Lagos Is Drowning: Media, Resistance, and Climate Coloniality in Flooding Narratives

The article examines the discursive politics of flooding in Lagos, Nigeria, showing how language and power intersect within climate vulnerability. Building on Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics and using insights from Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, the study explores the role public discourse serves as a site where decisions about whose lives are protected, and whose are effectively cast aside, are meted out and legitimized. It reveals how sovereign power is expressed in infrastructural neglect and selective protection. Drawing on 10 articles in The Punch (2017–2025), the study exposes how flood is constructed as a natural and fated act in government discourse, shifting blame and demanding that “urban poor relocate” and thus transforming vulnerability into an issue of individual blame. Conversely, public commentators and community voices mobilize counter-narratives, such as the viral slogan “China no be Lagos,” which counters the state’s comparison of characterizations between Lagos and more developed societies. These frames of resistance repoliticize the floods as manifestations of structural injustice rather than natural disasters. The findings illustrate that Lagos’s floods are not merely meteorological events, but profoundly rhetorical ones, wherein language becomes a technology of power that can either reproduce inequality or function as a tool for justice-centered change.