Sand is fast disappearing along Lagos shorelines due to unchecked mining and dredging activities. Bukola Adebayo reports on the socio-economic and environmental impact of the business on the communities and coastlines
Thomas Ujemeji comes from a long line of fishermen on Bishop Kodji Island, a coastal settlement on the Lagos Lagoon. Customers come from far and near to buy fresh sea foods from the 50- year-old fisherman.
He has a special skill set and he knows it. His traps get the biggest catch every time.
With a smile slowly lighting up his face, Ujemeji says he honed his skills while going on fishing expeditions with his late father as a young boy. But today is not one of those days that customers besiege him with requests. When our correspondent got to his fish smoking shed, just a handful of fish rested on a local oven filled with slow-burning, yellow coals.
What the fisherman had on display was incapable of attracting a long-time customer, let alone a prospective one. Ujemeji confesses that he’s fast losing his commercial reputation. He says a new business in the waterfront community has made a mess of his trade.
According to him, he can no longer fish on the Lagoon front due to the dredging activities in the area.
“The dredging machines have chased fishes to the deeper end. The sand they are harvesting has also polluted the Lagoon and fishes can’t stay.
“The noise from the machines when they are working also disturbs them. If I don’t set traps at the deeper end of the ocean, I won’t get anything. To do that, I need an engine boat that can withstand the tides and more fuel to power it through the long hours that I will be on water.
“I don’t have the money to buy that kind of boat and it is not safe.”
While most people come to the Island to patronise fishermen, many come these days to siphon the sand along its coastline.
Indeed, a massive dredging machine was the most prominent fixture on the island the day our correspondent visited. It was planted in the middle of the Lagoon front.
While residents lament, business is booming for 32-year-old James Adelike, who operates a pay loader that conveys the sand dredged to various destinations in Lagos.
Sand miners at work in the Iyana Oworo area of Lagos.
Photo: Saheed Olugbon
He says, “The price of the sand pumped from the Lagoon is different from the one that is dug with shovels from the shoreline. We sell sharp sand that has no impurities for N42,000 per 20 tonnes if it’s to Lekki, Ajah or Badore. The one that is scooped from shoreline is about N 20,000 per 20 tonnes. You can find some impurities in those ones. I make N10,000 from every trip and many times I go at least twice a day.”
Adelike says the trade has provided funds for him to start building a two-bedroom apartment in another state where his family resides.
While truck drivers, pay loaders, excavator operators and many other service providers in the dredging value chain smile to the bank, the denizens of Bishop Kodji reek of abject poverty.
The level of squalor on the island with over 150,000 residents is disturbing. It was evident from the 25-minute boat ride that our correspondent took with schoolchildren and other artisans to the shantytown; it became clearer on alighting from the canoe in the community.
Joseph Christopher, a fisherman, says life has not been the same since dredging activities began in the slum. Christopher laments that the business which many hoped would bring development to the settlement has brought more misery to residents.
“There are many people profiting from this island. When they want to start operations, they will promise to employ us, build schools and clinics but once they start, they forget us.
“They won’t even employ us. To make matters worse, the dredgers were installed in the areas where we were fishing and they harvested the sand so much that the anchor and ropes that we use to hold the boat while we set our fishing nets can no more reach the ground. They are now too short.”
A dredging machine on the Lagoon front in Sabon Kodji Island, Lagos.
Although they are surrounded by water, Christopher says, residents must gather money to buy clean water from the city as water sources in the area have been polluted as a result of sand mining activities in the area.
“We cannot use the water from the well or the borehole. We usually contribute money to vendors who take boats to Yaba or Iwaya to bring sachet water to this island. Many of the things they destroyed cannot be reversed.”
For Christiania Gbetode, who smokes fish, the poor fish harvest has forced her to consider an unlikely alternative.
The head of the fisherwomen on the Island confides in our correspondent that not only does she buy farmed fish from local breeders in Badagry and Epe areas of the state, she also augments her supplies with imported fish.
Pointing at the fishing boats lying idle at the community’s jetty, Christiana says, “Before now, the boats used to be filled with fishes when the men come back. I used to buy at least 40 buckets; but now, you get at most two buckets of fresh sea food after toiling for hours.
“To keep the business, I buy from local farmers at twice the price and I smoke imported fish. I am losing customers because my fish is the same price as those smoking in the city.”
For Gavei Kodji, it’s a story of collapse
The word, ‘dredging’, sends shivers down Whesu Gatson’s spine. For him, it is synonymous with destruction of livelihood and properties.
According to him, many houses collapsed into the Lagoon because of the flooding incidents that occurred in Gavei Kodji, after sand mining began in the community.
The farmer-turned-boat operator says apart from the houses that caved in, some farmlands were washed into the Lagoon in the aftermath of a flooding incident aggravated by the fact that sand was being excavated from the waterfront settlement.
He says, “I used to plant maize and cassava with a lot of vegetables but once they started packing sand from the coastline, the land began to get soft and muddy. If you plant anything today, the next day, water will wash it away. The soil became weak.”
Gatson points at some tumbledown huts close to the Lagoon front as some of the homes that collapsed when mining activities became more intense in the coastal community.
“Dredgers are digging into the seabed along Third Mainland Bridge, others”
Ujemeji
Environmentalists say that unchecked mining and dredging, which weaken seabed and deplete sub soils, could increase the incidence of building and structural collapse in Lagos.
The Director-General, the Nigerian Conservation Federation, Mr. Adeniyi Karunwi, defines sand mining as the process of removing sand and gravel from a particular location, essentially for the construction of buildings and roads. He also warns that insatiable demand for fine sand poses irreversible damage to both marine lives and the environment.
He identifies coastal and soil erosion, loss of aquatic lives, formation of sinkholes, loss of bio-diversity, soil contamination resulting from leakages of chemicals into the soil as some of the adverse environmental impact of the trade.
“A study by the Nigerian Institute for Oceanography and Marine Research revealed that un-coordinated activities by miners and dredgers have caused depths of almost six metres into the seabed as reflected in the Banana Island to Third Mainland Bridge axis,” Karunwi states.
The environmentalist notes that a recent biodiversity survey by a team of ornithologists along the Lagoon in the Sangotedo and Badagry areas of the state indicates an unprecedented proliferation of dredging activities, a situation, he says, thrives due to poor coordination and regulation.
The conservationist notes, “The government agencies responsible for stemming this tide should put a halt to it before it becomes a monster that will eventually consume us.
“Dredging in some places has been largely responsible for the loss of breeding habitats for sea turtles, which depend on sandy beaches for their nesting and other biodiversity.”
‘From Lagos to Dubai, sand is a highly sought after resource’
Globally, there is a huge demand for sharp sand which is dredged from the sea or mined from its shorelines for real estate purposes.
Lagos, a state in South-West Nigeria with over 50 coastal communities in Lekki and Epe, Ojo and Badagry as well as Amuwo-Odofin and Apapa areas, is a preferred destination for sand miners who must meet this need.
Fine sand, excavated from Lagos coast lines are exported to countries such as the United Arab Emirates. The waterfront business booms with an increasing need for housing for over 20 million Lagosians.
It’s been estimated that Lagos consumes an estimated 40 million cube metres of sand per annum for building and construction projects.
While the business generates great profits for urban property developers, its impact has brought despair upon residents who have had to deal with the polluted waters, collapsed houses, depleted lands and flooding that these activities leave in their wake.
As sand is taken from the coastlines to provide housing for urban dwellers – many more are rendered homeless in the affected areas.
‘And government reads the riot act’
Worried by the increasing menace of these activities, the Lagos State Government banned dredging activities in February.
This was after a communal clash in a sand-mining site in the Bariga area of Lagos reportedly led to the death of an elderly woman in the settlement.
The Commissioner for Water Front and Infrastructure, Mr. Ade Akinsanya, who relayed this directive, however, admits that the majority of the miners were operating illegally and often without the appropriate licence.
Akinsanya said, “All sand dredgers in Lagos State should stop operations immediately. The idea is to ensure adequate security of lives and property in the state. They need to renew their operational permit annually, but a majority of them have not renewed it for many years.
“The state government and the National Inland Waterways Authority are the licensing authorities to give directives on such operations on the waterways’’.
Despite the stern order from the authorities, sand miners continue their business especially in hard-to-reach areas that are far from the watchful eyes of the government.
For instance, dredgers were still operating on the Lagoon front at Ogogoro Island when our correspondent visited the community after the ban in April.
Knowing the ugly fate that had befallen their neighours, the residents alerted the authorities to ensure that the operators comply with the order.
According to a boat operator, Mr Soji Vvede, some miners did come like a thief in the night to scoop sand from the waterfront settlement. “They did not consult anybody, and we woke up to find their equipment on water. We are fishermen trying to make a decent living; nobody should come and spoil our land,” he says.
This report on sand mining and dredging was supported by The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and Code For Africa.
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