Owing to Nigeria’s poor road maintenance culture, informal road menders (IRMs) have emerged who fill potholes on urban and sub-urban roads in exchange for money from road users. This article interrogates the micropolitics of this phenomenon as a relatively new means of informal livelihood within the context of the ethnography of road infrastructure, informal agency and the everyday struggle for socioeconomic survival. Conceiving informal road mending as a livelihood offers a promising lens for discussing how IRMs gain and retain access to space, navigate risks, and harness relationships with other road users and state institutions along the road. Drawing on conversations with drivers and commuters during ‘go-alongs’ in public transport and on interviews with IRMs, private car owners and state regulatory agents, the article shows how IRMs and other road users appropriate the risks and opportunities associated with potholes as socioeconomic resources through which they leverage the precarious road transport experience in the country. This contributes to the literature on the ethnography of road infrastructures and the micropolitics of informal work in urban Africa.

The IJURR Editorial Board have voted this as a highly commended article in 2025:

Based on fourteen months of ethnography along the Ife–Ede Road corridor in southwestern Nigeria, this article tracks “informal road menders” who fill potholes with sand and stones in exchange for small payments from passing motorists. The sophisticated analysis reframes potholes as socio‑economic infrastructure that enable new livelihood strategies at the urban margins. Employing “going‑along” methods and rich accounts of interactions between menders, minibus drivers, roadside vendors and state agents, the article theorizes potholes as sites of “suturing” where survival, risk, gender, and ethnicity are renegotiated, making significant contributions to literatures on road infrastructures, informality, and distributive claims in African urbanism.