Who will save Lagosians from LAWMA and the imminent epidemic?

The Lagos Waste Management Authority is the primary state agency responsible for managing solid waste, including collection, transportation, and disposal, to ensure a cleaner and healthier environment in Lagos State.

This agency was established in 1977 to handle domestic, industrial, and commercial waste, enforce environmental laws, and promote recycling initiatives.

As background, LAWMA operates from Iddo Yard, Ijora Olopa, and provides services in waste disposal, drain clearing, and the management of derelict vehicles.

The key functions and services of LAWMA are as follows:

Waste collection and disposal: Manages the daily collection and disposal of household and industrial waste, including medical and hazardous waste.

Regulatory oversight: Enforces environmental laws and standards, including policing against illegal dumping and penalising non-compliance

Commercial services: Provides waste management services to business and commercial entities.

Public education and awareness:  Promotes environmental sustainability through public outreach programmes, educating residents on waste reduction, sorting, and recycling.

Recycling initiatives: Drives waste reduction by encouraging the separation of waste and supporting recycling programmes.

Infrastructure management: Maintains landfill sites and facilities for effective waste disposal.

Consultancy: Offering waste management expertise to other Nigerian states and African countries.

Monitoring: Conducting surveillance to ensure clean streets and proper disposal practices

Going through the above key roles and functions of LAWMA as enshrined in its enabling statute, ordinarily, one would have expected this agency to have risen up to its mandates. Contrary is the case in Lagos, particularly in today’s Lagos.

This writer is motivated to do this report based on an eyewitness account as of February 19, 2026. A drive through all the major city roads will confirm the unhealthy state of Lagos with respect to the failure of LAWMA to clean up the city. We currently have an overflow of refuse from streets to streets and from market areas through to highways. The worst hit are the market areas. Is stinking. Who Do Us?

Concerning the number function of the Lagos Waste Management Authority, the outcome is absolute failure. The collection and disposal, where it is being done, is poor and not regular. The experience in most places has been absolute abandonment. Refuse has not been collected in the Jibowu area of Abule Egba for two months running. Payment has been made ahead of the month. LAWMA served the resident bi-monthly. You dare not paid and there is no alternative.

Citizens are left helpless with no alternative. LAWMA is a government monopoly foisted on the citizens.

Let’s take it that the state’s number one citizen lives on the Island, but the second and the third, i.e. deputy governor and the speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly, reside in the highbrow estate in Agege. I mean Agege. They drive through from their place of abode to the office, and I don’t want to believe that these personalities are not aware of the current unkempt state of the city. Who will help us out with this?

LAWMA also has a regulatory oversight role, i.e. enforcement of environmental laws as one of its functions. What a contradiction.  For an agency created to make the city and the entire state clean, but has been failing to acquit itself successfully. How could it have enforced the laws they have been breaking?  Who is regulating this regulator? This is one area the Lagos State House of Assembly should have performed its oversight roles on the state Agency, but to say they have been failing is also saying the obvious. LAWMA may have been collecting refuse in the Big Ogas Estate, but should the governed be left helpless?

Interestingly, LAWMA serves its bills regularly, and residents must pay whether or not it comes to collect the refuse. They have ready-made excuses for their failures. Bad road to sites. Raining seasons. Vehicle breakdown. As if they didn’t know all these while canvassing for the contract.

In the face of these failures, LAWMA increased their fees using the inflationary trend as a yardstick. Do we blame them? No. Their oppressive conduct is legalised through the government’s failure to give the citizens an alternative.

The question on the lips of Lagosians now is, who will save us from this LAWMA-induced imminent epidemic?

• Adurogboye, a former General Manager of Public Affairs at the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, writes from Lagos