Thompson Akingboye is sufficiently old to recollect a time when the ocean was not a threat to his home within the coastal town of Ayetoro in Nigeria’s southwestern Ondo State. That was back in 1997, when he was just nine years old.
But within the 2000s, the storm surges began, after which all the things modified.
Homes, factories, schools, and maternity clinics built up over the town’s long history began to be slowly consumed by the water.
Ayetoro, meaning “joyful city” in Yoruba, is home to greater than 10,000 people. It is a theocratic Christian fishing community. Since it was founded in 1947, it has been run by the Ogeloyinbo, or traditional ruler, who can be the top of the town’s charismatic Holy Apostles Community Church.
Today, even that church, around which much of the town’s communal life revolves, has been impacted. It has needed to be moved 3 times in recent times, and the waves are lapping ever closer to its present location.
“Our common prayer within the church is searching for God’s intervention to the touch the guts of the federal government to reply our plight,” Akingboye, now 36 and the spokesman for the town’s youth congress, told CT.
That intervention would involve reclaiming the land that has already been lost to the ocean and increase levees, dikes, and seawalls that may withstand the waves, experts say.
Ayetoro’s persons are historically self-sufficient, but a project this big is beyond the skills of even its most able artisans, Akingboye said. Appeals have been made at every level of presidency: local, regional, and state.
“No tangible respite has come,” he said. “The land continues to be eroded, houses continued to collapse into the ocean, people continued to die.”
It appears to be an issue afflicting other communities along Nigeria’s 528-mile-long coastline.
Thousands of reclamation and shoreline protection projects have reportedly been awarded to contractors—but then abandoned. At least two projects meant to shore up Ayetoro’s own defenses have been in planning since 2004, yet nothing has materialized, locals say.
The consequences of inaction have been devastating. Video footage posted by Akingboye on Facebook last December shows waves breaking and swirling around large slabs of shattered concrete, while the skeletal frames of buildings protrude from the ocean.
The youth leader estimates around 5,000 residents—nearly half the town’s population—have been displaced. Some have moved to stick with relatives in neighboring communities. Others have needed to make do in Ayetoro. Rooms meant for 3 people now accommodate ten.
“People have develop into refugees in their very own town,” he said.
Tragically, lives have also been lost. More than 30 residents have died in storm surges that hit the town in 2010, 2016, 2019, and nevertheless, most recently, in April 2023.
The victims have been mostly children and the elderly, asleep when the storms struck at night. Some elderly residents have also died from the distress of losing property they don’t have the means to switch, Akingboye said.
More than half a century ago, things in Ayetoro looked very different.
Without any state support, the community established factories to provide bread, shoes, ice and textiles. It had a dockyard—the nation’s first—and there have been workshops and sawmills, a technical college, in addition to community-run supermarkets, laundry houses, and maternity centers.
Ayetoro was founded as a spiritual community, where everyone would belong to the identical church, praying and celebrating Communion together, and those that violated a strict ethical code could be kicked out. Holy Apostles is a component of the Aladura movement, which broke from Anglicanism within the Twenties over the facility of prayer and possibility of divine healing today.
Ayetoro had utopian visions of becoming a Nigerian city on a hill. And for some time, it was. Visitors flocked in from Nigeria and abroad. Then the seek for oil brought disaster.
“Ayetoro lived in peace and serenity until our oil attracted the federal government,” Akingboye said. “The land was distorted; the ocean rose and started to intrude into the town.”
Oluwambe Ojagbohunmi, the normal ruler of Ayetoro and the spiritual head of its church, shares this view.
“Apart from climate change, oil exploration is the most important factor behind the ocean surge,” he said. “Our oil resource has gone to make others wealthy and construct big cities within the state and federal capitals, while we which have the oil are left to be washed into the ocean.”
While marine geoscientists say offshore oil extraction may cause the land to sink, the crisis in Ayetoro not unique. Much of West Africa’s coastline, a magnet for development and economic activity, is vulnerable to the “converging crises” of rising seas, fast-growing populations, land pressure, and a scarcity of low-cost housing.
“The increasing population of coastal communities is posing a threat to natural barriers and ecosystems, exposing them to storm surges and flooding,” one study says.
Taiwo Ogunwumi, a Nigerian flood risk consultant based within the Netherlands, says the basis explanation for the ocean level rise affecting Ayetoro is triggered by processes happening removed from its shores: melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.
NASA, which monitors those ice sheets via its GRACE satellite missions, estimates that each are losing lots of of billions of tons of ice per 12 months. The meltwaters are answerable for a 3rd of world sea-level rise since 1993, in response to the American government agency.
Local oil extraction offshore of Ayetoro is, nonetheless, also aggravating the situation, notes Ogunwumi.
“The industrial activities of the oil-producing firms concentrated in Ayetoro contribute to the discharge of carbon dioxide emissions,” he told CT.
In addition to the “gray infrastructure” needed for frontline coastal defenses, Ogunwumi recommends nature-based solutions corresponding to restoring wetlands, coral reefs, marshes, and mangroves that may help buffer against coastal flooding.
Amid this ecological crisis, Ayetoro’s pastors and leaders persist in preaching excellent news. As a watery apocalypse rises to eat their city, the faithful are urged to show to the Lord.
“Most of our preaching now’s to encourage the those that assistance will come in the future,” Akingboye said. “There is nothing unattainable for God to do.”
