Displaced residents from Makoko, Oworonshoki and Jakande protest demolitions at the Lagos State House of Assembly, as police fire teargas and questions grow over urban renewal policies.
Over a thousand voices rose in Ikeja on Wednesday morning, cutting through traffic fumes, heat, and the early rush of the city. They had converged from Makoko, from Oworonshoki, from Jakande, carrying the weight of demolished homes and interrupted lives. Their destination was the State House of Assembly, where they hoped someone might finally listen.
The protesters moved through the streets with placards held high, blocking roads as they chanted. Families who had watched bulldozers flatten their neighbourhoods just weeks earlier now demanded what they said was rightfully theirs: fair compensation, proper resettlement, and a place to call home. Many said they had received little or no notice before the demolitions began. Some woke to the sound of engines and shouting, only to find their possessions buried under rubble by nightfall.
Police issued repeated warnings through loudspeakers, urging the crowd to disperse. Minutes later, teargas canisters were fired into the protesters.
Chaos followed immediately. People scattered in every direction, choking on the acrid smoke and stumbling over one another in panic. Eyewitnesses later described a stampede—a mother screaming for her baby lost in the confusion, journalists diving for cover as the situation spiralled. Some said they heard gunshots; others claimed to have seen protesters fall clutching their legs.
Among those arrested was Hassan Taiwo Soweto, an activist known for his work with the Democratic Socialist Movement. He had been addressing the crowd about residents’ rights and court orders he said the government had ignored when police moved in. By evening, he was in custody, facing bail conditions critics said were designed to silence him.
At least seventeen people were injured. Government officials later announced compensation of ₦11.2 million per household. In a city where rent continues to spiral and informal settlements house millions excluded from formal housing, the amount would barely cover a year’s rent in a comparable area. For many displaced residents, it felt like an insult added to injury.
The demolitions began earlier in January, framed by authorities as part of an urban renewal drive. Lagos, officials said, was becoming a megacity—a world-class destination that could no longer tolerate settlements built over water or too close to power infrastructure. To residents, many of whom had lived in these communities for generations, it appeared less like renewal and more like erasure.
Makoko alone had stood for more than a century, a floating community of fishermen and migrants who built lives around the lagoon. Now it lay in ruins. Oworonshoki, Owode Onirin, Jakande—neighbourhood after neighbourhood followed the same pattern: bulldozers backed by armed police, residents given hours or days to evacuate, and promises of resettlement that failed to materialise.
Those evicted did not see themselves as squatters. They pointed to court injunctions and legal provisions they said offered protection. But the machines kept coming, indifferent to paperwork and pleas. Beneath official language about safety and illegal construction, many residents said they suspected something else entirely: land being cleared for luxury developments, with poorer communities pushed aside.
Opposition politicians toured the demolished sites, some coughing through the same teargas that had scattered protesters. They spoke of injustice and a government disconnected from ordinary Lagosians. Still, the demolitions continued.
This was not new. Lagos had walked this road before. In 1990, Maroko was wiped off the map, displacing an estimated 300,000 people. In 2017, Otodo-Gbame burned as residents fled. Last year, parts of Oworonshoki faced similar destruction. Each time, the pattern repeated: eviction, protest, suppression, silence.
Wednesday’s crackdown ensured the silence would not hold. Videos of teargas-filled streets and fleeing crowds flooded social media, alongside images of ruined homes and bewildered faces—images that official statements could not erase.
In a city of more than twenty million, where informal settlements exist not by choice but necessity, one question remained unanswered: where were all these people supposed to live?
As night fell over Lagos, Hassan Taiwo Soweto remained in detention. Families camped amid the ruins of their former homes or crowded into already strained households. The protest had been dispersed, but the crisis that produced it remained—growing with each swing of the wrecking ball.
