Ogechi Maduagwu

Change requires a kind of organised, sustained pressure. It requires citizens who refuse to accept dysfunction as normal and officials who understand their role as serving public welfare rather than private interests.

The question is whether Lagos residents will demand governance systems capable of long-term planning, environmental protection, and genuine accountability to community welfare.

Accountability must replace impunity, so officials responsible for preventable disasters face real consequences. Most importantly, empathy must replace indifference, so those making decisions about public spaces understand themselves as serving human beings, not managing statistics.

"When leaders ignore suffering, they transform from servants to oppressors, their silence a statement louder than any official announcement."

The cruel irony is that as flood-prone areas expand across Lagos, the very populations least able to secure safe housing are being pushed into increasingly vulnerable locations, creating a deadly cycle of displacement, improvised shelter, and repeated disaster. Storing up human vulnerability like water behind a dam waiting to burst.

This food security crisis reveals another dimension of how infrastructure failure cascades through every aspect of daily life. Transportation, housing, commerce, education, and nutrition are all connected through networks that become visible only when they break down. The coastal road project didn't just create flooding; it created hunger,... See more

The same infrastructure collapse that creates flooding also eliminates the social and economic systems that usually provide some measure of security through predictability and community presence.

we're all vulnerable to the same systemic failures, all dependent on the same inadequate infrastructure, all subject to the same governmental negligence.

The same engineering decisions that flooded Lekki have disrupted water flow patterns across the entire Lagos basin. Areas that residents thought were immune to flooding are discovering that infrastructure connects everything to everything else.