Title: Lagos Water Crisis: Alternative roadmap for public water sector
Publishers: Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth-Nigeria
Date: October 2016
Pages: 56
Reviewer: Chido Onumah
Favour, 15, and her four siblings live
with their parents in a two-room apartment in Bariga, a suburb formerly under
Somolu Local Government Area of Lagos State, but now a Local Council
Development Area (LCDA) of its own. Like in other places, the taps in the
building have gone dry for years, and so is the public tap down the street
erected by the government to meet the water needs of the people in the area. So
they are forced to buy water from mai
ruwa, the ubiquitous water vendors who have become a permanent feature of
life serving the needs of the people in virtually every community in the State.
But most of the time the family can’t
afford the vendors, so she and her brother, Tomi, 13, would pick up the
jerrycans to go search for water for the use of the household before they go to
school. To get enough water every morning, they have to do three trips each.
And when they return from school, after homework, the other major preoccupation
is to go look for water.
Almost on a daily basis, they live with
the stress of pounding the streets with adults and early teens like themselves
who are routinely roused from sleep before dawn by their parents to go and
fetch water, not just for drinking and cooking, but also for other domestic
needs for which the commodity is required. This is the depressing spectacle
that is common in the coastal city of Lagos, a dreamy landscape of over 21
million residents.
Snuggled in the caressing coolness of
the lagoon and the Gulf of Guinea, Lagos is the fabled city of water; water
everywhere, yet in a disarming twist of cruel irony, its residents, especially
low-income earners that form the bulk of the population, have no access to
water. Thank God for mai ruwa. What
would have happened without the intervention of this itinerant group of
resilient economic hustlers whose main source of water supply are the boreholes
and water tankers? Of course, this acute water shortage has severe
consequences, including compromised sanitation and the impoverishment of
Lagosians.
It is this embarrassing dilemma
bedeviling the city that the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth
Nigeria seeks to address in its latest audacious report entitled, Lagos Water Crisis: Alternative Roadmap for
Efficient Water Sector. A tour de
force of no mean reckoning, the 56-page report (including references) is at
once an eye-opener—a sobering, reflective and penetrating excursion into the
stark profile of public water utility in Africa’s most populous city.
Thankfully, while it paints an ugly picture of this sector, this document also
offers a ray of hope.
The content page has seven sub-headings
and kicks off with the executive summary that outlines the aim of the report,
which includes charting a pathway out of the Lagos water problem, highlighting
the impact and reasons why the current water system is not working, offering
blueprints from around the world that would suit the Lagos situation and making
concrete proposals that can be exploited in the interim, as well as
continuously by the Lagos State government and the Lagos State Water
Corporation.
According to the report, Lagos is
responsible for more than 60 percent of industrial and commercial activities in
Nigeria. The Lagos State Water Supply Master plan estimates daily water demand
in the city at 540 million gallons per day (MGD) and production by the Lagos
State Water Corporation at 210 MGD. It says, however, that the Corporation’s
website lists total production capacity at only 163 MGD. By 2020, water demand
is expected to reach 733 GMD.
The report opens a rare insight into
the health and economic implications of the Lagos water crisis. It notes that
since water and sanitation are crucial factors in public health, the impact of
water crisis on public health is grave. “Indeed, it puts the State’s booming
population at risk of diseases like cholera, dysentery, diarrhea and
salmonellosis, in addition to escalating cases of typhoid and malaria fever,”
the report observes gravely.
Quoting Dr. Jide Idris, Lagos State
Commissioner for Health, it recalls that in February 2016, 25 children in Otodo
Gbame, in Ikate Eti-Osa Local Government Area of the State died after drinking
the community’s pathogen-infected water.
Unfortunately, many houses are
currently serviced by boreholes. The dangers of drinking such water, it is
says, include long-term exposure to toxins. Also quoting a 2012 report
published in Resources and Environment,
the report says some borehole water samples examined in Lagos contained high
concentration of the heavy metals lead and cadmium at levels above the World
Health Organisation (WHO) maximum acceptable concentration (MAC). It warns that
only adequate water treatment could help control heavy metal exposure.
On the economic consequences of water
shortage, the report notes that the high cost of sourcing water has made Lagos
residents poorer. It notes, “The average family could use up to seven or eight
jerrycans daily, which translates to N10,000 to N17,000 monthly in a nation
where the middle class average family income is N75,000-N100,000. This high
price threatens the availability of water, which improves the quality of life
and makes citizens healthier for economic activities and development.”
Faced with such high human and economic
cost as a result of water crisis, it is pertinent to examine how Lagos found
itself in this awkward position. For starters, the report observes that the
root of Lagos water crisis is not traceable to a single cause, but to a number
of causes which includes, first and foremost, the fact that for decades
expansion of the public water system has not corresponded with the rapid growth
of the metropolis.
Other reasons include ageing and
insufficient water infrastructure, decades of policies that did not work,
failure to ensure meaningful public participation, poor labour practices,
regulatory failures, and, of course, inadequate budget allocation. For example,
though the governor of Lagos State, Akinwunmi Ambode, described the State’s
2016 budget as the “people’s budget,” it falls short on water, with only
N17.6billion or 2.7 percent for the State’s Water Corporation. In spite of
this, the report notes that with the right financial and social policies, Lagos
can fund the water structure required to ensure all Lagosians have affordable
access to safe water.
If there’s one significant achievement
of this report it is the fact that it brings to the fore the problem of access
to water as a human rights issue. It clearly underscores this notion through
interviews with a cross section of Lagos residents which show that the public desires
a system that sustains their right to water and allows the people to
participate in making decisions about their water needs.
However, to fulfil the human right to
water, the report says governments must ensure water is available, physically
accessible, affordable, safe, and acceptable in odour, colour and other
qualities. The concept of water privatization being canvassed in some quarters
is unanimously rejected by all individuals and groups featured in the
interviews.
The report
examines public water successes, citing examples and models from around the
world which Lagos could draw from if it is committed to re-inventing its public
water system. It reminds those who are angling for the privatization of water
that the most prominent examples of efficiency are located in the public
sector, not the private sector. “For example, public operator Phnom Penh Water
Supply Authority (PPWSA) increased coverage from 20% to 90% in less than 20
years,” the report says.
Pointing
the way forward for Lagos, the report offers Governor Ambode and the State
House of Assembly a set of policy guidelines which, if followed with the
appropriate political will, could transform the Lagos water system “from a
source of disease, conflict and suffering into a model for all the world to
emulate.”
Well-researched
and brilliantly rendered, ERA/FoEN has through this report once again
demonstrated its legendary capacity to intervene and proffer solutions in
critical areas of life, especially as it affects the environment. Unlike the
Lagos water, the language of this report is accessible, and is made more
captivating by graphic illustrations that accentuate as much as the word the
quality of the entire package.
This is not
a document that should be left to gather dust on the shelves of public
libraries (where they exist) or government offices. It is a report that state
governors across the country should permanently hold on to if they are serious
about solving the water crisis in their states.
Perhaps as
a way of driving home the importance of water, it is just as fitting that the
authors summoned the immortal words of Leonardo Da Vinci to wrap up this
excellent report: “Water is the driving force of all nature.”
Onumah is
the Coordinator of the African Centre for Media & Information Literacy
(AFRICMIL).
*The title
of this review is paraphrased from
lines in the poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by
Samuel Taylor
Coleridge.
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