Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA) has cautioned the Lagos State Government against plans to place parts of the state’s public water infrastructure under private concession. The organisation described the move as a dangerous retreat from government’s responsibility to provide safe, affordable, and reliable water to residents.
The warning follows the state’s signing of a one-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC) and Naston Engineering Nigeria Limited. The agreement is intended to scope and define components of a water infrastructure programme within the Lekki Concession Area.
According to official statements, the first phase will involve installing a transmission pipeline beneath the Lagos Lagoon into the Lekki Concession Area. The second will cover downstream distribution, including metering and last-mile connections. The engagement is expected to produce a technical report and implementation framework to support a concession agreement between Lagos State and the consortium.
CAPPA said these details confirm the MoU is an early step toward concessioning, potentially giving private companies significant influence over distribution, tariffs, metering, and household access. It condemned the lack of transparency surrounding the MoU, saying no publicly accessible copy of the agreement, its terms of reference or record of consultations with communities had been released.
“There is no publicly accessible record showing the project’s full scope, how the consortium was selected, what obligations the companies have assumed, or how residents have participated in its development,” CAPPA noted. “The government is already discussing tariffs and a concession while the public remains shut out.”
While disclosing critical information is a basic democratic requirement, CAPPA maintained that transparency alone does not cure the inherent flaw of the state’s approach to privatise water, which inevitably subordinates universal public access to commercial profitability. The group warned that low-income communities are often the first to suffer when the ability to pay becomes the organising principle of an essential public service.
CAPPA questioned what it described as Lagos State’s inclination to transfer essential responsibilities to private actors. It argued that the state’s considerable revenue base gives it both the means and the obligation to mobilise public resources, maintain infrastructure, expand production, and guarantee public access to water.
Rejecting claims that longstanding failures of Lagos’s water system make private involvement and control necessary, CAPPA said years of inadequate investment, poor maintenance, unreliable electricity, and weak distribution networks must be addressed by rebuilding public capacity, not by discrediting public ownership.
“The problem is that successive administrations have failed to fund, maintain, and expand the system at the scale Lagos requires. Allowing a public institution to deteriorate and then presenting private control as its rescue is dishonest. It is an abdication of responsibility,” said Holiness
Segun-Olufemi, CAPPA’s Water Program Officer.
CAPPA also rejected the planned expansion of prepaid water meters. Unlike conventional postpaid metering, prepaid systems automatically shut off supply once purchased credit runs out, making continuous access dependent on a household’s ability to pay in advance, even during periods of unemployment, medical emergencies, or sudden economic distress.
“For a resource essential to human life, sanitation, and public health, automated disconnections are fundamentally exclusionary and set to worsen the lives of vulnerable groups and low-income earners,” Segun-Olufemi said.
The organisation compared the proposed water concessions and prepaid-meter rollout with Nigeria’s experience of electricity-sector privatisation and commercialisation. More than a decade after electricity generation and distribution were largely transferred to private operators, consumers continue to face repeated tariff increases, prepaid-meter shortages, estimated billing and persistent outages.
“The service-based tariff has further divided consumers into bands, with Band A and Band B customers charged according to promises of at least 20 and 16 hours of daily supply respectively, even though service shortfalls remain common. Many households now pay rising tariffs while also spending on generators, fuel, solar systems and other alternatives.
“Meanwhile, the government continues to finance interventions, absorb sectoral debts and protect private operators from the consequences of a system that has failed to deliver reliable electricity,” the statement noted.
CAPPA warned that Lagos risks reproducing the same flawed model in the water sector. Under this approach, public money finances infrastructure, private companies gain control over billing and revenue, tariffs rise in the name of cost recovery, and households are forced to pay upfront without any firm guarantee of supply.
The organisation stressed that the consequences would be far more severe. Families may endure temporary power cuts, however damaging, but they cannot survive without water.
It cited experiences in Akilo and Baruwa areas of Lagos, where prepaid meters have already been introduced. Residents reported unexplained intermittent supply, delays in activating purchased units, restricted supply periods, low pressure, and discrepancies between paid and received volumes. In Baruwa, households reported spending up to N60,000 monthly purchasing water, sudden disappearance of purchased units, outages lasting weeks, dirty water when supply resumed, and no clear complaint mechanisms.
CAPPA stressed that water is a public good and a human right. Decisions about its production, distribution, and financing must be governed by public need rather than investor returns.
In light of these concerns, the organisation called on the Lagos State Government to halt further steps toward concession and suspend prepaid metering expansion.
It demanded full publication of the CHEC–Naston MoU and urged the government to release a publicly financed plan for rehabilitating treatment plants, pipelines, reservoirs, and distribution networks. Such a plan, CAPPA said, must guarantee a basic quantity of water to every household.
The organisation also called on communities, labour unions, students, journalists, civil society organisations, and residents to defend the human right to water and hold government accountable for fulfilling its responsibility to safeguard lives through the provision of basic amenities.
CAPPA warned that concessions could bind Lagos for decades, long after the officials who negotiated them have left office. It reiterated that Lagos urgently needs substantial investment in water infrastructure. However, such investment, the organisation argued, must strengthen the Lagos Water Corporation, expand public capacity, and guarantee universal access rather than create another avenue for investors to profit from an essential service.
