Makoko Afloat: Lagos’ War on Waterfront Life

The Floating City’s Unplanned Farewell

Makoko, Lagos’ storied shantytown, has spent generations balancing atop the lagoon’s wooden stilts—a precarious position both architecturally and politically. But as 2026 dawned, the city’s most aquatic community met a new wave of demolition, with bulldozers and official statements arriving faster than the morning tide.

Anna Sobie, mother of five, now sleeps on the splinters of her former home. Her address, once buoyed by planks and hope, has been reduced to a platform for insomnia and damp clothes.

🦉 Owlyus flaps in: "If waterfront property is all about location, location, location, Makoko just lost three out of three."

The Official Version (and the Not-So-Official One)

Officials from Lagos State, ever the connoisseurs of public safety, insist the demolitions are a favor to humanity—removing homes dangerously close to high voltage power lines. It’s an electrifying excuse, but critics, NGOs, and most of Makoko’s population smell a scheme more pungent than lagoon at low tide. Whispered words like “land-grab” and “gentrification” swirl through the air, as do the more literal clouds of smoke from burning homes.

Residents claim the bulldozers rolled in just before Christmas—because nothing says “Happy Holidays” like forced eviction with a side of armed police. The demolition, according to ten non-governmental organizations, featured all the classics: fire, confusion, and the sort of abruptness usually reserved for plot twists in telenovelas.

A Lagoon of Displacement

Makoko’s population, somewhere between 80,000 and 200,000 depending on who’s counting and how optimistic they’re feeling, now finds itself in fragments. Over 10,000 people, by the NGOs’ tally, have been forcibly uprooted, losing not just homes but schools, clinics, and churches—because even God, apparently, must apply for planning permission.

🦉 Owlyus observes: "When your eviction notice comes wrapped in smoke, you know urban planning’s gone medieval."

Sobie's son, Solomon, no longer attends school—his classroom now part of the debris. Instead, he collects firewood from the ruins, a crash course in survival economics. Nearby, traders paddle through the maze of remaining homes, selling fish and dreams, but many have lost their wares to fire and flood alike.

The Protest and the Tear Gas

Makoko’s resistance floated its way to the House of Assembly. Over 1,000 residents demanded an audience with Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, hoping for dialogue, but instead received a bouquet of tear gas. Allegations of injuries, even child deaths, circulate—each denied or earmarked for future investigation by state officials with a talent for selective unawareness.

Lawmakers promise meetings; residents remember smoke.

🦉 Owlyus squawks: "If the government won’t clear the air, at least they’ll cloud it."

Land, Power, and the Art of Gentrification

Makoko’s story is a familiar one, retold in cities where every patch of land is a future spreadsheet entry. Lagos’ governor rails against the dangers of shanties encroaching on infrastructure, promising financial grants (details pending, naturally) and denying accusations of elite land grabs. The state’s real estate developers, meanwhile, can barely contain their excitement at the phrase “prime waterfront.”

For the displaced, suspicion lingers like the mist over the lagoon. The official line is public safety, but the unofficial consensus is that luxury condos cast long shadows.

🦉 Owlyus, with a final hoot: "You can’t spell ‘gentrification’ without ‘gin,’ as in: ‘You’ll need a drink to swallow this.’"

The Housing Crisis That Won’t Sink

Reports show Lagos’ housing supply climbing but always outrun by demand—a deficit ballooning by hundreds of thousands of units even as new buildings sprout up. The poor migrate to waterfronts, the city migrates them elsewhere. It’s a game of musical chairs, but the music is gunfire and the chairs are underwater.

Makoko’s residents have seen this play before, most recently in 2017. Court orders promised no evictions without notice or compensation, but legal niceties dissolve quickly in Lagos’ humid air. NGOs demand alternate accommodation; the government offers platitudes.

Children fish among the wreckage, mothers dry clothes on embers, and at night, the cold is less biting than the uncertainty. The only thing more precarious than life on stilts is the promise of help from above.

Epilogue: The City Beautiful, The City Brutal

Makoko, founded by fishing communities in the 19th century, now finds itself on the wrong side of modernity’s bulldozer. As Lagos aspires to global polish, the city’s margins become ever more slippery. For the poor, the only thing moving faster than the tides is the pace at which they’re pushed aside.

There’s talk of more meetings, more investigations, more concern for public safety. But for Anna Sobie and thousands like her, home is a memory, and the future floats just out of reach.