Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
•Onuma, a contributing analyst to USAfrica, is a Nigerian writer, essayist, and public intellectual whose work sits at the intersection of politics, culture, history, and lived experience.
There is a moment, somewhere between the first grey clouds gathering over the lagoon and the instant a mother, ankle-deep in her own parlour, begins moving photographs and certificates to the highest shelf she owns, when rain stops being a blessing and becomes a formal accusation. That moment arrived across June 30, July 1 and July 2, 2026, and has kept arriving, week after week, since. Watching the footage that has become our grim national liturgy — cars floating like discarded toys through Gbagada, homes swallowed along the concrete stretches of Lekki, children ferried to school in canoes past their own front gates in Agungi — the primary emotion is not mere frustration but a deep, existential ache: the fear of an impending erasure, the sense that a city is being slowly unmade by the very water it was built beside.
It is hard to look at these submerged streets without hearing the ancient echo of Noah’s generation. We romanticise that story through Sunday-school illustrations, but its reality was sudden, terrifying displacement — an old world discovering, too late, that the ground beneath its feet was entirely conditional. Noah’s ark rose in full view of a bustling public for decades, every hammer-strike a sermon that the present arrangement of the world could not hold. That generation’s tragedy was never a lack of information; it was a lack of discernment — they mistook the patience of God for the permanence of the earth. In Matthew 24, Jesus called such disasters not isolated catastrophes but “the beginning of sorrows” — birth pangs, progressive and intensifying, signalling irreversible change already underway. What is most striking is the apathy of the people right up until the crisis broke: they were “eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage… and knew not until the flood came, and took them all away.” They were not ignorant of the warning; they simply refused to connect it to their own reality.
Here is the painful parallel with contemporary Lagos. We fulfil these words not because the clouds now empty with unprecedented fury, but because our collective posture mirrors that pre-flood world. We see the warnings; we read the seasonal forecasts; and still we build estates on known wetlands, reclaim the lagoon with speculative energy, and raise coastal towers with no equal devotion to the drains beneath them — normalising the submerging of our own streets as a routine seasonal tax rather than an existential signpost that our whole way of building, and of living, is broken.
This numbness has a name in scripture: Jesus warned that in the last days, “because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.” Here, that coldness is a fragmentation of empathy — the wealthy build higher fences and buy larger pumps, indifferent to where the displaced water settles; the poor, denied reliable waste collection for weeks, empty refuse into the nearest open drain. Each of us engineers a private salvation inside a city undergoing collective judgement; when the physical drains are blocked, it is because the collective conscience has long been clogged by indifference. To watch a luxury vehicle float, engine dead, down a flooded street is to see a lifetime’s wealth rendered useless by inches of brown water. We build without a tomorrow in mind, and so stand defenceless when the long-warned tomorrow arrives.
The ache is compounded by an earthlier truth: our lack of engineering seriousness for the city we have chosen to build. Lagos, in constant negotiation with the Atlantic and a vast, restless lagoon, demands rigorous urban engineering; instead we get a mismatch between the grandeur of our skyscrapers and the primitive state of our gutters, designed decades ago for a fraction of the population now expected to carry the stormwater of more than twenty million people. Nowhere is this clearer than the Lekki peninsula, a barrier island once a network of wetlands that nature designed to absorb excess water like a sponge. Speculative real estate has sand-filled these wetlands with impermeable concrete, so water that once seeped harmlessly into the soil now has nowhere to go but up, into living rooms and the beds of sleeping children. The 2026 flooding in Ajiran laid this bare: officials discovered its main discharge channel had been deliberately blocked by a land-owning family, starving the neighbourhood of its only escape route for stormwater. As Commissioner Tokunbo Wahab put it, “we discovered that the outlet into the lagoon had been deliberately blocked; without opening that channel, the water cannot leave the area” — a confession that this was an act of greed, not an act of God (Tribune Online).
This is the hydrological trap now defining Lagos: when exceptional rainfall coincides with a high Atlantic tide, the lagoon swells, and the city’s gravity-fed drains cannot discharge into a body of water with nowhere to receive them. The water backs up through the grid until the tide recedes and the city can breathe — precisely the mechanism the state government cited when floodwaters swallowed Victoria Island, Lekki, Ikoyi, Maryland, Ikeja, Ikorodu and Ajah in early July (Vanguard), and again in the almost ritual drowning of Ajiran and Agungi, where drainage infrastructure completed more than two years ago has still failed residents (Tribune Online).
The government insists the warnings were given. In presenting the 2026 Seasonal Climate Prediction, officials projected above-normal rainfall, with annual precipitation expected between 1,650 and 3,030 millimetres, and urged residents to prepare for intense downpours (Premium Times). Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu has approved dredging of twenty-eight additional primary channels, and more than one thousand offenders have been prosecuted this past year for drainage-obstruction offences (Premium Times). Bulldozers have moved through Mehabond and Megamond Estates in Ikota, tearing down structures raised along the Ikota River without an Environmental Impact Assessment (Nigeria Housing Market). These are not small gestures, but they arrive, as always, as autopsy rather than prevention — after the water has claimed its due.
The same tired argument recurs each rainy season, government and citizen trading blame across a widening gulf of exhaustion. Officials insist residents worsen their own fate by dumping refuse into canals and building on floodplains, pointing to “irresponsible land-owning families” as the true villains of Ajiran’s perennial flooding (The Guardian Nigeria). Citizens ask why infrastructure completed years ago still fails them, and why the burden of failed enforcement always lands hardest on those least able to absorb it. Both accusations are true, and their truth changes nothing, because a city cannot legislate its way out of a design flaw with press statements alone.
The current approach — seasonal desilting, reactive demolitions, inspections conducted only after the water reaches the ceiling fans — treats symptoms of a terminal disease. If Lagos is to survive as a sustainable coastal hub rather than a cautionary tale, it needs a wholesale reimagining of how a delta city relates to the water that sustains and threatens it. Concrete gutters that merely relocate the problem downstream must give way to a “sponge city” philosophy — retention lakes and artificial wetlands along the Lekki-Epe corridor, permeable paving rather than asphalt sealing the earth like a drum skin. Because gravity drainage collapses at high tide, the city must also invest in automated tidal gates and high-capacity pumps, in the manner of delta cities that have made peace with their geography — Amsterdam did not out-pray its geography; it out-engineered it. None of this will matter without enforcement that treats a canal right-of-way as more sacred than a Certificate of Occupancy: a moratorium on sand-filling wetlands, and cleared channels bounded by buffers no developer may breach.
To watch Lagos drown year after year is to realise the flood is not confined to the asphalt outside; it becomes an internal drowning, a flooding of the mind with questions about how long a people can survive on resilience alone. If the birth pangs of Matthew 24 are intensifying — this year’s rain is not last year’s, rising faster, staying longer, penetrating deeper into streets once considered safe — our current state of urban and spiritual unreadiness suggests we are unequipped for the delivery that is coming. The water that fills Ajiran, Agungi, Gbagada and Iwaya does not discriminate between the villas of the wealthy and the shanties of the poor; it fills every vacuum left by our collective failure, every wetland sold for a song, every drain treated as a bin, every warning mistaken for background noise. It is both a divine reminder of our vulnerability and a human monument to bad governance and civic neglect — two floods arriving as one, waiting to see whether we will finally build the ark before the rain, or continue, like the generation before us, eating and drinking until the water takes us by surprise.
