Sanitation Is Not System Thinking: Lagos Needs Structural Reform
By Sola Fanawopo
The Lagos State Governmentโs decision to reintroduce the monthly environmental sanitation exercise in April 2026 feels like a journey into the past. For many, it evokes a sense of nostalgia for a time when communities paused on the final Saturday of every month to sweep streets and clear gutters. However, in a megacity of over 20 million people, we must ask: are we applying system thinking, or simply reviving a ritual that belongs to a different era?
Beyond the Broom: The Infrastructure Gap
Monthly sanitation offers temporary visual relief, but it fails to address the root causes of our environmental crisis. The current reliance on open drainage systems is a primary failure of urban design.Open drains are fundamentally incompatible with a high-density, rapidly growing megacity. They serve as magnets for refuse, become breeding grounds for disease, and collapse under the pressure of seasonal flooding.
To modernize, Lagos must prioritize a transition to covered or underground drainage systems. This structural change removes the physical opportunity for indiscriminate waste disposal, shifting the burden from human labor to engineering efficiency.
Decentralizing for Efficiency
The second structural failure is the obsession with a centralized waste management model. Attempting to micromanage waste collection for 20 million residents from a single state-level authority is, by definition, inefficient.We need a decentralized operational framework where the state moves from being the “operator” to being the “regulator.” By empowering Local Governments and LCDAs to manage their own waste systems, the government can foster:
Local Accountability: Authorities closer to the people are better positioned to understand specific neighborhood waste patterns.
Performance-Based Competition: The state should implement a framework where local authorities compete for efficiency, with success rewarded through preferential grants and failure met with administrative intervention.
Cleanliness as a Default Condition, Not a Ritual
In a modern, well-managed city, cleanliness is the “default state,” not the result of a Saturday morning cleanup. True urban sanitation requires:
Daily, reliable waste collection: Removing the necessity for residents to hoard or dump refuse.
Continuous environmental monitoring*: Utilizing data-driven oversight rather than periodic enforcement.
Infrastructure-led behavior: Engineering the environment so that it is physically difficult to pollute.
Lagos does not lack civic energy; it lacks a governance model that channels that energy into permanent, automated systems. We must stop viewing sanitation as a chore to be performed once a month and start viewing it as a continuous, minute-by-minute infrastructure operation.
If Lagos truly aspires to be a global, sustainable megacity, the conversation must move past the broom. It is time to retire the ritual and invest in the structural redesign of our drainage and the decentralization of our waste management. Only then can we move from the performance of sanitation to the reality of sustainable urban management.
ยฉ Sola Fanawopo
