Tokunbo Wahab@tokunbo_wahab
Dear Gbadebo @GRVlagos
A lot of people are genuinely concerned about the waste situation in parts of Lagos, and that concern is understandable. Waste is not something you can talk around. If refuse is sitting on your street, beside your market, close to your bus stop, or inside the drainage near your house, the only thing that matters to you is that it should be removed. And that is fair.
But it may also help to explain the scale of what is being managed, and what is actually being done.
Lagos generates about 13,000 tonnes of waste every day. Not weekly. Every day. In May alone, LAWMA and PSP operators evacuated about 418,500 tonnes of waste across the state, which comes to an average of about 13,200 tonnes daily. That is not a small operation. It involves hundreds of PSP operators, public waste teams, transfer and disposal operations, street sweepers, enforcement teams, customer service staff, drivers, loaders, supervisors and monitoring officers working across a very large and difficult city.
Just to mention, during the 2026 Hajj, Saudi Sanitation Authorities announced that a total of over 472 tons of waste were generated from Mina and Muzdalifah. This is total waste generated by pilgrims all over the world in 5 days.
Still, nobody is pretending that everything is fine everywhere. Some communities have had delays. Some PSP operators have not performed well. Some routes have grown beyond the capacity that was originally assigned to them. In some areas, road access is poor. During the rains, movement into disposal sites can become slower. Trucks break down. Diesel and spare parts are expensive. Payment compliance is also weak in many places, and when people do not pay for waste service, the operators struggle to maintain trucks, pay crews and keep to schedule. These are not excuses but the harsh realities that have to be fixed.
That is why LAWMA has been reviewing weak routes, replacing and sanctioning underperforming operators, increasing monitoring, and deploying evacuation teams to pressure points. As of last month (May), 442 PSP operators were active across Lagos while 27 routes were under review for service improvement. LAWMA also received 474 complaints and service requests that month, which are now part of how the agency is identifying weak spots and following up on operator performance.
There is also a daily blackspot operation that many people do not see unless it is happening near them. LAWMA clears 3,000 black spots every day across 57 routes. These are the road medians, market edges, illegal dumping points, bus stops, setbacks and open spaces where people keep dropping waste outside the normal collection system. Some are cleared in the morning and abused again by night. That is one of the hardest parts of the job.
This is why enforcement has become more serious. In 2025, LAWMA recorded 1,023 incidents of illegal dumping and other waste violations across the state. Out of these, 447 cases were referred for prosecution. The surveillance teams also identified 431 scavengers and reconciled 145 properties with their assigned PSP operators. The data showed that much of the illegal dumping happens between midnight and early morning, and the waste is not only household refuse. It includes construction debris and even hazardous waste in some cases.
So when people say “just clear it,” we agree. It must be cleared. But we also have to stop the same locations from being turned back into dumpsites again and again.
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