The national collective agreement adopted a restorative approach to bring academics, regulators, platforms and driver’s representatives to participate in a truth telling circle. The national collective agreement was adopted at the Lagos restorative conference at Protea Hotel in Lagos State on May 13, 2024. The conference explores how the principles of restorative justice can and should be embedded within a proposed regulatory framework that would provide redress to platform drivers while harmed on the job and prevent their repeat victimization in Nigeria. The objective of the Lagos declaration was to arrive at a restorative outcome with the help of facilitators, adopted and signed by stakeholders as regulation to address social protection, security and the welfare of platform drivers. The conference also aimed at building a relational or restorative communication between platforms and workers.

 A restorative justice facilitator gave a lecture of the concept of restorative practices and provided a contextual background of restorative justice and corporate harm, this was followed by another lecture from a co-facilitator on the indigenous aspects of restorative justice and the concept of “Ubuntu”, “I am because you are”. At the end of the lectures, the facilitators summarized how restorative justice in theory and in practice can be used as an effective tool to support the development of a regulatory framework for the industry, and can also be a model for resolving disputes between workers representatives and platforms, or an alternative model to the traditional collective bargaining in terms of social dialogue.

The Lagos Restorative Conference brought together 300 participants from across the six regions of Nigeria, and 13 indigenous platforms were present including regulators, both local and international scholars. There were also families of drivers present and survivors or victims who experienced harm on the platforms, the participants were divided into 5 circles, each circle was given one underlying theme to discuss from the findings of the initial deliberative forums. Each particular circle discussed one “particular theme” from the following themes; Compensation, Safety, Accountability, Empowerment, and Community.

Important stakeholders including regulators, academics, driver’s and their family members were represented in each circle, facilitators selected a group leader who facilitated questions based on a restorative framework; who has been hurt and what are their needs, who is responsible for the harm and what are their obligations; how can things be put right? How can we prevent it from happening again? The gathered responses on the opinions of participants from each circle on the “particular theme” discussed were collated and was endorsed by social actors and embedded into the national collective agreement which was adopted and then signed by social actors at the signing ceremony on the National E-hailing Day.