The Professionals and Marketers Association (PMA) was not born in a boardroom. It was born in the back of a bricklayer’s shed on Isolo Road, over roasted plantain and a shared frustration: everyone in Ejigbo was paying the local government, but nobody in Ejigbo was talking to the local government.
I had returned from my Master’s programme at the University of Lagos with a head full of Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, and Claude Ake, but the theory only made sense when I looked at the ledger of the Ejigbo Local Council Development Area. Shop rates, tenement rates, trade permits, tolls, levies — over 70 percent of what the council collected came from craft and tradesmen who had no seat in the council chamber. That imbalance was not just unjust; it was economically absurd.
Weaving the Coalition
In 2007, we began the slow work of weaving together 21 associations under one platform. The tailors were suspicious of the carpenters. The mechanics had a decade-long grievance with the panel-beaters. The market women, sensibly, distrusted everyone. It took eleven months of small meetings, held in the offices of trade guild heads, in mosques, in churches, and, more often than not, on wooden benches under mango trees, to arrive at a single principle everyone could accept: We pay together, therefore we speak together.
That sentence became the constitution of the PMA.
The First Victory
When the local government announced shop rates of ₦5,000 in 2010, the PMA sat with the administration and negotiated it down to ₦3,500 — a 30 percent reduction that put ₦1,500 back in the pocket of every trader in Ejigbo. On paper, it looks like a minor administrative adjustment. On the ground, it was a revolution. For the first time in the memory of the traders I spoke with, the local government had listened before it charged.
But the real victory was quieter and more durable. The council began to contract school benches to our carpenters and school uniforms to our tailors. Sponsorship of local students for international examinations was extended to PMA members’ children. Money that used to leave Ejigbo for suppliers in Ikeja and Apapa began to circulate within Ejigbo. A carpenter’s son could now sit for the SAT because his father’s association had negotiated the sponsorship into the council’s welfare budget.
The Deeper Lesson
Syndicalism, I have come to believe, is not an ideology. It is a technology of dignity. It answers a simple question: how do the many small persuade the few large that they are, in aggregate, larger?
When I was later elected Executive Chairman of the LCDA in 2008, some assumed the PMA would lose its independence. The opposite happened. Precisely because I had come from the movement, I understood that its power depended on its distance from me. I refused to appoint PMA leaders into council positions. I insisted that the association negotiate with my administration as a counter-party, not as a client. In my two terms as Chairman (2008–2014), the PMA fought me on at least four major policy decisions. It was right on three of them.
What Ejigbo Taught Me About Nigeria
Nigeria’s federalism problem is not, at root, a constitutional problem. It is a syndicalism problem. We have not yet learned, at scale, how to weave the small into the large. We have millions of small traders, small farmers, small workshops, small congregations — and no reliable technology for converting their aggregated interest into political weight.
Until we do, the country will continue to be governed as if the majority of its citizens do not exist.
A Model, Not a Monument
I do not offer the PMA as a monument. It has weaknesses I could catalogue for another 2,000 words. But I offer it as a model, and models are meant to be improved. Any young politician who wants to know how to build power from below without buying it from above should spend a week in Ejigbo, in the tailors’ halls and the carpenters’ yards, and study how the PMA still meets, every second Saturday, at 10 a.m., without a single naira from any government.
That is what democracy looks like when it is not being performed for cameras.
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