Tungan Bikini: Another FCT community sharing water source with animals

Residents of Tungan Bikini, in Kawu Ward of Bwari Area Council of the FCT, are lamenting how they have been battling cases of water-borne diseases, especially diarrhoea, and skin diseases due to the consumption of unclean water in the community. Some residents, who spoke with Abuja Metro over the weekend, said the community has, over […]

Residents of Tungan Bikini, in Kawu Ward of Bwari Area Council of the FCT, are lamenting how they have been battling cases of water-borne diseases, especially diarrhoea, and skin diseases due to the consumption of unclean water in the community.

Some residents, who spoke with Abuja Metro over the weekend, said the community has, over the years, been battling with the challenges posed by the absence of potable water in the village.

They said the only water source in the community was a pond, which they share with animals.

They said the water they drink was fetched from the pond, which was often contaminated by cows, saying herders mostly move their cattle to drink from it.

A housewife, Mrs Asmau Gambo, who spoke with our reporter, said she usually woke up as early as 3 or 4am daily and trekked to the pond to scoop water for her domestic use.

She said, despite the unclean nature of the water, several households queue up at the pond to fetch the water, before herders move their cows to also drink at the pond.

“In fact, I always wake up as early as 3 to 4 am and trek down to the pond to get water and sometimes before I arrive at the place, I will meet a long queue of women waiting to also fetch from the pond,” she said.

She said the pond had been the only source of water in the community, adding that the water situation gets worse during the peak of the dry season as the pond dries up.

“It even worsens during the dry season when there is no rainfall again, that is when the villagers will now be in search of any Faduma farm to dig out ponds just to scoop water from,” she added.

Another resident, Mrs Halima Abdullahi, said she almost got bitten by a snake sometime ago, while on her way to fetch water from the pond.

She said she left home around 3am using the torchlight of her small phone, adding that she almost stepped on a brown snake that was crossing the road.

“I can’t forget that day when I was on my way to the pond alongside one of my daughters to fetch water. If not because of the light of my phone, which I flashed to the ground, I or my daughter would have stepped on the snake. But God almighty saved both of us that day,” she said. She said the lack of a potable water source in the community causes their children to be affected with water-borne diseases, especially diarrhoea, adding that some children ended up stooling and vomiting as a result of the unhygienic water.

“Although in my own, whenever I bring the water home, I put some alum in it so that the dirt and other particles in the water will settle down, after which I will boil it before drinking, while some people don’t treat the water before drinking,” she said.

Malam Ibrahim Danjuma, an elder of the community, who also spoke with our reporter, said lack of safe drinking water has been the major challenge facing the people of the community over the years.

He said there was not a single hand-pump borehole in the community, and that residents have always relied on water from the pond for their domestic uses.

“In fact, it is only God that has been saving our lives in this community due to lack of potable water. And apart from that, I cannot count the number of times that we have been having problems with herders who move their cows to the pond to drink and contaminate the water, which sometimes almost resulted in a clash,” he said.

Malam Ibrahim said the community had written severally to the authorities of Bwari Area Council over the water problem, but nothing has been done

He said a non-governmental organisation (NGO) visited the community some weeks ago and he led them to the pond in order to see where the villagers get their drinking water, even as he said he was yet to hear from them since then.

He appealed to the authorities of the council, under the leadership of John Gabaya, to come to the aid of the people of the community by sinking a borehole in order to tackle the problem of drinking water.

An official in the works department of the council, who preferred not to be mentioned, told our reporter over the phone that the council has already captured the sinking a boreholes not only in the community but in some neighbouring villages in the area in its 2025 budget.

It would be recalled that the FCT minister, Nyesom Wike, just returned from China, where he sought collaboration with a company to provide water in the satellite towns of the six area councils towards addressing the perennial water problem facing residents of the nation’s capital.