‘They told us to leave. They didn’t tell us where to go’: the demolitions destroying homes and lives in Lagos

It was 12.30pm when amphibious excavators escorted by armed police roared through Makoko, crushing wooden shacks built on stilts. “It was the second time this year,” says Augustine Agpoko, 42, a fisher and father of eight whose six-bedroom bungalow was demolished on 16 January.

Like many of his neighbours, Agpoko was already dismantling his home piece by piece in an attempt to save some of the materials before the machines arrived. “I was removing my roofing sheets, trying to salvage materials from my house when the bulldozers began demolition,” he says. “When they started firing tear gas into the air, I had to quickly evacuate my family to safety in a neighbouring community, because one of my two wives is in her second trimester.”

By the time he returned, everything had been reduced to floating debris on the Lagos Lagoon. “They later set everything ablaze, including my fishing nets,” he says.

Agpoko was born and raised in Makoko. He says his children have not been able to attend school since the demolitions began in December. During an operation on 21 December the excavators arrived under cover of darkness. At first, Makoko residents thought the low metallic hum vibrating across the lagoon was a distant generator or the rumbling of trucks on the nearby Third Mainland Bridge. But when the sky began to brighten, they saw excavators advancing towards the wooden structures of the waterfront settlement.

“It was before dawn,” says 60-year-old Timothy Ategi, a fisher who has