What goes down the drain: Other sanitation problems in Lagos

By Grace Egbunuekhe

When Lagosians talk about waste, they usually mean what they can see. Plastic bottles. Food remnants. Polythene bags. Cartons. Refuse heaps. Yet every day the city produces another enormous stream of waste that attracts far less public attention. Wastewater.

It leaves bathrooms, kitchens, hotels, restaurants, industries, estates, hospitals and commercial facilities. And unlike ordinary solid waste, improperly handled wastewater can disappear from view while continuing to contaminate the environment.

A pumping machine may empty sewage into a public drain in minutes. The evidence can flow kilometres away. This is why wastewater management deserves a prominent place in any serious assessment of Lagos’s environmental progress.

The Lagos State Wastewater Management Office is the specialist agency responsible for regulating private and commercial wastewater facilities, overseeing sewage infrastructure and licensing and monitoring wastewater management within the state.

Its current infrastructure portfolio includes treatment facilities and rehabilitation projects at locations including Alausa, Abesan and Iponri. But infrastructure is only half the problem. Behaviour remains the other half.

In August 2025, the Wastewater Management Office sealed a residential facility off Orchid Road in Lekki after complaints that untreated sewage was being pumped into public drains, creating odour and pollution concerns for surrounding residents. That case illustrates why wastewater regulation matters.

A public drain is designed principally to convey stormwater. It is not a sewer. When untreated wastewater is deliberately emptied into stormwater infrastructure, several problems are created at once.

The immediate environment suffers. Odour affects neighbouring residents. Drains and waterways become polluted. And human exposure to contaminated water can create public-health risks.

Wastewater management is therefore inseparable from sanitation.

In 2025, the Lagos State Wastewater Management Office used World Water Day to emphasise the relationship between clean water, hygiene and wastewater, warning that pollution compromises sanitation infrastructure and increases health risks associated with unsafe water.

The challenge will become larger as Lagos grows. More houses mean more wastewater. More hotels mean more wastewater. More industries mean more effluent. More densely populated estates mean larger quantities generated within smaller geographic areas.

The old reliance on individual septic tanks and informal evacuation cannot indefinitely constitute the dominant sanitation model of a megacity.

Over time, Lagos will require significantly larger networks of properly engineered collection, treatment and reuse systems. That transformation cannot be funded by government alone.

In April 2026, the Wastewater Management Office disclosed engagement with the World Bank and International Finance Corporation aimed at expanding investment and improving sanitation infrastructure and service delivery.

This is an important direction. Wastewater infrastructure is expensive. Much of it is underground. Its political visibility is limited. No crowd gathers excitedly to celebrate a sewer line. Yet few forms of infrastructure are more fundamental to modern cities.

London’s transformation in the nineteenth century was inseparable from the construction of its sewer system. Modern Singapore built water reuse into its long-term resource strategy.

Cities that grow without adequate wastewater infrastructure eventually confront the consequences in contaminated waterways, public-health problems and degraded living conditions.

Lagos cannot be different. But there is also an opportunity. Properly treated wastewater does not always have to become waste in the conventional sense.

Depending on the treatment level, water can be reused for landscaping, industrial processes and other non-potable purposes. Sludge can potentially be processed into useful products or energy.

Here again, the circular-economy principle applies: what leaves one process as waste can sometimes enter another as a resource. This is where the Lagos environmental legacy can become especially consequential.

Wastewater management has historically received considerably less public attention than refuse collection or flooding because much of the system is invisible. That invisibility should not translate into neglect.

Government must invest in infrastructure. Developers must provide adequate treatment systems. Industries must not treat waterways as convenient disposal routes.

Hotels, estates and commercial facilities must comply with wastewater standards. And regulators must combine enforcement with expansion of viable treatment options.

Ultimately, the question is very simple. Lagos spends enormous resources ensuring that clean water enters homes and businesses. It should care just as much about what happens to that water after people have used it.

A modern city is not defined only by the quality of water coming from the tap. It is also defined by where everything leaving the drain eventually goes.

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