70% of Lagos drinks from plastic bags: the water crisis nobody is solving
Seventy percent of Lagosians get their drinking water from sachet bags — the small plastic pouches sold at every intersection for ₦50 each, now ₦500–₦600 per bag of 20. The Lagos Water Corporation, despite receiving ₦16 billion in budgetary allocations over five years, delivers pipe water to fewer than 4% of residents. Staff at the Corporation's own Iponri office have been recorded telling new residents that drilling a borehole is "the only and last resort." The water infrastructure isn't failing — it was never built at the scale a 18-million-person city requires.
The economics split along the familiar Island-Mainland divide. On the Island — Victoria Island, Ikoyi, Lekki — groundwater is brackish (salty) due to proximity to the lagoon and ocean. Boreholes must drill 80–150 metres deep and need reverse osmosis treatment systems, pushing total installation to ₦2–₦3 million. Monthly tanker delivery costs ₦40,000–₦47,000 for 10,000 litres — a standard household uses 2–3 deliveries per month. For Island residents, water is a ₦100,000–₦150,000 monthly expense that rarely appears in any cost-of-living calculation.
The mainland tells a different story. Areas like Alimosho, Ikorodu, and Ogba sit on shallow freshwater aquifers. Borehole drilling costs ₦800,000–₦900,000 and produces drinkable water with basic filtration. The payback versus tanker delivery is under 12 months. This is one of the genuine advantages of mainland living that the rent-versus-Island conversation consistently ignores.
Sachet water — "pure water" — remains the daily reality for most. At ₦500–₦600 per bag, a family of four consuming 3 bags per day spends ₦45,000–₦54,000 per month — almost as much as a tanker delivery, but generating mountains of plastic waste. The nylon price hike from the Iran conflict pushed prices up 25–50% in April 2026, and water producers warn that further increases are likely if crude oil stays above $115.
The through-line across all of it is that in Lagos, water is a cost you provide for yourself, not a utility you can assume. The public pipe network reaches little of the city reliably, so nearly every household budgets for its own supply — a one-off borehole where the ground allows, tanker deliveries where it does not, and treatment or filtration almost everywhere for anything you drink. Geography sets the difficulty and the price: fresh, drillable groundwater on much of the mainland at one end, saline, treatment-dependent supply on the coastal Island and reclaimed land at the other. Reading your own area's water reality — borehole viability, likely quality, and whether you will lean on tankers — is as much a part of choosing where to live as the rent.