind do not have that luxury.

Until the next brief.

But what do I know? I’m just a bloody roving counsel.

Do have an INSPIRED rest of the week with the family.

Follower of Christ. Husband. Father. Egalitarian. Goodwill Investor. Attorney. Author. Thriver. Culture-Edge Family Strengthening and Child Safeguarding Pioneer, Innovator and Practitioner. Value-Based Parenting Ideologue. Change Agent. Rebel with a Cause. Three Decades in the Saddle.