At a spot not far from the bank of the lagoon, 49-year-old Elizabeth Tosihnu sat in the canoe with her children, awaiting the arrival of her husband. Time was 12:50 pm and the October breeze blew gently across the lagoon. She told PREMIUM TIMES things had changed for the worse with regard to fishing in the Lagos lagoon.
“Things are not the way they were before anymore,” she said in her local Ogu dialect as she struggled to reposition one of her fish baskets. “In the past, say two or three years ago, we would have left this place by now because my husband would have been back with good catches. But now, it’s almost afternoon and he is not even back with anything.”
Mrs Tosihnu said a number of factors account for the poor catches fishermen record in the community in recent time but she was emphatic about the activities of dredgers on the Oworonshoki end of Lagos mainland.
The Lagos state government, as part of its urbanisation initiatives, began dredging the Oworonshoki end of the bridge in 2016. The government said it plans to build ultra-modern hotels and shopping malls in the area. But while the government moves to industrialise, very little attention is paid to the impact of its policies on the city’s local fish production.
“Before now, our people used to be back from expedition by early morning or latest, 10 o’ clock; but since they began dredging activities across several parts of Lagos, we wait till afternoon and sometimes evening for them to come back,” Mrs Tosihnu said. “These days, they don’t even come with better fishes.”
According to the Fisheries and Aquaculture Department of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Nigeria had an estimated annual per capital fish consumption of 13.3 kg in 2013, which makes fish an important dietary element and one of the few sources of animal protein available to many Nigerians.
By 2015, data showed, the nation’s total fish production was estimated at 1,027,000 tonnes, to which marine catches contributed 36 percent, inland waters catches contributed 33 percent and aquaculture 31 percent––from which the nation gets smoked fishes it exports. In terms of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), fishery sector contributed 0.5 percent in the same year.
With little or no significant structures by the government, more than 80 per cent of Nigeria’s total domestic production is generated by artisanal small-scale fishers from coastal, inshore, creeks, lagoons, inland rivers and lakes. Many of the fishermen and women in these areas including Makoko and Badagry – two fishing hubs in the city – now sit idle.
“We simply just sit down nowadays as we barely get catches because of the effect of dredging,” Gafar Ayoola, a fisherman in Badagry, told PREMIUM TIMES.
