The Lagos State government has raised an alarm over the growing misuse of its emergency hotlines and warned that fake calls are delaying response times and putting lives at risk.
According to the State, fake emergency calls or prank calls account for nearly 70%, a massive majority, of distress communications. Commissioner for Special Duties, Olugbenga Oyerinde, said the numbers are deeply troubling.
He said the severe misuse dangerously delays response times for real emergencies like fires, crimes, and medical crises, and wastes critical first-responder resources
The scale of the disruption has significantly affected emergency response operations, with the government disclosing that 5.47 million incoming calls went unanswered during the period under review.
The abandoned call rate climbed sharply from 9.3% in January 2025 to 37.6% by April 2026, suggesting worsening pressure on operators handling emergency traffic.
Officials warn that if the current trend continues, more than 7.2 million calls could go unanswered before the end of 2026
The Lagos State Command and Control Centre serves as the central coordination hub for emergency response agencies across the state, including the fire service, ambulance services, traffic management authorities and neighbourhood safety operatives.
According to the report, the sheer volume of fake and misdirected calls has forced the system to devote significant operational resources to filtering non-emergency traffic before genuine distress cases can be handled.
To address the growing burden, the ministry said it plans to introduce artificial intelligence-driven call screening technology designed to detect and filter nuisance calls before they reach human operators.
The proposed system, expected to be introduced before the end of 2026, is projected to reduce operator handling time by 35%.
Other reforms outlined in the ministry’s strategic response plan include expanding agent capacity by 40%, deploying automated callback systems for abandoned calls and establishing a real-time analytics dashboard for emergency response monitoring.
Yet one of the most striking figures in the report was not the 16.39 million nuisance calls, but the fact that only 39 calls were officially categorised as hoax calls requiring legal follow-up during the same period.
