Lagos is surrounded by water — so where are all the beaches?

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A few weeks ago, a group of my Lagos-based friends tried to arrange a day out at the beach. It should’ve been a fairly straightforward idea that required little to no planning. After all, we’re surrounded by water. The combination of the Atlantic Ocean and Lagos Lagoon provides the city with an ample coastline and white sandy beaches.

But as anyone who has ever visited Nigeria knows, hardly anything comes easy here. Reaching our beach of choice required renting a boat for a roughly 30-minute journey each way and paying an entry fee upon arrival.

This inconvenience is repeated at many other beaches across the city: they are both hard to get to and require a fee to access.

Across Lagos, the state has washed its hands of managing beaches, leaving private investors to develop resorts with beachfront access that exclude all but the fairly well-off. In a country with sky-high inflation and acute poverty, the beach has become one more form of entertainment that is prohibitively expensive for many of its largest city’s estimated 21mn residents.

Nigeria is an anomaly in that regard. As the Financial Times’ man in west Africa, I’m often on the road in the region. Every other country with an Atlantic Ocean coastline, from Ghana to Sierra Leone via Togo and Senegal, offers free access to public beaches. No reporting trip is complete without an evening visit to the shoreline.

Things were not always this way in Nigeria.

The infamous Bar Beach — once the site of public executions by firing squad during the country’s squalid 1970s military era — was a Lagos hotspot until the 2010s. The beach was just like the city: chaotic, not well suited to the faint of heart and always fun. Prayers and loud music boomed, sometimes at the same time. For a fee, visitors could ride on a horse and have their pictures taken — there’s a grinning photo of a younger me on horseback at the beach.

But Bar Beach has now completely disappeared after years of floods. It has made way for the ambitious Eko Atlantic project, built on land reclaimed from the sea and planned as a glitzy business district.

This is a serious loss.

Lagos is very hot and humid, particularly in the dry season. A west African heatwave last year saw temperatures soar above 40C (and is presumably a sign of things to come). High humidity made the days feel even hotter. It would’ve been an opportunity to seek relief by the sea for the city’s put-upon residents — but they are struggling to find anywhere they can go.

Lagos’s lack of free beaches illustrates the way in which the city continues to squeeze its poorer residents. It matters in many ways beyond sea and sand that only people of a certain social status can afford something as simple as a trip to the beach.

Across Nigeria, supposedly public spaces and services are becoming increasingly privatised.

Privatisation is seen as a way to revive the economy. But ever more public services — such as schools and hospitals — have become neglected and high-quality, low-cost alternatives have not always taken their place. People make do with the private versions they can afford.

It seems unsustainable to me that a city that runs on the hard work of its poorest people can continue to deprive residents of even the most basic of pleasures because it deems recreation unimportant. Yet it is highly unlikely that beaches will ever be free to access in Lagos again.

Government officials often argue that privatisation has made beaches cleaner and safer than when they were government-run.

This is undoubtedly true. But it also amounts to an admission of failure and a dereliction of duty for a city government that leads the country in tax revenue collection and is never shy about trumpeting its record “internally generated revenue”.

If a city that collected more than $800mn in tax revenues last year — 45 per cent up from the previous year — cannot guarantee free access to the beach, when its much poorer counterparts across west Africa do so with relative ease, then who exactly is Lagos for?

aanu.adeoye@ft.com