On a breezy afternoon on March 5, Juliet Nnaji, 23, ordered a Bolt ride to Maryland, in central Lagos, to meet a friend. But when Nnaji, who works as a content creator, asked the driver to pull over a few blocks from her final destination, he became visibly angry. He didn’t want to change the destination and tried to end the trip, leaving her to wait under the sun in an unfamiliar neighborhood. “He threw a tantrum and called me a prostitute,” she told Rest of World.
Moments later, the driver turned on his phone’s video camera, shouting at her to pay up while he recorded. “The next thing I saw was a punch on my face,” she said. In front of several witnesses, she said he punched her again, and threw her bag out of the car, damaging her phone. “I never, in my wildest dream, expected that he would do that.”
Nnaji reported the incident to Bolt, and received an email from its MyCoverGenius customer service team a few days later on March 11, which bluntly declined to proceed with her report because of “so many irregularities” in her claim. The email, seen by Rest of World, ended: “We hope that you try to be more careful next time.”
Bolt, which launched as Taxify in Lagos in 2016, has mushroomed in popularity over the last three years, as drivers flocked to the Estonia-founded platform. Drivers told Rest of World that many had chosen it because its onboarding process was a lot less rigorous than that of Uber, its main competitor. Wait times for Bolt rides are often much shorter than Uber, which has attracted more riders. They’ve also been lured through numerous discount promotions. But the easier onboarding standards can be exploited by some unscrupulous drivers. Rest of World has seen evidence that some drivers have been selling their Bolt accounts to unregistered third parties, avoiding the platform’s driver verification processes altogether.
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