Canoes As Bedrooms. In Makoko, Families Sleep Where They Once Fished.

The Morning After

A Man Standing Where His House Used to Float

Tunde Agando woke on January 6, 2026, in a canoe. Not because he was fishing. Not because dawn on the Lagos Lagoon still carries the cool that the city’s concrete canyons extinguish by nine. He woke in a canoe because the house where he had slept for twenty-three years — a wooden structure on stilts above the brackish water of Makoko, the community the city calls a slum and its residents call home — no longer existed. It had been demolished the day before. Amphibious excavators, the kind designed for swamp dredging, had arrived at dawn on January 5, flanked by armed police in motorboats — one morning inside a demolition wave that UN Special Rapporteurs date to 23 December 2025 and that Lagos State did not suspend until 3 February 2026. They moved through the neighborhood methodically, house by house, stilt by stilt. By nightfall, more than three thousand structures were gone.^[1]

Tunde’s canoe was twelve feet long and four feet wide. He shared it with his wife and their two children, ages nine and fourteen. They had salvaged a foam mattress, a plastic bag of clothes, and a kerosene lamp. The mattress, laid across the hull, was their bed. The tarpaulin they had pulled from the wreckage of a neighbor’s house served as a roof when rain came, which in January in Lagos means most afternoons. Around them, on the open water where their neighborhood had stood twelve hours earlier, other families were doing the same thing — arranging themselves inside canoes, trying to sleep on water that was no longer under their homes but was now their only remaining surface.^[2]

Makoko is — or was — the largest floating settlement in Africa. Depending on whose estimate you trust, between 85,000 and 300,000 people lived there, on the Lagos Lagoon, in a lattice of wooden houses, walkways, churches, schools, and markets built on stilts above the water. The community predates Lagos as a modern city. Egun fishing families settled the lagoon in the nineteenth century, before British colonial administration formalized the city’s boundaries. Makoko was not an encroachment on the city. The city grew around it. But property law in Lagos does not recognize customary water rights. Under the Land Use Act of 1978, all land — and by extension, all water within state jurisdiction — is held in trust by the governor. Makoko’s residents are, in legal terms, squatters on water their ancestors navigated before the law that dispossesses them was written.^[3]

The wave that began on 23 December 2025 was the largest forced eviction in Makoko’s modern history, but it was not the first. The community had already been cleared in 2012, an operation that UN Special Rapporteurs say cost over 30,000 people their homes. The 2026 wave destroyed more than 3,000 structures and displaced over 40,000, according to the same source. People, including children, were reportedly killed during the operation, and others hospitalised with injuries; no official toll has been published. The government’s stated justification was a 30-metre buffer zone required around high-tension power lines that cross the lagoon. NGO surveys, conducted in the weeks after the demolition, documented destruction extending 250 to 500 metres from the nearest power line — eight to sixteen times the stated buffer.^[1]

Structural Read

The Legal Architecture of Erasure

To understand what happened between December and February, you must understand that the demolition of Makoko is not an event. It is a policy. Lagos State has been systematically clearing waterfront communities for more than two decades, under a framework that treats informal settlements on water as both illegal and disposable. The framework operates through three interlocking mechanisms.

Mechanism 1: Legal non-recognition. The Land Use Act of 1978 vests all land in each state’s governor, who grants rights of occupancy at discretion. This framework was designed for terrestrial property. It does not accommodate communities built on water, on stilts, above lagoons. Makoko’s residents have no formal title, no Certificate of Occupancy, and no legal standing to contest demolition orders. They are not tenants. They are not homeowners. In the state’s legal architecture, they do not exist as occupants of anything. The structures they build are classified as obstructions. The community they have maintained for over a century is classified as encroachment. The United Nations Special Rapporteur has used a specific term for this pattern: domicide — the deliberate destruction of a home as an act of policy, distinct from incidental displacement.^[3]

Mechanism 2: Infrastructure as pretext. The 30-metre power-line buffer is technically real. The Lagos State Electricity Board does maintain buffer requirements around transmission infrastructure. But the selective enforcement is the signal. The power lines crossing the lagoon have been there for decades. Makoko has existed beneath and around them for decades. The buffer was not enforced when the community was invisible to the development economy. It is enforced now because the waterfront land beneath Makoko has become valuable. The Eko Atlantic development — a $6 billion land-reclamation project on Victoria Island — has restructured waterfront property values across the entire Lagos Lagoon basin. Every hectare of lagoon surface that can be converted from “slum” to “development potential” appreciates the surrounding land portfolio. The buffer is the legal instrument. The economic driver is waterfront real estate.^[4]

Mechanism 3: Displacement without relocation. The Lagos State Government did not provide resettlement housing, relocation assistance, or compensation to the more than 40,000 people displaced. This is not an oversight. It is consistent with every previous Makoko demolition. The 2012 operation provided no resettlement. The 2017 Otodo Gbame eviction — another Lagos waterfront community, approximately 30,000 residents — provided no resettlement. The pattern is structural: demolish, disperse, and let the displaced population absorb itself into the city’s existing informal settlement fabric, which is already at capacity. The assumption embedded in the policy is that these populations will simply disappear — that they will find space somewhere in a city of 24 million where formal housing is unaffordable to 80% of residents.^[5]

They do not disappear. They redistribute. Some families moved deeper into the lagoon, rebuilding in areas where the excavators cannot yet reach. Some moved to Sogunro, Ilaje, and other waterfront communities that have not yet been scheduled for demolition — though every waterfront community in Lagos understands that its schedule is a matter of when, not if. Some moved to mainland informal settlements in Mushin, Bariga, and Somolu, where a single room costs between 15,000 and 30,000 naira per month — roughly $9 to $18 — and where three or four families may share a room designed for one. And some, like Tunde Agando, stayed on the water in canoes, because the water is the only space that has not yet been formally claimed by someone with a title deed.

The Tenancy Bill

When Demolition Creates Legislation

Five months after the January demolition, something unprecedented happened. In May 2026, the Lagos State House of Assembly introduced the Lagos State Tenancy Bill — the first comprehensive reform of tenant protections in the state since 2011. The bill’s timing is not coincidental. Its drafting was accelerated by the political pressure generated by the Makoko eviction, which received international coverage, a UN condemnation, and sustained domestic criticism from the Nigerian Bar Association, the Social and Economic Rights Action Center (SERAC), and multiple civil society organizations.^[6]

The bill addresses several structural gaps in Lagos tenant law: mandatory written agreements for all tenancies, standardized notice periods, restrictions on arbitrary eviction, and a dispute resolution mechanism that does not require court proceedings. If passed, it would represent the most significant expansion of tenant rights in Lagos in fifteen years. But its scope reveals its limitation. The bill protects tenants — people who rent formal or semi-formal dwellings from landlords. It does not protect the residents of Makoko, Otodo Gbame, or any of the dozens of waterfront communities built on water, on stilts, on land the state does not recognize as occupied. The people whose displacement created the political pressure for the bill are the people the bill does not cover.

This is a pattern with deep roots in African urban policy. Demolitions generate public outrage. Outrage generates legislative reform. Reform addresses the margins of the problem while leaving the structural core — the legal non-recognition of informal settlements — untouched. The residents who lost everything become the catalyst for improvements that benefit a different population. The gap between the crisis and the remedy is the signal.

Pattern Confirmation

Africa’s Waterfront Clearance Corridor

Lagos is not an anomaly. It is the most visible node in a continental pattern of waterfront demolitions driven by the same structural logic: informal communities occupy land that has become valuable, legal frameworks classify them as illegal, and demolition proceeds under infrastructure or public-safety pretexts while the underlying economic driver is real estate.

In Luanda, Angola, the government cleared an estimated 120,000 people from waterfront and city-center informal settlements between 2002 and 2015 to make way for post-civil-war reconstruction projects. In Nairobi, Kenya, the demolition of settlements along the Mathare River in 2018 displaced 30,000 people under flood-management justifications that coincided with the launch of the Nairobi River regeneration project. In Accra, Ghana, the Old Fadama settlement — locally known as Sodom and Gomorrah — has faced repeated demolition campaigns affecting over 79,000 people, each justified by flood risk, each coinciding with rising land values in the adjacent central business district.^[7]

The structural sequence is consistent across all cases. Step one: an informal community establishes itself on land the city does not value. Step two: the city grows around the community. Step three: the land beneath the community appreciates. Step four: the community is reclassified from “tolerated” to “illegal.” Step five: demolition proceeds under a technical justification that obscures the economic motive. Step six: no relocation is provided, because providing relocation would acknowledge that the community had a legitimate claim to the space it occupied.

What distinguishes Lagos from the continental pattern is scale and frequency. Lagos has demolished more waterfront communities, more often, displacing more people, with less relocation provision, than any other African city in the 21st century. The 2012, 2016, 2017, and 2026 operations together have displaced well over 100,000 people from the Lagos Lagoon basin alone. The city is not clearing slums. It is clearing a coastline.

Alternative Explanations

It is possible to argue that the demolitions are genuine public-safety interventions. The high-tension power lines crossing Makoko carry 330kV. Structures within the buffer zone do face electrocution risk, particularly during the rainy season when water levels rise and wooden structures shift on their stilts. Under this reading, the government is protecting residents from an infrastructure hazard that they cannot adequately assess. This argument has narrow technical merit but collapses on two points: first, the buffer has existed for decades without enforcement, suggesting the safety rationale is opportunistic rather than genuine; second, the destruction extended far beyond the buffer, which is consistent with clearance objectives rather than safety objectives.

A second counterargument holds that the waterfront settlements impede Lagos’s economic development, and that the long-term interests of the city’s 24 million residents are better served by clearing obstructed waterways for transportation, drainage, and commercial development. This argument treats displacement as an acceptable cost of urbanization. It fails when it confronts the absence of relocation: if the city genuinely valued these residents’ welfare alongside its development goals, it would provide alternative housing. It does not, because the goal is not relocation. It is removal.

What is not known: The precise number of people displaced, and the number killed. UN Special Rapporteurs put the displacement at over 40,000 and report deaths without a figure; other estimates range from 30,000 to 50,000 depending on the source, and pre-demolition population counts for Makoko vary by a factor of three. The total area of structures demolished — whether it constitutes the entirety of the targeted zone or a fraction of a larger planned clearance — has not been officially confirmed.

What is not confirmed: Whether the Lagos State Tenancy Bill will pass the House of Assembly, and if so, whether its enforcement provisions will be funded and operational. Lagos has a history of passing progressive legislation that remains unenforced due to institutional capacity constraints.

What would change the signal: If the Lagos State Government includes waterfront and stilt-house communities in a formal land regularization program — granting occupancy rights or certificates that confer legal standing — the demolition trajectory would be structurally altered. If the Tenancy Bill is amended during legislative debate to include protections for non-titled communities on water, the gap between the crisis and the remedy would narrow. Neither development is currently on the legislative agenda.

Monitoring indicators: Track the Lagos State Tenancy Bill’s progress through committee and floor votes. Monitor satellite imagery of Makoko and surrounding lagoon communities for evidence of further demolition or reconstruction. Watch for UN Special Rapporteur follow-up reports on the domicide designation. Track SERAC and Justice and Empowerment Initiatives (JEI) litigation filings related to the January demolitions. Monitor Eko Atlantic development milestones and their proximity to remaining waterfront communities.