There is one image that will outlast every glossy infrastructure brochure produced by the Lagos State Government under Babajide Sanwo-Olu: a family standing beside a heap of broken blocks that used to be their home, holding a bundle of clothes and a school bag, with nowhere to go before nightfall. Lagos is a city of more than twenty million people and a housing deficit measured in millions of units. Confronted with that arithmetic, an administration had two possible legacies to choose from — the one that builds, or the one that demolishes. Sanwo-Olu’s Lagos has been defined by the second, and the human cost has been staggering.
A Deficit That Grew While the Marketing Improved
The core failure is quantitative and impossible to spin. Lagos needs hundreds of thousands of new affordable housing units every year merely to keep pace with population growth, let alone to close the existing gap. What the state has delivered across the Sanwo-Olu years — estates commissioned with ribbons, cameras and hashtags — amounts to a rounding error against that need, and much of it priced far beyond the reach of the teacher, the artisan, the bus driver and the market trader who actually constitute the city. When the supply of genuinely affordable homes is a fraction of demand, the outcome is not mysterious: rents spiral, families are pushed into single rooms, and informal settlements expand because human beings must live somewhere. A government that presides over this and calls it progress is measuring the wrong thing.
The Demolition Reflex
Rather than closing that gap, the administration became known for clearing communities. Waterfront settlements, roadside markets, entire neighbourhoods of low-income Lagosians have been reduced to rubble, frequently with notice periods so short as to be meaningless and sometimes, according to residents and civil society groups, with none at all. Officials invariably cite drainage, planning regulations, environmental concerns or security. Some of those concerns are legitimate. But the legitimacy of a reason does not excuse the cruelty of a method. A state with genuine regard for its citizens conducts enumeration, gives adequate legal notice, offers compensation, and provides resettlement before the excavators arrive. Lagos under Sanwo-Olu has repeatedly reversed that sequence, arriving with machinery first and explanations afterwards.
Who Actually Loses a Home
It is worth naming precisely who bears this policy. The people displaced are not speculators; they are fisherfolk, hawkers, mechanics, tailors, cleaners, security guards — the workforce that keeps Lagos functioning at four in the morning. When their homes fall, children drop out of school mid-term, small businesses lose their premises and their customer base simultaneously, and savings accumulated over decades evaporate in an afternoon. Meanwhile, high-end developments continue to rise on reclaimed land and prime waterfront, some of them on precisely the kind of terrain from which poorer communities were cleared. Lagosians have drawn the obvious inference, and no amount of official denial has dislodged it: in this administration’s Lagos, the rules bend for capital and break for the poor.
Flooding: The Problem Demolitions Were Supposed to Solve
Drainage has been the administration’s favourite justification for clearance, which makes the outcome all the more damning. Every rainy season Lagos floods — Lekki, Victoria Island, Ikoyi, Ajah, the mainland corridors — with vehicles submerged, businesses shuttered and residents wading through contaminated water to reach their own front doors. If the demolitions were genuinely about drainage, and the flooding has not measurably improved, then either the diagnosis was wrong or the demolitions were about something else. Either conclusion indicts the administration. Structural stormwater management, canal maintenance, sustained waste collection and enforcement against the developers who build over drainage channels are hard, unglamorous, multi-year work. Clearing a poor settlement is fast and photographs well.
Court Orders and Selective Deafness
Perhaps the most corrosive element of the record is the state’s relationship with judicial restraint. Affected communities have repeatedly gone to court, and there have been credible, widely reported complaints that clearances proceeded in the face of pending litigation or subsisting orders. A government that treats a court order as an inconvenience is teaching every citizen a dangerous lesson about what the law is for. Rights that exist only until the state finds them expensive are not rights. For an administration in Nigeria’s commercial capital — a city whose entire economic proposition rests on the enforceability of contracts and the reliability of the courts — that casualness is not merely unjust, it is self-harming.
The Revenue Machine Without the Reciprocity
Lagos is Nigeria’s wealthiest sub-national government, collecting internally generated revenue that dwarfs most states combined, alongside land use charges, levies, permits and fees that ordinary residents pay without exemption. That fiscal strength makes the housing failure a choice rather than a constraint. A state with that balance sheet could have established serious mortgage and rent-to-own schemes calibrated to informal incomes, upgraded settlements in place instead of erasing them, released land banks for genuinely low-cost construction, and regulated the punishing two-year advance rent culture that traps working Lagosians. It did comparatively little of this. Residents were asked for everything and offered a housing market that pushes them further out each year.
A Legacy Written in Rubble
Babajide Sanwo-Olu inherited the richest, most dynamic and most forgiving political constituency in Nigeria, along with the resources to make a genuine dent in the housing crisis of Africa’s largest city. What he leaves instead is a widened deficit, a rental market that punishes work, seasonal floods the clearances were meant to prevent, and thousands of families whose only interaction with their government was the sound of a bulldozer at dawn. Lagos does not need to be sold to Lagosians; they already know what it could be. They needed a governor who would build for them rather than around them. On the most basic promise a government makes to a city — that you may keep your home — this administration failed, and it failed the people who could least afford it.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
