Eko Atlantic

Bar Beach was where Lagos went on a Sunday. It is not there now, and it did not go suddenly. the Lagos coast has been eroding since at least the 1910s, in the order of 2 to 10 metres a year — that figure comes from the marine engineers on the project that replaced it, and nobody argues with it.

Sand was trucked in for decades to hold the line, and the sea took that too. By the time anyone drew a plan for what is there now, the argument had already been settled by the water: by 2005 Bar Beach no longer existed.

So the first thing to be clear about is that the problem was real. Whatever you make of what was built here, it was built on a coast that was genuinely going.

The thing holding the Atlantic off is a revetment, not a sea wall in the way most people picture one. It is a sloped bank of rock faced with interlocking concrete units that break a wave up rather than bouncing it back. 100,000 concrete accropodes, each cast on site and weighing five tonnes.

work on the wall began in 2009, and it is meant to run 8.5 kilometres of sea wall when it is finished. Behind it, dredgers pumped sand off the sea floor into a shape: around ten square kilometres of land taken back from the sea.

Both of those numbers come from the people who built it. We have looked for an independent survey of the wall's length and the reclaimed area and have not found one.

The state did not build this. a land concession agreement was signed with Lagos State in 2006, and South Energyx Nigeria Limited, a company of the Chagoury group, was created to build it. The wall went up from 2009; a ceremony marking the start of reclamation followed in February 2013.

The arrangement is a straightforward trade, and it is worth stating plainly rather than disapprovingly: a private company takes on the cost and the risk of defending a shoreline, and in exchange it gets to own and sell the land it makes. The erosion problem becomes somebody's asset.

What the new ground is for is not a secret either. at least 250,000 residents and 150,000 people commuting in each day.

Run your eye east along the coast in the picture above and the bays start. Past them is Okun Alfa, and past that is where Alpha Beach used to be. the state’s own climate risk assessment records that Alfa Beach has been lost to the Atlantic.

residents describe losing ten houses in one night in 2009, and seven buildings in one family. The sequence is not disputed by anyone: dredging from 2008, the first big surge in 2009.

the traditional ruler of Okun Alfa says his palace is in the ocean. a community leader says people who had block houses now sleep in structures made of planks. Five years later the same family told a different reporter the same thing: the Baale of Okun Alfa says the government pumped sand to the Eko Atlantic site and the water came for his community.

Something was built to stop it. the breakwaters meant to protect the community were started in 2011 and left half-built. Where the barriers exist, people say they held.

Against the community’s account, the developer is unambiguous. the project’s managing director says the dredging has not caused any erosion on the coastline.

And the state says the same. the Lagos commissioner responsible dismisses the idea that Eko Atlantic is the main driver, and accepts the science is still argued over. His question is not a rhetorical one: something was eroding this coast long before anybody dredged anything, at 2 to 10 metres a year, and that process did not stop.

The argument on this coast is usually presented as community belief against engineering judgement, with nothing in between. There is something in between, and it has been sitting in a university repository, free to download, for fourteen years.

a 2012 study modelled what the project would do to the coast beyond it and found the erosion shifted eastward. It is a master’s thesis rather than a peer-reviewed paper, and it models a coastline rather than measuring one. Read it for what it is and it is still the most specific answer anybody has published.

Its finding has three parts, and the middle one is the part both sides leave out. the total volume of erosion downstream is not altered by the project — it is redistributed. erosion rates directly downstream of the project are increased significantly, then fall away with distance. So the model does not say the wall created the erosion. It says the wall concentrated it, worst nearest, easing with distance, spreading further along the coast as the years run.

That matters because it rules out the easy dismissal. This is not an activist model. It came out of the same engineering world that designed the revetment, and it reached a conclusion the developer’s public materials do not mention.

It also said what to do about it. the model’s remedy is sand, put back every year, in the order of the annual longshore transport. Put plainly: to hold the coast east of the wall, somebody needed to be putting sand back, in the order of six hundred thousand cubic metres, every year, indefinitely.

We have looked for evidence that this happens, or has ever happened, and we have not found any. the breakwaters meant to protect the community were started in 2011 and left half-built. Rock was put in instead of sand, and then the rock stopped.

So here is where it lands, and it is narrower than either side would like.

The wall protected Victoria Island. The erosion east of it was happening before and would have continued. A model initiated by the project’s own engineers said the wall would concentrate that erosion directly downdrift, and named the annual price of preventing it. Alpha Beach is gone, on the state’s own account. The people of Okun Alfa have been saying the same thing, in the same words, to anyone who turns up, since at least 2021.

the environmental impact assessment was submitted in 2011 and approved in 2013, after the dredging had started. South Energyx did not answer questions about any of this.

What nobody has produced — not the developer, not the state, not us — is a shoreline survey of this coast before and after, set against the model, to say how much of what happened is the wall and how much is the ocean doing what it was already doing. Fourteen years on, that is a choice, not an oversight.