LagRide, the Lagos government-backed ride-hailing platform that charges significantly higher fares than its rivals, says it will not open its service to drivers from Bolt and inDrive, even as drivers on both apps continue to protest low fares and high commissions. The standoff is playing out in Lagos, Nigeria's commercial hub and one of Africa's most active ride-hailing markets, where Bolt and inDrive rank among the most widely used e-hailing apps.

In a chat with Technext, the company's Director of Communications, Ifeanyi Abraham, said drivers from those platforms have yet to complete the rigorous, multi-area training required to operate on LagRide. According to him, these programmes, ranging from hospitality to behavioural training, are what equip ordinary drivers with the professionalism that qualifies them to become LagRide captains.

"We are not opening our app for Lagos drivers to earn. We can't, unfortunately, because of the standard. If you understand the LagRide ecosystem, we believe that until a driver passes through academy to become a captain, they are not fit for Lagos roads. That is the entire premise of LagRide to start with. The Hospitality training, the Cost Management training, and the Behavioural Psychology training that drivers go through in our academy are what empower them and prepare them for the roads," Ifeanyi said.

His comments come as e-hailing drivers in Lagos stage protests against the hardship caused by what they describe as ridiculously low fares on the Bolt and inDrive apps. Their situation is made even harsher by ever-increasing operating costs: fuel currently sells for roughly ₦1,400 per litre, data costs have risen by 50 per cent, and spare parts prices continue to soar due to an unstable currency, import tariffs and other economic factors. The squeeze mirrors the broader cost-of-living pressures that have strained budgets across Nigeria in recent years.

Despite rising costs, fares keep falling across both apps, prompting drivers to adopt several measures to shore up their earnings. These include negotiating fees outside the apps and cancelling trips in-app while completing the same trips offline to avoid paying platform commissions. Since ride commissions are a primary revenue source for e-hailing platforms, the workarounds illustrate how far the fare-versus-cost imbalance has pushed drivers from the apps' standard operating model.

LagRide professionalism

One solution proposed by many drivers is to move en masse from Bolt and inDrive to other platforms, with the Lagos government-backed LagRide frequently mentioned as a destination. A quick check shows that LagRide offers considerably higher fares than both apps, in some cases as much as double.

That gap has raised the question of whether it would make good business sense at this time for the company to open up its app to drivers from these other platforms. LagRide, however, said the difference in class and quality between its captains and outside drivers is simply too wide for such an admittance to be considered.

"If you notice the quality of LagRide captains, they are different from most of these other platforms because of this. And they have an ownership mindset from the scratch; they know that once they complete those 90 days, they are going to own their brand-new cars. So this is what is driving them. So we are not opening the LagRide platform to any externals," the company's spokesperson said.

The academy-to-ownership structure, in which captains take home brand-new cars after completing their 90 days, stands apart from the commission-based models that have fuelled driver discontent on rival apps.

In a previous chat, the LagRide spokesperson noted that there is more than enough demand on its platform, as the company's marketing team spends millions of naira every month generating rider demand that captains are not currently meeting. He added that the company is actively working to increase capacity to ensure that any captain operating within its ecosystem has more than enough work without looking elsewhere. How LagRide grows that capacity without opening its doors to outside drivers, and whether the protests shift the fare-and-commission debate on Bolt and inDrive, remain open threads in Lagos's e-hailing market.