Makoko: The People the City Forgets
Makoko:
The People
the City Forgets
A century of life on the Lagos Lagoon — and the government is bulldozing it away for a yacht club. The case for inclusion, not erasure.
The Venice of Africa, Set on Fire
Just past the Third Mainland Bridge — the long concrete spine that connects Lagos Island to the mainland — a city within a city stirs at four in the morning. Canoe oars cut the dark water. Smoke begins rising from fish-smoking huts. Children prepare for school, boarding narrow wooden boats that serve as their school bus. This is Makoko. And in December 2025, the Lagos State Government sent in bulldozers, water-based excavators, and armed police to tear it down.
By the latest estimates, Makoko is home to somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 people — the village chief puts the figure closer to 400,000 across water and land — with some studies citing upward of a million when surrounding lagoon communities are included. No one knows the exact number, because in the 2006 national census, enumerators simply skipped the settlement entirely. For the Nigerian state, Makoko has always been easier to erase on paper than to serve.
What is not in dispute is what happened in the final weeks of 2025. Armed demolition teams entered the community on the pretext of enforcing a 30-metre safety buffer beneath high-tension power lines. They did not stop at 30 metres. They did not stop at 100 metres. By mid-January 2026, over 3,000 structures had been razed — homes, schools, health clinics, churches, market stalls. More than 10,000 people were left without shelter, many sleeping on canoes in the same lagoon their families had lived on for generations, covered by tarpaulin sheets when the rains came.
Human rights organisations and UN Special Rapporteurs formally condemned the Lagos demolitions as violations of international human rights law. Among the dead: a newborn infant exposed to teargas. A pregnant woman bled to death after demolition crews prevented residents from leaving the area. Protest leaders were arrested. The Lagos State Legislature eventually ordered a halt on 3 February 2026 — but not before the damage was done.
Behind the official safety narrative sits a different story. A property development company called FBT Coral Estate Limited had signed an agreement with the Lagos State Government in 2021, envisioning in Makoko's place a waterfront business hotel, a yacht club, a banquet hall, luxury malls, and multi-level car parking — a 75/25 ownership split between the developer and the state. Sand-filling and land reclamation had already begun along parts of the lagoon even as homes were being demolished. Lagoon communities have seen this pattern before. They call it what it is: a land grab.
"Fish smoked in Makoko feeds much of Lagos. Makoko is more than just a home — it is a living lagoon community sustained for generations by fishing, canoe transport, and market exchange closely tied to its location."
— Coalition of community organisations and NGOs, January 2026A History Written on Water
Makoko did not appear overnight. It was founded in the 18th and 19th centuries by Egun-speaking fishing families migrating from what is now the Republic of Benin and from Badagry. Long before Lagos became a megacity, these communities had already established an intricate way of life on the lagoon — building homes on wooden stilts, developing water-based trade routes, and creating a self-sufficient economy tied to the rhythms of the sea.
Makoko comprises six villages: four floating communities on water (Adogbo, Migbewhe, Oko Agbon and Yanshiwhe) and two on land (Apollo and Sogunro). An old map from 1962 shows Makoko in an almost empty Lagos, when the city's population was under one million. Today Lagos has grown to over 17 million people. Makoko grew with it — absorbing migrants from across Nigeria who found in its informal economy a foothold in the nation's commercial capital.
The community speaks Egun, a language that blends French-influenced expressions with Yoruba and other local tongues — a linguistic map of West African movement. Many of its residents have never known another home. Families have lived there for four, five, and six generations. When you displace Makoko, you are not just moving people. You are erasing an irreplaceable piece of Nigerian cultural heritage.
What Makoko Gives Lagos Every Single Day
Here is what the Lagos State Government's demolition orders never mention: Makoko feeds this city. Not metaphorically. Literally. The fish market at Makoko-Asejere is ranked among the top ten food markets in all of Lagos — a city whose food economy is valued at ₦16.14 trillion, with transactions across state markets estimated at ₦9 billion every single day. Lagos's Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu himself has acknowledged that Lagos consumes more than 50% of food traded across the South-West.
Makoko's fishermen venture far into the Atlantic and across the lagoon in large canoes, hauling back croakers, barracudas, red snappers, shiny-nose, prawns, crabs, squid, octopus, lobster, and crayfish. These catches flow directly into the food supply of one of Africa's most populous cities. The women of Makoko — rising at 4am, working 12-hour days — process, smoke, and trade fish that ends up in the vegetable soups and tomato stews consumed across Nigeria. Supermarkets, restaurants, caterers, and household buyers from across Lagos mainland make regular runs to the Makoko market. It is the seafood heartbeat of the mainland.
A University of Lagos study found that about half of Lagos State's 17+ million residents live in informal settlements. Professor Timothy Nubi proposes "gentrification that upgrades slums like Makoko without displacing residents." Meanwhile, thousands of luxury apartments across Lagos sit vacant because rents are unaffordable — while the state demolishes the only housing millions can access. The market is not solving this problem. Policy must.
The contribution of Makoko's women fishers, in particular, is systematically undervalued. A peer-reviewed study in The Conversation (2024) found that these women's roles in artisanal fisheries were "rarely appreciated" even as they served as the primary breadwinners of their households — paying school fees, feeding families, and managing small but consistent businesses across the fish value chain. They have built this economy without bank loans, without government support, without infrastructure. They have done it through sheer resilience, community solidarity, and generations of inherited knowledge. That knowledge cannot be relocated to an apartment block in Agbado.
The Voices the Bulldozers Silenced
These are not the voices of squatters. They are the voices of people whose families built one of Africa's most remarkable communities over more than a century — without government help, without formal title, and without recognition. The Lagos High Court ruled in 2017 that evictions without resettlement were unconstitutional and barred the state from doing exactly what it did in December 2025. A Federal High Court issued a fresh injunction in August 2025. The government demolished anyway.
This is a pattern. From 1973 to 2024, Lagos has carried out at least 91 forced evictions, directly displacing over two million residents. In July 1990 alone, the Maroko community of 300,000 was erased in what remains Nigeria's largest state-sponsored violent eviction. In Otodo Gbame in 2016-2017, security forces set the community ablaze while residents fled into the lagoon — some drowned. In Oworonshoki in 2023–2025, wholesale demolitions cleared entire streets. And now Makoko. The same justification. The same pattern. The same people who suffer.
Research from the Institute for Security Studies (ISS Africa) draws a sobering correlation: for every 1% increase in the eviction rate, there is a corresponding rise in violent incidents, including shootings. Evictees — especially women, girls, and children — are pushed into more dangerous, more precarious situations. The cycle of criminality that Lagos officials claim to be cleaning up is, in significant part, created by the very policies they pursue. You cannot arrest your way out of homelessness.
Not Erasure
Lagos deserves to be great. But greatness built on the ruins of its own people is not greatness — it is extraction. Here is what inclusive development looks like.
Commercial Units
Displaced Residents
For every 10 high-end homes or commercial properties built on land cleared of existing communities, a minimum of 2 affordable, community-priced units must be legally mandated for original residents — on the same waterfront, not in a distant relocation estate. This is the baseline of justice. It should be Lagos State law.
We Want Lagos Great. That's Why This Matters.
Let us be direct. We are not romanticising poverty. The conditions in Makoko are genuinely harsh: open sewage into the lagoon, no electricity grid, limited schooling, healthcare nearly nonexistent, polluted water making fishing increasingly precarious. The safety risk from high-tension power lines running through densely packed wooden structures is real. We do not deny any of this.
We grew up in Lagos. We know Ebute-Meta. We know Ajegunle. We know what these communities are — and we know what they produce. Lagos has always been a city of strivers. People who came with nothing and built something. The nurses, the engineers, the traders, the teachers, the musicians — the extraordinary Nigerians who have shaped this nation — many of them grew up in exactly these communities. Makoko and its neighbours are not a blight. They are a foundation.
The question for Lagos in 2026 is not whether to develop the waterfront. Of course it should be developed. It is how. The city of Amsterdam sits on more than a hundred kilometres of canals. Bangkok has its floating markets. Kampong Ayer in Brunei is a water village of 30,000 that has existed for six centuries and is now a UNESCO-recognised heritage site. These communities were not bulldozed to make cities great. They were woven into the identity of the cities that host them. Lagos can do the same.
The security calculus alone should settle this argument. The Institute for Security Studies has documented the correlation between forced eviction and rising crime. Every family driven from a home without alternative becomes a vulnerability. Every young man displaced from a community becomes a recruit for the very criminal networks the state claims to be fighting. The cost of policing the desperation that results from this displacement will exceed — many times over — the cost of inclusive development. This is not charity. It is fiscal sanity.
"Development that destroys lives and criminalises poverty is neither fair nor sustainable. There must be a better approach to developing Lagos without adding to the security crisis."
— Institute for Security Studies Africa, February 2026Lagos has the talent. It has the architecture firms, the urban planners, the engineers, the civic institutions. What it has lacked, repeatedly, is the political will to insist that development benefit those who already live here — not just those who arrive with capital to buy what used to belong to the poor. The ₦16 trillion food economy of Lagos already depends on these communities. Makoko's market is already rated one of the top ten in the state. The fishing economy is not separate from Lagos's economic story. It is part of it.
What would it take to build a Makoko that its residents can be proud of — and that Lagos can showcase to the world? Clean water infrastructure. Proper sewage systems. Elevated wooden boardwalks between stilt homes. A formalised fish market with cold storage, proper stalls, and hygiene. A water-bus system connecting the settlement to the mainland commercial areas. Solar-powered lighting throughout. A proper school. A primary health centre. Cooperative land titles. An ecotourism offer that brings visitors to one of the most unique communities in Africa.
This is not a fantasy. It is a budget line. And it would cost, over five years, a fraction of what the state will spend policing the crime that emerges when 300,000 people are scattered without a plan.
"Lagos belongs to everyone who built it. You cannot erase the builders and call it development."
The men and women of Makoko did not choose informality. They chose survival in a city that gave them no other option, and they built a remarkable life on the water against extraordinary odds. Four generations of Lagosians have raised families, built businesses, educated children, and contributed to this city's story from the very stilts the government is now burning.
A great Lagos is not a Lagos without Makoko. A great Lagos is a Lagos that found a way to bring Makoko with it — cleaned up, infrastructure intact, residents included, culture preserved. That is the Lagos that would truly deserve to be called Africa's model megacity.
We call on the Lagos State Government: engage the residents, not the bulldozers. Commission the urban planners who have been proposing in-situ solutions for a decade. Make the 10+2 inclusion ratio the law of every waterfront project in this state. Honour the court orders you signed your name to. And when you announce your Water City — make sure the people of the water are in it.
Research & Documentation
Population data: Wikipedia / Makoko community; Smart Cities Dive; Code for Africa / Urban.net (est. 250,000); World Bank (est. 85,840 on land); Local chiefs (est. 400,000 total); BetaSales (est. 300,000, 2023); The Conversation / univ. research; ISS Africa.
Demolition events Dec 2025–Jan 2026: AFP/Guardian Nigeria; FairPlanet; Punch Nigeria; People's Dispatch; CAPPA Africa; BONews; ISS Africa; PM News; African Elements; FairPlanet.
Legal background: OHCHR UN Press Release (2025–2026); UN Special Rapporteurs Rajagopal & Gaviria; Lagos State High Court rulings 2017; Federal High Court August 2025.
Economic data: Nairametrics / Lagos food economy ₦16.14T; Lagos Commissioner for Agriculture (₦9bn daily market transactions); Arbiterz (fishmonger profiles & working capital); The Conversation (women in artisanal fisheries, 2024); GlobalGiving / DoGood.Africa (fishing equipment project).
FBT Coral Estate: People's Dispatch; CAPPA Africa; The Guardian Nigeria (reporting Feb 2025 sand filling).
Security & eviction data: ISS Africa (1% eviction = rise in violent incidents; 91 forced evictions 1973–2024; 2M+ displaced); Otodo Gbame documentation, Amnesty International.
Historical: Atlas Obscura; Statelessness & Gentrification research; tutor2u GCSE Geography; Climate Justice Central.
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