Lagos:  River Lekki, demolitions and the cost of shortsightedness, by Ugoji Egbujo

Lagos is a bustling coastal city, so its vulnerability to floods is natural. But with a culture of indiscriminate refuse disposal, haphazard building developments, and lousy town planning enforcement, Lagos is the cause of much of its own flooding woes.

Often, governments come like pirates or parasites—ravenous and impatient, looking for what and where to strip and reap. So it isn’t mere policy incoherence and discontinuity. Our governments lack the temper for painstaking, elaborate planning. The few cities in the country that look planned benefited from the foresight of the colonial masters. Besides Abuja, we have transformed most of our cities into slums. Our building regulators have no sense of sustainability or aesthetics. The future for them is too abstract a concept. With “anything goes” as the culture, our people dwell in cutting corners on their way to nowhere. The outcome is dishevelment and impoverishment.

In the late 1980s, Lagos opened a beautiful new corridor. The city of aquatic splendor already had enough slums and had seen decent livable spaces decline rapidly. Many parts of Oshodi, Mushin, and Ebutte-Metta, which had been planned by the colonial masters, were already going seedy. Lagos ought to have been wary of leaving spaces to develop without ordaining their destinies. There was time and money   to create order and secure the future. It didnt require any innovation , we could have borrowed designs  from the western countries. But people cheerily took their eyes off the ball as they scrambled to fill their pockets. The problem wasn’t just greed—it was  profound  shortsightedness 

Now, every rainy season, Lekki becomes a river. Multimillion-naira homes in posh estates are swamped. Sewage floats into the open  and fills boreholes, the only source of potable water. Walls soak until they weep and grow algae. Roads erode. Half of the Lekki-Epe Expressway has become denuded, raw earth. The contents of packed green gutters are set loose spread into the sitting rooms and kitchens of big boys and girls. When people focus on short-term gains, they pay long-term prices.

The predicament of Lekki and many flood-prone areas in Lagos is caused by poor drainage. In some places, the government looked away while people built estates on drainage channels. Sometimes, governments sold those drainage channels for plates of porridge, only for another administration to come a decade later and knock down the buildings. Other times, the government built small drainage channels, knowing full well they would be blocked by cynical residents disposing refuse into gutters. Most drainage channels in Lagos are useless, blocked by filth. This major challenge hasn’t been confronted with innovation. Some governments sold buffer zones and green areas. Monies went into private pockets to buy mansions in planned neighborhoods abroad. All the parks had disappeared before Fashola came to recreate a few. The governments and residents of Lagos have to find a sense of tomorrow.

Lekki becomes a river during the rains because the lagoon fills up. At these times ,  if  the drains from residential estates and roads aren’t high enough, they can’t empty into the lagoon. Once the drains are full and stagnant, more rainfall causes homes to flood. In some places, governments looked away while people built on low-lying grounds. Nobody stopped anybody. Governments exist to offer authoritative directions for the common good. But when governments allow the easy circumvention of regulations, rules are seen as superfluous impediments. In Lagos, as in most other cities in Nigeria, rationality is not governed by private advantage.

Our town planners knew before Lord Lugard that Lagos town planning must account for floods. They knew that if people reclaiming swamps and rivers don’t meet certain thresholds, they would gnash their teeth. When the Americans came to build the Chevron Oil estate in Lekki, they knew this. They sandfilled the area properly, raising it to 2.3 meters above sea level. It must have made the project a little more expensive, but today, Chevron never floods. With that elevation, its drainage works in dry and wet seasons. But our people cut corners to nowhere, and the regulators are tax collectors. So they must have dismissed Chevron as oversabi. That’s why most of the estates directly opposite Chevron are now learning the hard way 

Despite the presence of Chevron before most others came into the Lekki area, the tragedy was not avoided. The government and developers were cutting corners . They didnt know  the enduring profit was in having having a resilient city. Up till now, estates are sprouting at levels below 1.5 meters above sea level. The government sees this and looks away. Those reclaiming lands are not compelled to comply with standards  to avoid future losses. For many governments , building control is  primarily an avenue for private and public Internally Generated Revenue rather than a public safety and town planning device.

Lekki is supposed to be the pride of the nation. But when it pours, it becomes a river of sewage. The government occuoies itself  knocking down housing estates sitting on drainage channels, whether they were approved or not. Whether they were approved or not their existence is an evidence of criminal negligence on the part of the government.  In a country of millions of homeless people and widespread abject poverty, the destruction of finished buildings must be made a grave crime. This will impose a special responsibility on both building regulators and builders to avoid calamitous waste. In addition, in certain situations, governments must learn to own the responsibility for negligence and do more than break houses without remorse.

For a start, all new reclamations must meet stringent climate change-compliant standards. And all new estates and houses in flood-prone areas must be subject to new flood-resistant building controls. Prevention, they say, is better than cure. Government officials who give direct or tacit approvals to new developments must bear criminal consequences if the approvals are later found to be flawed. The government must find alternatives to open shallow gutters. And that brings me to Festac.

Festac was reclaimed in the 1970s. The town was completed in 1977. Festac was such a solid job. The reclamation wasn’t done by charlatans. The drainages were made durable, wide, and deep. They are not prone to blockage by polythene bags and filth. Except for a few areas in Festac where later-day indiscriminate construction has blocked water flow, Festac never floods. Yet Festac was developed before Lekki. So at what point did we lose it and pick up anyhowness? How are we so unable to do things we did for fun 50 years ago when we were in the dark?

The government must redesign emerging areas to make them sponge rather than gutter cities. Shallow open gutters should be stopped. All new developments can be compelled to meet the standards of Festac—not the Festac of today, but the Festac of 1977. Even though it never really floods, the Festac of today has decayed beyond recognition. The roads are in pathetic condition. The government has abdicated its responsibilities, and the city is fast crumbling. A thorough review of the refuse disposal laws and systems must be done to banish indiscriminate waste disposal. The focus must be on sustainability rather than revenue.

Chevron is an example of proper planning. Festac is what happens when planning is not supported by maintenance. Lekki is the summary of haphazardnes. Lekki that was meant to symbolize progress but has instead become the symbol of shortsighted development, and a portrayal of how greed, lax enforcement, and a lack of forward-thinking can turn natural vulnerability into a man-made disaster.

Eko o ni baje o. But the  responsibility doesn’t belong to the gods alone. It belongs to the government and the people.

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