Repeated floods expose the cost of poor drainage, waste management and shrinking wetlands as experts urge Lagos to rethink urban resilience

“In Nigeria, when rain falls for just three hours, WhatsApp becomes a rescue centre. Somebody is stranded. Somebody’s car is floating.

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Somebody is asking for a canoe in Lekki. Then someone will inevitably conclude: ‘This rain is from the village.’ Perhaps not. Perhaps this one came from our own hands.”

Every rainy season in Nigeria follows a familiar script. The rain falls. The roads disappear. Cars become boats. Homes become swimming pools.

Government officials promise action. Citizens blame government. Government blames citizens.

Then the sun comes out, floodwaters recede, memories fade, and we return to business as usual, until the next downpour reminds us that nature has a longer memory than we do.

But here is an inconvenient truth. Our cities are not being defeated by nature. They are being defeated by our own choices.

The story of flooding in Lagos and many Nigerian cities is no longer simply about rainfall.

It is about governance, environmental stewardship, urban planning, and perhaps most importantly, our collective disregard for the natural systems that once protected us.

Now hear this. The Rain Is Not the Villain! According to the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet), the 2025 and 2026 Seasonal Climate Predictions warned of above-normal rainfall across many parts of Nigeria.

Likewise, the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA) consistently identifies hundreds of communities across dozens of states as being at significant flood risk each year. The rain did exactly what scientists predicted.

However, the real surprise is that many of us behaved as if nobody warned us.

Climate change is certainly making extreme weather more frequent and more intense.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has repeatedly warned that warming temperatures are increasing the frequency of heavy rainfall events worldwide.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) also notes that urban flooding is becoming one of the fastest-growing climate risks globally.

But climate change alone does not explain why some neighbourhoods flood after two hours of rain while others remain relatively safe. The difference often lies beneath our feet.

What did we do? We closed nature’s escape routes. Rainwater has always known where to go.

For centuries it flowed through wetlands, streams, floodplains, forests and natural drainage channels before eventually reaching lagoons and rivers.

Like people without knowledge, we ‘intervened’. We paved almost everything. We filled wetlands. We built on river setbacks. We reclaimed natural floodplains.

We removed mangroves. We replaced soil with concrete.

Then we wondered why the water refused to disappear. Water has nowhere to go because we have occupied its home.

As environmental planners often remind us, ‘every building constructed on a wetland is effectively asking water to negotiate for space. Water rarely loses that negotiation’.

In another magical move, we turn our drains into refuse dumps. Our drains are clogged with refuse because, for too long, we have refused to confront the consequences of our actions.

Plastic bottles, pure water sachets, food wrappers, construction debris, household waste, old mattresses, tyres, and everything except water.

Walk through many communities after rainfall and one uncomfortable truth becomes obvious. Many drainage channels no longer function as drainage channels. They have become unofficial waste bins.

Citizens certainly deserve criticism for indiscriminate disposal of waste. But that is only one side of the story.
Lagos has a waste management problem we can no longer pretend does not exist.

Lagos, our Lagos.

The commercial heartbeat of Nigeria. The city that prides itself as Africa’s mega city. The warning signs have existed for years.

This year’s heavy rains merely exposed what many residents have quietly endured. In the community where I live, household refuse has remained uncollected for more than four months. Unfortunately, this is no longer unusual.

Over the past two years, delays stretching three, four, sometimes even six months have become disturbingly common. Residents are left with impossible choices.

Store decomposing waste indefinitely. Dump it illegally. Or burn it. Some reluctantly choose the last option, not because they enjoy polluting the environment, but because they fear disease outbreaks more than smoke.

The result? Communities exchange one environmental disaster for another. Toxic smoke. Air pollution. Respiratory discomfort.

Neighbourhood disputes. Children and elderly residents inhaling dangerous fumes.

This cannot be the waste management strategy of a 21st-century mega city.

The situation becomes even more alarming around major markets and commercial corridors.

Refuse heaps now occupy portions of roads meant for vehicles and pedestrians. Environmental sanitation exercises come and go. The refuse remains.

Sometimes waste is removed from blocked drainage channels only to be left beside the gutters for days or weeks. The next rainfall simply washes much of it back into the drains. The cycle begins again.

It would appear that the Lagos State Waste Management Authority (LAWMA), despite the commitment of many of its personnel, is carrying a burden that has outgrown its current operational model.

The system is overwhelmed. Pretending otherwise serves nobody. The human cost is bigger than statistics.

Flooding is often discussed using numbers. Properties destroyed. Roads submerged. Economic losses. Insurance claims. But behind every statistic is a family.

Someone loses a lifetime investment. Someone’s business inventory disappears overnight.

A student loses school books.

A trader loses her shop. A family spends weeks repairing walls already weakened by repeated flooding.

According to the World Bank, flooding remains one of the costliest natural hazards affecting urban economies, with poor households bearing the greatest burden because they often live in vulnerable locations and have limited resources for recovery.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) estimates that nature-based infrastructure such as wetlands, urban forests and green spaces significantly reduces flood risks while improving air quality and public health. Ironically, these are precisely the systems many cities continue to destroy.

Governance Matters Floods are acts of nature. Flood disasters are often failures of governance. Good governance anticipates.

It plans, enforces, educates, invests, maintains, and responds. Urban resilience cannot depend solely on emergency responses after floodwaters have entered people’s living rooms. It begins months and years before the first drop of rain falls.

Here comes a new environmental contract. Lagos, and indeed Nigeria, needs a complete rethink of urban waste management. Not cosmetic adjustments. Not temporary interventions. A structural redesign.

Waste management should become a genuinely collaborative enterprise involving residents, Community Development Associations (CDAs), Local Governments and LCDAs, private operators, recyclers, environmental professionals, market associations and state agencies. In fact, the LGAs and LCDAs should be playing a more deeper role in the management and enforcement of the environment waste management.

Lagos has grown and gone beyond the present arrangement started over 20 years ago.

They should be involve also in the recycling ecosystem. Recycling must move from policy documents into neighbourhood reality.

Communities should be incentivised to separate waste at source. Plastic should become an economic resource rather than a drainage problem.

Digital monitoring should improve collection efficiency. Performance indicators should be transparent.

Residents should know when waste collection is expected, and agencies should be accountable when those schedules fail. Equally important is enforcement. Illegal dumping cannot become socially acceptable.

Planning regulations protecting wetlands, river setbacks and drainage corridors must be enforced consistently, irrespective of influence or status. No city successfully manages flooding while simultaneously allowing natural drainage systems to disappear.

Finally, Lagos must accelerate the implementation of its flood management strategy by combining engineered infrastructure with nature-based solutions, by expanding drainage where necessary, restoring wetlands where possible, increasing urban tree cover, and ensuring routine maintenance long before the rains arrive.

The choice before us. Perhaps the rain deserves an apology. For years, we have blamed it for problems it did not create. Rain merely exposes the quality of our planning.

It reveals whether governance works. It tests whether citizens respect the environment. It uncovers whether institutions respond before crises instead of after them.

As another rainy season unfolds, perhaps the better question is no longer, “Why is Lagos flooding?” The real question is:

“How much longer will we continue manufacturing the very disasters we blame on nature?” Because the next time the skies open, the rain will simply do what rain has always done.

The rest will depend on what WE have done before it arrived. And if we continue treating our drains as dustbins and our wetlands as vacant real estate, then we should not be surprised when the water calmly replies in familiar Nigerian fashion:

Also read: Lagos Attributes Lekki Flooding to Illegal Construction and Waste Disposal

“Na una call me.”