A treaty aimed at a gap Nigerian courts already found
On June 15, 2026, ITUC-Africa General Secretary Akhator-Joel Odigie urged Nigeria and other African governments to ratify and domesticate the newly adopted ILO Convention No. 193, the Decent Work in the Platform Economy Convention. Adopted at the 114th International Labour Conference in Geneva on June 12, 2026, it is the first global labour standard written specifically for gig and platform work — covering misclassification, algorithmic management, and social protection for a workforce that exists in most countries' labour codes only by analogy.
The timing is not abstract for Nigeria. The country's gig economy has grown to roughly 3 million workers and a $5.17 billion market, with ride-hailing alone accounting for close to a quarter of that workforce — around 720,000 drivers, according to a 2026 Bolt-commissioned survey. The same report found 64% of drivers reporting improved living standards, but also a workforce that is 96% male and increasingly squeezed by fuel costs that climbed from under ₦1,000 to over ₦1,200 a litre this year.
The case for the Convention, stated fairly
ITUC-Africa's argument deserves to be taken on its own terms. Convention 193 does not mandate that every platform worker be reclassified as an employee; instead it requires member states to determine employment status by "factual reality, and not solely contractual clauses," per the ILO's own explainer. That is a response to a real problem: platforms writing one-sided independent-contractor agreements and treating the label as the whole analysis, regardless of how much control they exert over pay, routing, and deactivation. The Convention's algorithmic-management provisions — requiring disclosure of automated decision systems and access to human review — target a genuine accountability gap, since drivers routinely report being deactivated by an opaque score with no appeal. And its social-protection provisions speak to workers who, unlike salaried employees, have no employer-side pension or health contribution and no fallback if a platform suspends their account overnight.
Nigeria's own labour court has already wrestled with exactly this problem — and came down on the other side. In Olatunji & Anor v. Uber Technologies Systems Nigeria Ltd, the National Industrial Court of Nigeria ruled on December 4, 2018 that drivers were independent contractors, reasoning that the written service agreement controlled and that drivers who go unbooked simply go unpaid, which is inconsistent with a salaried relationship. The court dismissed the suit largely on procedural and evidentiary grounds, but the substantive reasoning — contract language over factual control — is precisely what Convention 193 asks states to stop treating as dispositive. Eight years on, Nigerian law has not moved past that 2018 posture.
What's actually moving in Abuja is narrower than it looks
Nigeria does have live legislative activity in this space, but it undercuts the idea that ratification is a simple next step. The Informal Sector Employment (Regulation) Bill, 2025 passed its third reading in the Senate on November 12, 2025, aiming to regulate domestic workers, apprentices, interns and employment agents — but its sponsor's own description of scope does not mention gig or platform workers at all. Separately, the Nigeria Social Security Trust Fund Bill, which could plausibly become the vehicle for portable, platform-funded social contributions, was still at second reading in the Senate as of early 2026. Ratifying an ILO convention commits Nigeria to domesticate its terms through national law "in accordance with each country's legal system and national practice" — the ILO's own language leaves the mechanism open, but Nigeria doesn't currently have a bill in flight that does the job.
The proportionate path, not the maximalist one
That gap is where ITUC-Africa's ask should be taken seriously but not swallowed whole. A blanket reclassification of Nigeria's ~720,000 ride-hailing drivers as employees — full payroll obligations, fixed hours, employer-side benefits — would collide with the flexibility that a majority of surveyed drivers say improved their lives, and would raise platform costs in a market already squeezed by currency depreciation and fuel inflation. In a country with Nigeria's youth unemployment pressure, the platforms are not villains to be regulated out of existence; they are one of the few growth sectors absorbing labour at scale.
The better model is the one Convention 193 itself gestures toward: mandatory algorithmic transparency and a real deactivation appeal — cheap to implement, directly answers the drivers' loudest complaint, and requires no new employment category. Pair that with a portable, contribution-based social-protection instrument routed through the pending Social Security Trust Fund rather than a status fight in the National Industrial Court. And leave status determination to sectoral, tripartite negotiation between platforms, driver associations, and the Ministry of Labour — not a courtroom relitigating a single 2018 precedent, and not a treaty ratified in Geneva with no domestic statute behind it. Nigeria doesn't need to choose between ITUC-Africa's treaty and Uber's contract; it needs a labour ministry willing to write the specific rules Convention 193 leaves to "national practice," instead of waiting on either side to blink.