In the travel notes of Thomas Malcolm Knox, a British philosopher, there was a searing description of Lagos as “a town of unspeakable squalor…filth everywhere”. Knox was the secretary to Lord William Hesketh Lever, one of the founders of Lever Brothers. What struck me the first time I read this portion of his journal entry in Stephanie Newell’s book, Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos (published in 2019), was the date the comment was recorded: the mid-20s of the last century. That was roughly one hundred years ago. If Knox and other British fellows who made unsavoury comments about Lagos while travelling through should wake up from their graves today and see the city still sizzling in its putrid juices, they would either be shocked or pleased that their racist projections of Africans had been vindicated.

Some of the cringey comments made about Lagos a century ago cannot be extricated from the racism, elitism, and imperialism of the writers, yet the description of the city they provided is uncannily familiar. Lagos is still everything it was, despite the passage of time. The Lagos of the early 20th century, as described in the book, was also a crucial economic hub and a magnet for people eager to capitalise on the business opportunities it offered. Houses and shacks sprang up at the most unsuitable sites, and it did not help that many migrants to Lagos brought their village practices (such as shunning pit latrines to defecate in the bush) to the heart of Nigerian civilisation. As another traveller recorded, Lagos was “a filthy, disgusting, savage place” where it was “unsafe to wander about in the streets”. The only places that were recorded as sane were the Brazilian quarters and the habitations of the Europeans.

While the oyinbos of the 21st century might have become too politically correct to point out our faults to us, our fellow Nigerians are not shy about calling Lagos “dirty”. The other day, a youth corps member serving in Lagos, Ushie Uguamaye, inflamed people when she described Lagos as dirty and smelly. Trust our people, a comment like that quickly became their opportunity to throw some tribal, generational, partisan, and sexist punches. While the young woman might have lacked tact, everyone knows what she said to be true. It is as true in 2025 as it was a hundred years ago. Recently, social media influencer Scott Iguama, who has been making videos that decry the high cost of real estate in Lagos, also made a similar comment about the poor hygiene conditions of Lagos. This time, he attracted the attention of Lagos State Commissioner of Environment and Water Resources, Tokunbo Wahab, who took to his social media account to take a jab at the people who relocate to Lagos from their home states to find better economic opportunities, only to begin disparaging the state for clout. I guess Wahab would have been less defensive about Lagos’ poor environmental conditions if the comments had come from a Yoruba person.

Wahab wrote, “While constructive criticism is essential for growth, malicious attempts to vilify a state that empowers countless lives daily are counterproductive. Lagos remains a place of opportunity, innovation, and resilience, and it is imperative that we collectively uphold its integrity while fostering unity and progress.” I am genuinely curious to know what the commissioner meant by upholding the integrity of Lagos. What is Wahab’s definition of integrity, and how does pointing out the obvious undermine it? How do you “foster unity and progress” by maintaining a lie?

To some extent, the discomfort of the commissioner and other locals who react to calling out the squalid conditions of the city is understandable. One of the stereotypes other tribes in Nigeria regularly lob at Yoruba is that of hygiene. The trope of the “dirty Yoruba” is the stuff of ethnic jokes, both light-hearted and mean-spirited ones. The thing is, calling other people “dirty” is not always about an objective assessment of their living conditions; it is also about making ethical valuations of them. Who or what we think is “dirty” is as much of a moral judgment of others as it is a description of their physical conditions. That is why the pushbacks by people like Wahab are excusable to some extent.

It is funny when Nigerians insult others based on the foul conditions of their living spaces, when there is virtually nowhere in the country that does not reek of under-maintenance. I have visited more than half of the state capitals, and there are only a few of them that are not in a state of decline despite the superficial improvements of a newly built bridge here and there. While most of our rural areas are filthy because they have hardly ever figured in any agenda of development planning, our urban places—where all governmental efforts are supposedly concentrated—are also perpetually in an unsanitary state. How many of our habitations, rural or urban, have what is akin to a sewage system? How many of our villages, towns, and cities have a regular water supply to begin with? Without an adequate and well-managed water supply system, people cannot maintain proper sanitary conditions. It is even worse for a country like Nigeria, where we do not plan our cities or project how they will grow over time to preemptively develop a management agenda. If more people are pointing fingers at Lagos than other states on these general problems, it is also because its socio-economic and socio-cultural dominance makes its problems far more magnified.

To the best of my knowledge, no state has developed anything close to a sophisticated waste management system, yet Lagos—due to its teeming population—appears to be the one drowning in its own trash. Unfortunately, Lagos also suffers from a severe shortage of water supply. When you watch the cooking videos of our social media “chefs” who live in so-called prime estates like Lekki, you see them using bottled water for cooking.

They cannot turn on the faucets like normal people around the world do and use water because what is pumped by their individual boreholes is contaminated. Since there is no water treatment plant to clean the water and make it potable, they resort to bottled water for their everyday use. The consequence is that plastic waste is everywhere, clogging sewers and swelling up landfills. Without an adequate water supply system, people generate more waste, which exacerbates their existing squalid conditions. The result is a city so filthy that its managers need us to be silent to maintain its “integrity”.

Reading The Histories of Dirt and observing Lagos in the present, I find it rather distressing how we never seem to outgrow our problems. As far back as the 19th century, travellers to Lagos have been bellyaching about its squalor. It is the 21st century, and barely anything has changed. What is even worse is that the rest of Nigeria is so socio-economically impoverished that Lagos, despite its poor conditions, is still considered the country’s crown jewel.

The man who was sworn in as president two years ago today made much political gain because of Lagos. They sold him as the builder of modern Lagos; our people—so used to dysfunctionality—thought he had any magic to replicate at the national level. Today, not only is Lagos still marinating in its own sewage, but the country itself is awakening to the truth of the lie they bought.