Oseni Dares Lagos and Federal Ministries to Release Coastal Road EIA Documents

Rufai Oseni said something on live television Wednesday that a lot of Lagosians have probably been thinking but nobody with a government business card has been willing to say out loud.

The Arise Television anchor, speaking on The Morning Show, issued a direct challenge to the Lagos State Ministry of Environment and the Federal Ministries of Environment and Works: if the environmental impact assessment for the Lagos coastal road project was done properly, prove it. Show the documents. Produce the email trails. Let the public see what the assessments said about flooding risks and what mitigation measures were promised.

He was responding to recent flooding in parts of Lagos that critics have linked, at least in part, to the ongoing coastal road construction.

The framing of his challenge is worth noting because it was not a vague call for transparency. It was a specific, procedural demand.

"I would like to challenge the Ministry of Environment in Lagos, and challenge the Federal Ministry of Environment and Works to please show us one mail trail and the negotiations and conversations over the environmental impact assessments," Oseni said.

He argued that a road project of that scale could not legally or logistically have proceeded without formal consultations between state and federal environmental authorities. That is not a political argument. It is how EIA processes are supposed to work under Nigerian law. The implication, left unstated but clearly understood, is that if those consultations happened and the flooding risks were assessed and mitigations were promised, the public is entitled to know what was decided. And if that process did not happen the way it should have, that is an entirely different conversation.

He also asked specifically for the narrative around the coastal road's effect on Lagos floodwaters, including when the assessment was done and what the stated mitigating effects were supposed to be.

"I also challenge them to bring out those documents as regards the floods in the other areas," he added.

He prefaced all of this with something that is worth quoting on its own terms: "You see, when we talk, they say my mouth is smelling, but it is better my mouth smells and Nigeria gets better."

That line says something true about what it feels like to ask accountability questions in Nigeria. You get dismissed before you get answered. And sometimes the dismissal is easier to deliver than the document.

To be honest, environmental impact assessments in Nigeria have a complicated relationship with the projects they are supposed to govern. They exist. They are required. They are sometimes conducted thoroughly and sometimes treated as a bureaucratic box to tick before the real work begins.

The Lagos coastal road EIA flooding question that Oseni is raising matters because flooding in Lagos is not a side issue. It is one of the defining quality-of-life crises in the city, and it interacts with infrastructure decisions in ways that are not always made visible to the people who live with the consequences.

If a major coastal road was built without properly modelling how it would affect water drainage and flood patterns, that is a serious governance failure. If it was modelled and the risks were documented and the mitigations were planned but not implemented, that is a different kind of failure. And if the documents exist and are simply being withheld, that is a transparency failure on top of everything else.

Oseni's challenge is essentially asking: which one is it?