Last week, my journey from Lagos to Ibadan, along the Lekki peninsula through Ijebu Ode, afforded me the nostalgic opportunity to view the coastal swamp forest of western Nigeria, maybe for the last time.

These rich habitats will not survive the chainsaw and bulldozer. So much is the frenetic pace of anthropogenic conversion into housing estates, factories, farms, export-free zones, and highways, all in accommodation of urban spillover from Lagos metropolis.

Every state in Nigeria has generated some design of projected mega industrial parks, housing estates and shopping plazas replete with 5-star hotels, night clubs, spas, conference centres and international airports.

Some would even like to host the next Olympic Games! But few have a documented benchmark for addressing food insecurity, malaria or HIV/AIDS. In the south-east, sanitation, waste disposal and creation of forest reserves are unheard of.

Governors all over the Federation remain conspiratorially silent on progress towards attaining the UN MDGs, the Multilateral Development Goals by 2015 or even within a moratorium 10 years further! The picture is the same everywhere – hordes of unemployed young men and women moving about like loose molecules in a very unstable fluid, a fluid that is on the verge of igniting.

From the bridge, l looked into the placid waters of Lekki lagoon at Epe, and knew that even this habitat would face the dangers of industrial and domestic pollution, siltation and saltwater intrusion when the mega-projects of Lagos State are in place. Unlike the more shallow and brackish lagoon at Lagos, Lekki is mainly freshwater and the source of the coveted catfish, tilapia, and diverse edible shellfish.

Is it too late for considerations of environmental impacts to be made? I think not. The signs are however
ominous! Nigerians may not live on the fault lines of earthquakes or in the paths of Tsunamis, but what
is the preparedness for disasters in our built environments? We cannot take comfort from watching the horrors in Haiti and Chile on television, and then repeatedly thank God for not being exposed to the same fate.

By doing so, we make the dangerous mistake of complacency and overt fatalism, foolishly believing it could not be our turn some day, in one form or the other.

Overt fatalism

In Abuja, one of the amusement park attendants declared, “God forbid that it should happen!” My question was what manner of contingencies they have should a bunch of kids plunge from the heights of the roller coaster.

Nigerian beach waters harbour unpredictable sharks, barracudas and camouflaged stingrays. The authorities have no arrangements to do something in the
case of drowning or fatal attacks.

Game wardens and guides in our national parks accompany tourists with ancient machetes and
muskets. There are no anti-venom medicines around in forests with a range of non-poisonous, but also highly venomous reptiles. Why kill a carpet viper in revenge after it has struck? Its victim could most likely pass away within a week. In the case of a mamba,or cobra, even much earlier!