Last Saturday, June 21, 2026, as several Lagos residents criticised the state government for enabling many parts of the state to turn into dumpsites, the Commissioner for Environment and Water Resources, Tokunbo Wahab, attempted to rationalise the government’s failure. Responding to criticism from the African Democratic Congress (ADC) governorship candidate for the 2027 elections in Lagos, Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, on X, Wahab wrote: “Lagos generates about 13,000 tonnes of waste every day. Not weekly. Every day… 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.”

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… https://t.co/XM78pvrXXW

— Tokunbo Wahab (@tokunbo_wahab) June 20, 2026

And that, precisely, is the problem.

Nigeria runs one of the most defective governance systems in the world. At the national level, power is heavily centralised in the federal government. At the subnational level, the state government wields near-total authority at the expense of local government. Both tiers consequently accumulate responsibilities far beyond their capacity to manage effectively.

Nowhere does this failure show up more plainly than in Lagos’s current waste management crisis. With an estimated population of over 17 million in the metropolis, it is unrealistic to expect any single entity to efficiently manage that volume of waste. Yet the Lagos government’s proposed solutions — a “Waste Police” to pursue those dumping refuse, and the acquisition of more trucks and equipment — reveal an administration still thinking within the same broken framework.

Snapshot from Lagos today…

1 &2: Mushin
3: Isolo
4: council bus-stop.

Eko oni baje o https://t.co/y8ce14yT41 pic.twitter.com/YRqIfQl5Oq

— Oluwanifise (@Oluwanifise13) June 23, 2026

In true Nigerian fashion, it is treating the symptoms rather than cutting out the cancer. The symptoms are the indiscriminate dumping of refuse on road medians, roadsides and drainage channels, and an overwhelmed waste management operation that periodically collapses under its own weight. The cancer is a dysfunctional system that places the entire burden on the state government instead of distributing it across Lagos’s 20 Local Government Areas (LGAs) and 37 Local Council Development Areas (LCDAs). Waste management should never be a centralised function. LAWMA cannot be everywhere and the past month has proven it.

Update
Igando Lagos Nigeria📍 https://t.co/3Gx6yDSZ0t pic.twitter.com/7PJHCisVnC

— Ayodeji Adedeji🎬 (@a_aadedeji) June 23, 2026

The Local Government Question

Section 7 of the Nigerian Constitution guarantees the existence of democratically elected local government councils. Section 1, subsection h of the Fourth Schedule of the same constitution lists the functions of local government, and among them, explicitly, is the responsibility for “sewage and refuse disposal.” It is not ambiguous. Waste management belongs at the local level by law.

But across Nigeria, and Lagos is no exception, state governments have effectively neutered local government. Council chairmen are rendered appendages of the governor’s office, starved of funds, stripped of autonomy, and left without the institutional capacity to deliver on their constitutional mandates. The result is that a function as fundamental as collecting household waste — something that should be managed ward by ward, community by community — gets absorbed into a centralised bureaucracy that is structurally incapable of handling it at scale.

The residents of Mushin do not have the same waste management needs as those of Lekki. The challenges in Alimosho are not identical to those in Eti-Osa. A functional local government understands its terrain, knows its communities, and can respond with the kind of proximity and speed that a state agency operating across 1,171 square kilometres simply cannot. Decentralisation is not just a governance ideal here, it is a practical necessity.

The Only Sustainable Fix

Neither a “Waste Police” nor a larger LAWMA fleet will solve this problem sustainably. Enforcement without infrastructure punishes residents for a failure that is not entirely theirs. History shows that more trucks without structural reform only delays the next collapse. 

In 1998, Lagos declared war on refuse, but the refuse appeared to be winning.

Military administrator Mohammed Buba Marwa ordered a massive clean-up operation, decentralised LAWMA into 20 zones and demanded the evacuation of waste across the state. But weeks into the exercise,… pic.twitter.com/fbhG9SL9lH

— archivi.ng (@StartArchiving) June 22, 2026

The only durable solution is restoring local governments to their constitutional role — properly funded, genuinely autonomous, and held accountable for waste collection within their jurisdictions — while the state plays the supervisory and regulatory role it is better suited for, including oversight of where waste ends up and how it is processed.

It is important to emphasise that this is not a Lagos problem alone. Across Nigeria, governors have built political systems that reduce local governments to satellite offices, and residents are paying the same price in different ways. The lesson from Lagos’s waste crisis is one every state needs to hear: neutering local government is not just a political choice, it is a disservice to the people those governments exist to serve.

State governments must stop treating local councils as subordinates and start treating them as governance partners. Because when the system fails — when the trash piles up and the streets become dumpsites — it is not the governor’s office that bears the immediate cost. It is the community. And the community deserves better than that.