As you draw closer, the noise doesn’t just hit you, it swallows you.
And yet, it is here that Lagos eats.
It is Lagos’ belly—the lungs, liver, and the intestines.
Chaotic, disorganized, and disorderly, yet that same market feeds Lagos.
As someone puts it, it’s the literal kitchen of chaos.
“Ikorodu o!” a conductor of a dilapidated BRT bus screamed like a battle cry, flung out one leg like he was about to somersault mid-motion, hung carelessly on the door of the blue rickety bus like Batman on the rail of 3rd Mainland Bridge.
Around him, a mash-up of buses belch out smoke like exhausted dragons, from dusty Danfos to broken BRTs, even Oko Ashewos, dragging their fates to doom.
‘Ketu jábòòlé… I dey talk my own o… Ketu come down o!’ another screamed in flat Yoruba intonation, face folded in frustration, pulling his ear like a village elder warning his naïve first son to beware of the treacherous city girls.
Then comes another familiar chant as his Danfo bus raced up into Ketu area:
‘Ojota waso… wole fifty naira Ojota!’ His voice battles the screeching tires, honking madness, and the bass-heavy Davido track booming from somewhere between a speaker and a cursed generator.
Shekpe!
Welcome to Ketu–Mile 12 market, a riot of smells, sounds, and sweat.
The Mecca of Naija food trade, stretching its reach from the downtown Lagos to the dusty streets of Minna and beyond.
The smell hits differently. A rotting bouquet of crushed tomatoes, sunburnt onions, urine-soaked concrete, and forgotten fish cling to your skin and colonizes your nostrils. Even the flies come with strong lungs. You don’t breathe Mile 12—you inhale the struggle.
This is not the Lagos you find in Instagram reels.
This is the underbelly, where money is counted with dirty fingers; and bargains are screamed, not spoken; where tomatoes come to live, rot, and rise again in cheaper bowls for poorer mouths; where gbo-gbo boys loiter for leftovers, and aláàru balances a 50kg sack like it’s a crown; where languages collide – Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Pidgin, Ishan, Calabar, Fulani – and they all shout in capital letters.
The intense, bustling, and electric atmosphere associated with any Lagos market is what you get at Mile 12, considering the fact that over 95% of all the food products coming into the state land there. No matter the food, someone sells it in Mile 12.
Formed after Iddo Market could not supply the growing Lagos populace, Mile 12 became one of the biggest, most popular, and busiest food markets in Lagos and South West Nigeria. Here, Lagos survives not by elegance or order but by unfiltered hustle.
Mile 12 is a breathing ecosystem comprising primary and secondary actors: the casual labourers, aláàru women and aboki mekayás, wheelbarrow pushers, hawkers, lenders of rubber boots, touts, pickpockets, thieves, drifters, wives, mothers, and warriors in wrappers – swarming all over like Mushin rats and colliding into each other and vehicles.
The cacophonous ecosystem stretches into wholesale merchants, retailers, alongside hordes of women who flood in to buy either for resale in neighborhood markets or for last-mile consumption.
Accessing the market? Good luck.
It’s a struggle from the jump. First, you face the nuisance of gridlock, thanks to traders displaying their goods on the road. Then comes the olfactory assault—a gut-punching mix of rotting tomatoes, decaying plantains, and food waste fermenting in corners.
No warning. No mercy. The stench greets you at the gate like a bouncer with beef. Not only is it unpleasant, it’s a full-body experience, one that starts before you even step inside.
Mile 12 market doesn’t close—it only morphs. From the pre-dawn grind of trailer offloading to the midday frenzy of market women pricing tomatoes as if they’re fighting an election, to the twilight zone where you find baskets of esha (spoiled tomatoes) being packaged like fine wine, ready for resale in underserved areas.
Very true!
It is a common sight for baskets of esha to leave the market in droves—not to the waste truck, but to rickety vehicles waiting at the entrance of the market, to be conveyed to poor neighbourhoods.
Truly, what you troway in Lekki is a delicacy in Ajegunle.
And amidst all this madness, deals are made, lives are fed, and families are raised.
Mile 12 is the heart of a broken city that still keeps beating.
Smelly, loud, and often lawless, but it is also rich, relentless, and wildly resourceful. Yet, Wizkid’s voice continues wailing like a gospel singer at a street revival, pulsing out of raucous speakers and banging the vicinity. Raw!
In this anarchic temple of trade, where gods wear flip-flops and goddesses carry yam and agbado on their heads, everything starts here.
Ugly, overwhelming, chaotic, and unkempt, but somehow remains the unsung hero of Lagos, where madness feeds millions.
This is Mile 12, and it doesn’t need to be pretty.
It just needs to feed us.
