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Lagos flooding and the cost of weak urban resilience 12 Aug 2026

The latest episode of flooding in Lagos has again exposed a persistent policy failure at the intersection of urban infrastructure, climate adaptation, and food security. Rainfall over the city on Sunday, 28 June, continued for more than 24 hours; by 30 June, major roads had become waterways, commuters were stranded for extended periods, and businesses were assessing unplanned losses. 

In Gbagada, a hairstylist captured the resignation of many residents when she told News Central TV: "Many of us have had to raise our storefronts with concrete blocks because this happens almost every year, but this particular downpour was too much." Behind the submerged streets lies a more pressing question for public finance and governance: after more than ₦106 billion reportedly spent on drainage in little over a year, why does the water continue to prevail?

The answer is not peculiar to Lagos. Ghana recorded at least 12 deaths in Accra; Côte d’Ivoire lost 59 people in Abidjan; and Lomé, the Togolese capital, also saw its streets transformed into rivers. The pattern is regional: obstructed drains, encroachment on waterways, and a changing climate that is increasing the frequency and severity of extreme rainfall events. Lagos is therefore not an exception but the most visible expression of a wider coastal urban crisis.

Nevertheless, public authorities continue to frame the problem largely as unavoidable.

"Must we always get flooded? I will tell you no. But can we realistically, as a coastal state, avoid flash flooding? I will tell you no," Tokunbo Wahab, Lagos State Commissioner for Environment and Water Resources, said on Channels Television, before reiterating the familiar admonition that residents must stop dumping refuse into drains. The implication is that the government builds, citizens obstruct, and responsibility is so widely distributed that institutional accountability becomes difficult to pinpoint.

There is a broader pattern of governance, and it is not confined to drainage. When residents criticise the city’s waste-management failures or its flood-control infrastructure, they are often accused of advancing “agendas.” This response may be politically convenient, but it weakens the culture of accountability that effective urban management requires. A drainage system that continues to fail despite spending in excess of ₦100 billion demands scrutiny, not defensiveness. When a government treats questions as hostility, it diminishes its capacity to learn.

The contrast with the Netherlands is instructive, not merely because of its well-known dykes. A quarter of the country lies below sea level, yet centuries of investment in dykes, sluices, polders, and cooperative water boards have protected settlements and supported highly productive agriculture. The Netherlands is, by value, the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter: a country smaller than two Lagos states that produces tomatoes, peppers, dairy, and other food products for European markets on land secured by sophisticated water management. 

In that system, flood control is not separated from food security. The infrastructure that keeps Amsterdam dry is also part of the system that sustains greenhouse production through winter. Nigeria has not achieved comparable integration. When rainfall floods a farm in Bauchi or blocks the route to it, there is often no storage reserve, no buffer stock, and no alternative logistics corridor – only a direct transmission from a flooded field to a more expensive cup of pepper in Kaduna.

The cost of this failure warrants closer attention, and the latest Lagos flooding has provided an unusually clear account of its economic implications.

The World Bank estimates that flooding, damaged infrastructure, and lost productivity cost the Lagos economy up to $4 billion annually – roughly the size of the state’s capital budget in a favourable fiscal year. Nationally, data from the World Bank, UNDP, and the Lagos Economic Development Update place the combined cost of flooding between 2024 and 2025 at more than ₦13 trillion, with housing and agriculture bearing much of the burden. These macroeconomic estimates are significant, but they can seem abstract. The most recent SBM Jollof Index translates the same shock into a household measure that is more immediately legible.

Between July 2025 and June 2026, the National Average Jollof Index – the cost of preparing a standard pot of jollof rice – rose by 14.6 per cent, from ₦25,798 to ₦29,578. The national average, however, masks a regional story shaped by rainfall and logistical disruption. Trade Fair and Balogun markets in Lagos recorded a 49.6 per cent increase, the sharpest rise among the markets tracked by SBM, as flooded roads constrained the import and transport routes that carry tomatoes and peppers into the city. Calabar Municipal rose by 36.3 per cent and Port Harcourt by 18.2 per cent, despite their coastal access. In Bauchi, tomato prices increased by more than 200 per cent in some markets, not because Bauchi experienced flooding on the scale of Lagos, but because heavy rainfall elsewhere disrupted harvesting and transport.

The index’s researchers describe a food system with “no buffer”: storage is inadequate, roads are weak, and insurance for traders and farmers remains limited. When the rains arrive, tomatoes and peppers are often the first commodities to be affected, prompting households to substitute. In Lagos, this has meant carrot-based sauces and dried pepper replacing fresh ingredients. In Kaduna, Blessings Okoro, a housewife interviewed for the report, provided a household-level indicator of the shock: a cup of pepper that cost ₦2,500 to ₦3,000 last year now costs ₦15,000, while tomatoes have risen from ₦3,000 to ₦8,000. She has not stopped cooking jollof; she has simply reduced what goes into the pot.

This is what billion-dollar loss estimates often overlook. Flooding does not only destroy roads and homes; it enters the kitchen and alters household nutrition, one substitution at a time. Its impact is also uneven. The gap between Nigeria’s cheapest and most expensive markets has widened to ₦14,700, indicating that flooding is not a national equaliser but a multiplier of pre-existing weaknesses in local supply chains.

Ghana offers a useful contrast, albeit on a smaller scale than the Dutch example. Accra and Kumasi’s indices fell slightly over the same period, supported by a steadier cedi and easing global grain prices, even though Ghana also suffered deadly flooding in June. For the first time in years, the dollar cost of a pot of jollof is roughly equivalent in both countries – not because Nigerian households obtained meaningful relief, but because Ghana’s currency stability gave its food system a cushion that Nigeria’s lacked. Weather affected both countries. Only one had sufficient shock absorbers to moderate the impact. That distinction reflects policy, not providence.

This brings the analysis back to Lagos’s drains and the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway. The link between them and a plate of jollof in Kaduna is shorter than it may seem. The highway has drawn criticism from more than 70 civil society organisations, which argue that the project failed its own environmental assessments by routing through the Stubb’s Creek Forest Reserve, a mangrove system that would otherwise help absorb excess water. 

When Arise TV’s Rufai Oseni pressed Works Minister David Umahi on the project’s cost per kilometre, the minister dismissed the question as too complex for a journalist and described himself as “a professor in this field.” The exchange was not merely about road-construction metrics. It reflected a broader governance disposition in which scrutiny of public spending is treated as impertinence, even as infrastructure outcomes fail to control water and the associated cost pressures transmitted through food markets.

The remedies are not conceptually difficult. Existing environmental regulations should be enforced more consistently. Lagos requires a drainage master plan that treats the metropolis as an integrated hydrological system rather than a collection of self-defending neighbourhoods and storefronts. Nigeria must also strengthen the currency and logistics systems that turn a week of heavy rain into a food-price shock. 

Above all, public officials should stop dismissing scrutiny as an “agenda.” Until accountability improves, the water will continue to rise, the household pot will continue to shrink, and the bill will continue to land on citizens who neither authorised the failures nor have the financial capacity to absorb them.

Cheta Nwanze is a partner at SBM Intelligence.