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DOCUMENT YOUR EXPERIENCE: Share your flooding experience to build evidence for policy accountability
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If you are reading about this flooding issue for the first time, start here: Lagos Infrastructure and Flooding Volunteer Desk
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In April 2025, I wrote about gridlock. I wrote about systemic failures and the endurance of Lagos residents who navigate broken infrastructure daily. I spoke of staying safe when chaos demanded reaction, of wisdom to choose stillness over immediate response.
I had no idea I was writing my own future.
Today, I write from a flooded reality - not from the comfortable distance of observation, but from the muddy truth of lived experience. My home in Lekki sits underwater. The kitchen appliances rot in floodwater that has no intention of receding. My housemates wade through murky water to salvage what they can, while roads remain impassable, cutting off entire communities from the rest of Lagos.
The irony cuts deep as broken glass: the very flooding observed from distance in April has swallowed daily life whole across Lekki and beyond. The privilege I acknowledged then - the ability to stay safe when others must move - has revealed its fragile nature. Safety, it turns out, was not a permanent condition but a temporary accident of geography and timing.
This is the story of how prophecy becomes reality, how distance collapses, and how the luxury of intellectual analysis gives way to the urgency of survival. It's the story of a city where twenty million people are held hostage by infrastructure decisions that prioritise profit (and perhaps petty elitist tribalism) over human welfare.
"Leaders ignore suffering / Citizens endure silently / Raging requires planning"
When I wrote these lines in April, Lagos was already showing its fractures. “The Independence Bridge closure along the Eko bridge axis had trapped thousands of commuters in endless queues of metal and exhaust. Bodies cramped in vehicles, fuel gauges dropping toward empty, appointments missed, children waiting”. The image haunted me then - not just for its immediate cruelty, but for what it revealed about the casual indifference of those entrusted with public welfare.
The true violence, I wrote, lay in the predictability. “A crowded city of over twenty million, a vital infrastructure point, a post-holiday rush hour. These factors required no specialised knowledge to anticipate, only the basic humanity to consider how decisions affect lives. Yet here we were, watching leadership without empathy transform into mismanagement of resources, where citizens became statistics, their time and dignity expendable commodities in calculations that prioritised everything except human experience.”
I spoke then of the "quiet dignity of endurance" - how Lagosians develop practised patience with systems that consistently fail us. “Strangers sharing water bottles through car windows. Pedestrians navigating impossible spaces between bumpers. Office workers in wilted formal wear, walking kilometres in inappropriate shoes.” Their resilience was both admirable and heartbreaking, a testament to human adaptability in the face of institutional dysfunction.
But even then, I understood that this quiet endurance carried dangerous power. It normalised dysfunction. Each time we accepted the unacceptable, we unwittingly participated in lowering the standards of what we collectively deserved.
The warnings were embedded in the very logic of what was being proposed. When the federal government announced plans for a coastal highway that would run directly through Lagos’ natural drainage corridors, basic environmental science screamed in protest. You don't build roads through wetlands without expecting consequences. You don't block the ocean's access to inland waterways without creating new flood zones.
Yet the project proceeded with the kind of bureaucratic momentum that treats environmental impact as an afterthought rather than a primary consideration. The current plan for the coastal road is a massive intervention in a delicate ecosystem that had, for generations, managed water flow between the ocean and inland areas.