There is a point at which a problem stops being merely unpleasant and becomes a threat to public safety. Lagos has reached that point with its worsening refuse crisis. From Ajegunle to Mushin, Akowonjo to Festac, Bariga to Yaba, Alimosho to Ikota, the sight of refuse accumulating on roads, medians, neighbourhoods and drainage channels is becoming impossible to ignore. This is not about whether Lagos looks dirty, and it is not the tired argument that Lagosians are careless. It is about public health, human dignity, urban governance and the real possibility of a preventable disease outbreak. It is time to raise our voices, because we should not wait for the epidemic before we begin asking questions.
The warning is not speculation. Lagos has seen cholera outbreaks before. A recent review recorded 401 confirmed cases and 21 deaths in the state in 2024, and found that such outbreaks have historically clustered in densely populated communities with inadequate sanitation, heavy rainfall and flooding. The World Health Organization is equally clear about the link between waste and health: poor collection blocks drainage, the resulting flooding and standing water favour cholera and vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue, and mismanaged waste contaminates water, soil and air. A pile of garbage is never simply a pile of garbage. It breeds flies and rodents, obstructs drains, contaminates floodwater, provides stagnant pools for mosquitoes and taints food and water. What begins as a collection problem quietly becomes a health emergency.
What makes the present situation alarming is the sheer duration of some collection failures. A recent report from Ejigbo and Idimu described refuse heaps that had sat on road medians for roughly four months despite repeated complaints. In Alimosho, residents of Ikuomola Close said their assigned PSP operator had last collected refuse on 17 April 2026, leaving the community with four months of accumulated waste that had drawn mosquitoes and rodents and begun blocking drainage channels. Four months. Can we seriously expect a family to store four months of household refuse inside its compound and still remain compliant with environmental regulations? This is where the conversation must mature. Citizens have a duty not to dump refuse indiscriminately, but government has a matching duty to ensure that the system it established for lawful disposal actually functions. Enforcement cannot substitute for collection.
Lagos generates an enormous volume of waste each day, and the state deserves credit for the scale of the system it has built to handle it. But aggregate figures conceal neighbourhood-level failure. If thousands of tonnes are being evacuated across the city while a particular street has not seen a truck for months, then there is a problem of distribution, accountability, route management or contract enforcement that must be confronted. The citizen does not live in a statistic. He lives on a particular street, and he knows exactly when the truck last came. This is why I am uneasy about the growing reliance on enforcement. I have heard complaints of residents being harassed by local actors over where they dispose of their refuse. If the authorised system has failed, threatening a resident for trying to remove accumulated waste from his home is not environmental management. It is a transfer of risk from the system to the citizen.
The most dangerous dimension is what happens when the rains come. Lagos is a coastal megacity with chronic drainage problems and recurrent flooding. Picture thousands of tonnes of plastic, food waste, packaging and bottles building up in communities, some of it inevitably finding its way into gutters. Then heavy rain falls, the drains are blocked, and the floodwater rises. That water does not distinguish between refuse and a residential compound, and it carries whatever contamination lies in its path. The WHO warns that flooding raises the transmission of water- and vector-borne diseases including cholera, typhoid and malaria, while contaminated sources and standing water create further risk. That is the danger we should be debating now, before the wards fill, before the laboratories report clusters, before families lose loved ones.
We sometimes speak of cholera as a disease of another era. It is not. The WHO describes it as an acute diarrhoeal infection spread through contaminated food or water, capable of killing within hours through severe dehydration if treatment is delayed. Safe water, sanitation and hygiene are the foundations of prevention. That is precisely why refuse management must be treated as public-health infrastructure. When waste accumulates near drains, markets, homes and food premises, we widen the conditions under which infection spreads. So we should stop asking only why Lagosians dump refuse, and also ask why a resident who wants to dispose of his waste lawfully cannot obtain the authorised service. Both questions matter.
There is a comforting misconception worth demolishing: that this is a problem for poorer neighbourhoods alone. An epidemic respects no address. It does not check whether a home stands in Ikoyi, on Banana Island, in Victoria Island or in Mushin. A resident of Alimosho may work in Victoria Island; a domestic worker may live in Mushin and work in Ikoyi; a food vendor may serve customers from every social class. A mosquito cannot tell a mansion from a face-me-I-face-you house, and a contaminated water source does not understand social class. Lagos is one ecosystem, and what happens in one part of the city eventually reaches the rest.
The consequences reach well beyond cholera. Waste provides food and shelter for rodents and creates pools of stagnant water, and the WHO notes that vector-borne diseases account for more than 17 per cent of infectious diseases worldwide. We should therefore be alert to acute diarrhoeal disease, typhoid and other enteric infections, malaria, dengue, rodent-associated illness, contamination of drinking water, the respiratory harm of open burning and the many consequences of flooding. When residents begin burning uncollected refuse because no one comes for it, the WHO’s warning about open burning as a hazard to workers and surrounding communities becomes real. The result is a vicious cycle: uncollected waste leads to illegal dumping, which blocks drains, which causes flooding, which contaminates water, which spreads disease, which prompts open burning and air pollution. That is not a sustainable urban system.
This is no longer a LAWMA problem alone. The agency is central, but the response must bring together the state government, the ministries of health and environment, local governments and LCDAs, PSP operators, community organisations, markets, businesses, health institutions and emergency-management agencies. Waste management cannot operate in isolation from public health, drainage, water management and disaster preparedness.
I believe Lagos should immediately institute a 30-Day Environmental Health and Waste Recovery Programme across the metropolis. Not another committee, campaign or slogan, but a physical, measurable intervention. Every LGA and LCDA should identify its waste hotspots and publish, for each, the location, the quantity of accumulated waste, how long it has been there, the responsible PSP, the date of last collection, the drainage situation, the nearest health facility and the corrective action taken. Where a PSP has failed to collect within an agreed service period, a backup operator should be deployed automatically. The resident should not have to beg, negotiate with street enforcers, or keep months of garbage in his home.
I would go further and establish a clear Right to Collection. Every resident paying for an authorised service should be entitled to a defined maximum service interval. If the assigned operator fails, the state steps in, the contractor is penalised, the route is reassigned where necessary, and the resident receives the service he has paid for. This would transform waste management from an arrangement in which citizens are routinely blamed into one in which providers are measurably accountable.
None of this is an argument against enforcement. There must be firm enforcement against those who deliberately dump waste into drains, canals and roads. But enforcement must target the behaviour that creates the problem, not stand in for a functioning collection system. Collect first, and enforce at the same time. Do not tell a family it cannot put out its accumulated garbage while the contractor has failed to appear for months; give it a lawful alternative, then enforce the law. That is how a modern city operates.
Prevention also demands surveillance. Lagos should not wait for hospitals to report large numbers of acute watery diarrhoea before it grows concerned. The Ministry of Health, the NCDC, LAWMA, local health authorities and emergency agencies should establish coordinated surveillance around identified waste and flood hotspots, watching for unusual rises in acute watery diarrhoea, suspected cholera, malaria, other febrile illnesses and rodent-associated disease, and investigating any cluster at once. The purpose of public health is not merely to treat an epidemic but to detect and prevent one. In the same spirit, the crisis should trigger targeted testing of wells, boreholes and other water sources in communities suffering prolonged accumulation or flooding, since contamination of drinking water is among the gravest risks that flooding brings. We cannot clean the streets while allowing contaminated water into homes.
The lasting solution is not simply to buy more trucks and move garbage from one place to another. Lagos needs a modern circular waste economy in which waste is segregated, recovered, recycled, composted, converted to energy and only finally disposed of when no further use remains. The state’s exploration of waste-to-energy and other modern solutions is welcome, but sophisticated infrastructure in the future cannot excuse dangerous conditions today.
I write this not to condemn the Lagos State Government but because Lagos is too important to let an avoidable public-health crisis develop under our watch. It is Nigeria’s commercial capital, home to millions, and the country’s principal international business gateway. Its environmental condition shapes not only the lives of its residents but Nigeria’s economy and reputation. We cannot aspire to a globally competitive megacity while garbage becomes part of the landscape, and every Lagosian has a right to an environment that does not needlessly expose them to disease.
There is an old lesson in public health: prevention is cheaper than cure. It is cheaper to remove garbage today than to treat a cholera outbreak tomorrow, cheaper to clear a drain than to rebuild homes after a flood, cheaper to test water than to fill hospital beds, and infinitely cheaper to prevent a death than to explain afterward why it happened. So my message to Lagos State is simple. The time to act is now: not when the next outbreak is declared, not when the hospitals are overwhelmed, not when the media begin counting the dead. Let us remove the garbage, clear the drains, restore reliable collection, hold failed operators accountable, end the harassment masquerading as enforcement, test vulnerable water sources, strengthen surveillance and build a waste-management system worthy of a city of Lagos’s size. Because if we wait until the epidemic begins, we will have waited too long. Lagos does not need another warning after the crisis. It needs action before it.
Prof. Adesoji Adesugba, DBA, Ed.D, is a Social Commentator and writes from Lagos.
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