Lagos Declares Waste Management Emergency as Sanwo-Olu Unveils Reforms After Olusosun Inspection
Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu has declared what he described as a “small state of emergency” on waste management in the state, unveiling a series of short, medium and long-term measures aimed at tackling mounting pressure on refuse collection and the growing problem of indiscriminate dumping across the metropolis.
Sanwo-Olu made the declaration on Wednesday during an inspection tour of the Olusosun dumpsite in Ojota, Lagos, accompanied by his deputy, Obafemi Hamzat, and the Commissioner for Environment and Water Resources, Tokunbo Wahab. The governor said the visit was intended to identify the immediate challenges confronting waste management operations in the state and to develop a coordinated response. “We are here for ourselves to see what the problem is and what is happening, so that we can clearly declare what we will call a small state of emergency,” he said. According to Sanwo-Olu, the state had, in recent weeks, witnessed significant pressure on waste collection capacity, resulting in indiscriminate dumping of refuse across different parts of the city, a situation he attributed partly to slow waste turnaround and what he described as uncoordinated public advocacy around the issue.
As part of the government’s immediate response, Sanwo-Olu announced plans to increase capacity at Olusosun and other dumpsites in order to improve the turnaround time of waste collection trucks. He said Olusosun currently receives between 220 and 250 trucks daily, and that government plans to raise this to between 350 and 450 trucks by expanding the number of tipping points from the current two or three to between four and five. Additional equipment and new waste-receiving locations are also expected to be deployed as part of the effort.
On the longer-term outlook, Sanwo-Olu pointed to planned transfer loading stations and material recovery facilities as the state’s ultimate solution to its broader waste generation, disposal and conversion challenges, describing the investment involved as running into tens of millions of dollars. He also announced a forthcoming restructuring of the Lagos Waste Management Authority (LAWMA), criticising what he characterised as an excessive concentration of senior officials in administrative offices at a time when operational personnel were more urgently needed on the streets and at dumpsites. “Waste is outside on the street; it’s not in their offices,” he said, indicating that LAWMA’s organisational structure would be reviewed to prioritise field operations.
Addressing the role of Private Sector Participants (PSPs) in the state’s waste collection system, Sanwo-Olu said the PSP association had agreed to review its own membership and identify operators with the necessary capacity and technical expertise to continue providing services, an exercise he said would complement an independent review already being carried out by the state government. He argued that the current number of registered PSPs was excessive relative to those actually delivering effective service, saying the state did not want 800 operators when only around 400 were genuinely effective, and that the system needed to be streamlined to create room for more capable investment.
The governor also appealed directly to residents and tenement occupiers to pay for waste collection services rendered to them, describing it as unfair that operators providing a genuine service often went uncompensated. He announced that the monthly sanitation exercise launched four months earlier, along with ongoing public advocacy campaigns, would be better coordinated going forward, while warning residents against indiscriminate refuse disposal on roads, highways and drainage channels, stressing that a PSP operator’s delayed collection did not justify improper dumping. Environmental officers, Sanwo-Olu said, would be deployed to monitor both PSP operators and residents, with offenders facing possible prosecution through mobile and public courts.
With the declaration, Lagos State’s government has signalled a renewed, more urgent push to address a waste management crisis that has drawn increasing public concern in recent months, combining immediate operational fixes with a broader push toward structural reform of the city’s refuse collection and disposal system.
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