Makoko

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A waterfront settlement on Lagos Lagoon, founded in the nineteenth century as a fishing village and built substantially on stilts over the water, whose population is reported anywhere between about 80,000 by one NGO estimate and over 300,000 by community leaders — a spread that exists because no official count has been made. Makoko is the standard illustration of informality as a legal condition rather than a building type: it has streets, markets, schools, churches and a functioning fishing and smoked-fish economy, and it has no recorded tenure. That is what makes it clearable. Lagos State demolished a large part of it in July 2012, and again from late December 2025 into 2026, in an operation that removed more than 3,000 structures before the Lagos State House of Assembly ordered it halted in February 2026; the state gave proximity to a power line as the reason, and residents and advocates described it as clearance for waterfront redevelopment. UN figures reported at the time put displacement above 40,000 people.