Unsafe water: Complaints persist

Water is one of the top most necessities of life, but a large population of Nigerians still drink it in its contaminated form, resulting in many deaths caused by water-borne diseases. The WaterAid has estimated that around 68,000 children under five years old die every year from diarrhea caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation. […]

Water is one of the top most necessities of life, but a large population of Nigerians still drink it in its contaminated form, resulting in many deaths caused by water-borne diseases.
The WaterAid has estimated that around 68,000 children under five years old die every year from diarrhea caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation.
However, reports released by Oxfam, a nongovernmental organization, on the Nigerian water sector in 2016 shows that the country has made substantial progress in providing safe water to the people. The report shows that the population of Nigerians accessing safe water has risen from 62 million to 66 million.
A World Bank report also puts the percentage of Nigerians having access to safe water at 69 percent, an improvement from 68 percent in 2014.
Safe water, according to the World Bank, includes piped water on premises and other improved drinking water sources public taps or standpipes, tube wells or boreholes, protected dug wells, protected springs, and rainwater collection.
Despite the feat, however, there are still many cities where potable water is still a luxury while several rural communities depend on water from the streams and rivers.
Hardly does an average Nigerian wonder how the water he or she drinks is treated. Most states water boards have become moribund while some only add alum or few chemicals to the water before discharging it to the consumers. Most people drink untreated water, and in cases where the water is treated, corroded pipes and burst supply pipes jeopardise the effort of the water boards at supplying safe water. In all the cases, the consumer is left to bear the brunt, accounting for the prevalence of cholera in the country.
In many places across Kano metropolis, pipe-borne water is a luxury which only few households access it. The supply of this commodity keeps fluctuating in some areas while in others taps have gone dry for several months. In recent times, where the taps run, the water is muddy.
In most wards of Sabongari, water vendors themselves sell only muddy water.
“We have noticed some changes in the water we are buying now, government has to do something to arrest the situation, or else the water might lead to breakout of an epidemic,” said Chika Madu, a resident of Sabongari.
In Wailari Quarters, Na’ibawa and Unguwa Uku wards of the metropolis, residents complain that rusty pipes have contaminated the water running from their taps. In such other wards as Brigade, Gayawa, Gawuna, Gama and surroundings, taps have not ran since 2015, according to most residents who complain that they now buy the commodity from water vendors at between N30 and N50 per one 25-litre jerry can.
The Public Relations Officer (PRO) of Kano State Ministry for Water Resources and Rural Development, Umar Abdullahi Kurmawa, attributed the distasteful situation to the state government running out of supplies for chemicals to purify the water.
In Benue State, potable water remains a mirage. The continued inaccessibility of clean water to the residents has constituted a matter for grave concern, with most residents in the state’s major towns wondering if the state government would ever be able to tackle the problem which has grown seemingly intractable recently.
Mrs. Josephine Wantu, who resides opposite the Zone 4, Police Headquarters, Makurdi described the water running from her home tap as unhygienic.
“We doubt the hygiene of the water, so we took the precautionary measure of using water guard to purify it. The pipe-born water comes with some particles and that could be due to rusty pipes supplying it,” she said.
 The state commissioner for Water Resources and Environment, Engr. Nick Wende, said the government would need N15 billion to reticulate water in Makurdi alone, noting that the state government had fixed the water distribution problem in Katsina Ala and Otukpo.
Dutse, Jigawa State, has a population of 153,000 according to the 2009 population census, yet not all residents in the metropolis have access to potable water.
Checks by Daily Trust revealed that most people in the state capital buy water from water vendors.
Habib Idris of Gida Dubu Quarters said Jigawa State Water Board has not supplied him the commodity in the last eight years, adding that he buys the commodity from water vendors.

Checks by Daily Trust showed that many people in Cross River State still fetch water from shallow hand-dug wells, ponds, streams and rainfall.
Cross River State government spends staggering sums of money to generate, purify and distribute water to the residents, yet majority say they are not supplied the commodity by the Cross River State Water Board Ltd (CRWBL).
This is because the water is frequently not available. Arising from this, some landlords and water vendors sell water to residents without minding its purity.
A journalist, Ubong Inyang, said the water from the CRWBL comes with some particles. He said the particles usually gather at the bottom of the consumers’ water tanks. Consumers have no choice but to drink it.
Umoh Ime, a store owner in Calabar, complained that broken pipes are not attended to swiftly by the authorities. As a result, consumers in such areas are exposed to water-related diseases.
Speaking on broken pipes and the effect of polluted water, an environmentalist and lecturer at the Cross River State University of Technology (CRUTECH), Dr Felix Akubuenyi, said: “In some research we did, we discovered salmonella species, an organism that causes typhoid fever as a result of our underground water which is heavily polluted with dangerous heavy metals and refuse dumps. Oftentimes, this also causes cancer.”
However, the Assistant Director in charge of public affairs at the CRWBL, Mr Emmanuel Orok, said the Water Board regularly evacuated and washed water tanks and used chlorine, lime and alum to treat the water before discharging it to the consumers.
In Kaduna State, residents get their water from boreholes due to continued water scarcity from state water board.
In most of the wards of Kaduna metropolis, residents complain of paying huge amounts of money to buy unhygienic water from water vendors.
Rebecca Nyok, a resident of Sabon Tasha in the metropolis said her tap had not run for about two years.

Ibrahim Idris, a resident of Badarawa said “until recently, we never had problem of water because the water board always pumped water into the area every day, but recently, the situation changed. We have not had pipe-borne water for the past two weeks. I now have had to buy 10 jerry cans of water dailyat between N300 and N400.”
Maryam Abdullahi, a resident of Kawo, said due to the scarcity of potable water, her husband was forced to sink a bore hole in their rented house.
However, locations like Sardauna Crescent, Malali, Ungwan Rimi and parts of Gwamna Road that are connected to the World Bank water line do not face water scarcity except in the event of a major power outage.
A reliable anonymous source at the Kaduna State Ministry of Water Resources attributed the persisting water scarcity to technical problems, including obsolete machines.
He said residents complained about dirt in their water because most pipes were laid along drainages and when there was a crack in the pipe, it allowed filth to go into the water, thereby reducing the quality of the commodity.
The Federal Capital Territory (FCT) boasts of an automated treatment plant, one of the best in the country. The plant manager at the Lower Usuma Dam, Bwari, Engr. Rufai Bello, said good quality is ensured from the raw water sourced from Gurara Dam and Usuma River to the consumer. He said the water is tested to ensure compliance with the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) recommended standard.
Engr. Rufai said there are four automated treatment plants with the capacity of 30,000 cubic metre per hour and that professionalism is guaranteed at every stage.
The director of the FCT Water Board, Hudu Bello, said the FCT Administration spent millions of naira maintaining the facility and ensuring that the quality of water is not compromised.
“The chlorine we buy at about N500,000 is now up to a million and those giant cylinders you see will consume three in one week; then alum and dehydrated lime. The higher the turgidity of the water, the more the chemicals we use, especially during the rainy season,” he said.

Despite these efforts, some residents of the Federal Capital territory (FCT) said they preferred buying bottled water to drinking the pipe-borne water supplied by the board, saying that though the water looks clean, they are skeptical about its safety.
Garba Hussein, a resident of Garki, said in the last two years, he and all his neigbhours drink from their water dispensers. out of fear of contracting waterborne diseases.
“The water is clean and I use it for other things but I am used to drinking from my dispenser,” he said.
An Abuja based medical practitioner and the General Manager of Biotec Laboratory Products, Dr. Idigu David Oghenetega, said “I think that most times, we have problems right from the processing, packaging and distribution stages of the water from the water board.”
Dr. Oghenetega said most times, these processes are not properly handled by the personnel in charge.
He explained that treated water from the water board could be contaminated as a result of pipe eruption and the consumer becomes a victim. 
The safety of water supplied to homes has been generating concern to the Association of Water Well Drilling Rig Owners and Practitioners (AWDROP), a body set up to handle drilling activities in search for underground water in the country.
According to its national president, Mr. Michael Oludare Ale, AWDROP is very worried as 80 per cent of Nigerians rely on ground water for survival.
The other known sources of potable water extraction in the country include surface water, notably the rivers and streams in addition to rain water.
Ale told Daily Trust that many Nigerians currently risk the danger of contending with water supply from doubtful sources.  This is because those saddled with the responsibility of the provision of potable water supply are at times sidelining the necessary things to ensuring safe water required by the people.
The AWDROP president lamented that the Nigerian Integrated Water Resources Management Commission (NIWRMC), the regulatory authority on potable water supply issues in the country are concerned, only exists on paper and not in practice. “It is like a toothless bulldog unless the bill empowering it to regulate water extraction is passed into law,” Ale stated.
According to him, the bill regulating water extraction in Nigeria, regulating indiscriminate drilling and indiscriminate generation in search of underground water needed to be passed into law to streamline the practice and, therefore, safeguard water quality and checkmate contamination through leakages.
Ale said:  “Government should ensure that our waters are tested for safe drinking.  It is not the responsibility of NAFDAC.  It is the responsibility of the ministry.’’ 
Also, Dr. Uche Ewelike, a public health expert, said water safety and sanitation is a public health challenge in Nigeria with about 60 million Nigerians not having access to safe drinking water.
He said unsafe water has a lot of health implications and causes diseases such as diarrhea, cholera, typhoid fever, and other water borne diseases like dysentery, hepatitis A and hepatitis B. Some of these diseases cause high mortality amongst the population.
 “Nigeria contributes majorly to under-five mortality in the world, and unsafe water contributes very significantly to it. One of the major diseases associated with unsafe water, diarrhea accounts for about 16 percent of the causes of death amongst children. Safe water means the water that is safe for your consumption and will not predispose you to ill-health,” said Ewelike who is also the Secretary, Association of Public Health Physicians of Nigeria, FCT chapter.
He said the fact that water comes out of a tap or water treatment plants does not mean that it is devoid of contamination or that it is drinkable, as there are chances of contamination in the water purification cycle from the dam till the time it gets to the table, saying that usually water is colourless but being colourless does not mean that it is free of micro-organisms and pathogens that cause diseases.
He said boiling water before drinking ensures more safety.
Water Resources Minister, Engr. Suleiman Adamu Kazaure, said the federal government is working hard to provide Nigerians with portable water in their homes.

With contributions by Ojoma Akor, Taiwo Adeniyi, Kamardeen A. Ismail (Abuja), Dele Ogunyemi,(Ibadan), Maryam Ahmadu-Suka, (Kaduna), Eyo Charles, (Calabar), Aliyu M. Hamagam, (Dutse), Hope Abah, (Makurdi) & Ibrahim Musa Giginyu, (Kano)