Nigeria Content Online

The taps have run dry in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and many residents are not amused.

The FCT water board, on March 7,
2010, announced that water supply within the territory will be rationed
and that only some selected districts will have full capacity treated
water supplied them.

The situation has made life
difficult for residents in the affected areas. Gab Omozwa, a resident,
told NEXT that the water board did not provide adequate publicity
regarding the rationing.

“I turned my tap for water and
nothing came out. I thought my recharge card had finished. I was
disappointed to learn that it was the rationing thing after all,” he
said.

Jibrin Ibrahim, the Director of
the FCT Water Board, said the rationing will continue until work is
completed at the phase 3 and 4 of the treatment plants in Abuja. He
said an increase in population in the city has stretched water supply
beyond estimated limits.

“You see, Abuja is a new city and
is developing,” he said. “There is space between the pace of
development and provision of water infrastructure. That is why we are
now rationing. What happened is that when the forefathers envisaged the
building of Abuja, it was not to be a business capital but an
administrative centre and the population is not to be very large. But
you can see things are changing in the country. Due to insecurity in
some parts of the country, people have now seen Abuja as a haven.
Population has grown. The infrastructure we have now is not meeting the
demand. We cannot give water to everybody 24-7. So we said, we are all
Nigerians, everybody needs water, we can ration so we can move water
from our system to every portion. Our water goes as far as Gwagwalada,
Bwari, Karu and Nyanya.”

He also explained that there are technical issues that have impeded the supply of adequate water.

“We have the problem of raw water
and that of capacity to treat the water. The raw water issue is being
addressed with the Gurara inter-basin transfer. We now have water to
augment the lower Usman dam where we have our own raw water,” he said.

“Government has also gone far with
the development of treatment plant, but there is just a little bit of
gap in the design. There were things not envisaged that cropped: there
is gap between the pipeline coming from Gurara because first of all we
take water straight to the dam and the extract water from there so that
is what has happened but we have seen that the dam has its own capacity
and the maximum you can extract from it but this population is so
high.”

Mr Ibrahim noted that the board
has a long term plan of providing adequate water that will last for
over 20 years without refilling and that the water board was designing
a system that will make it meet expected demand up to 2035.

“What we have now is 10km/hour but
we are going to have 30km/hour when we finish the construction and
commissioned the water treatment plant, which is more than 90 per cent
completed.”

High ground

Mr. Ibrahim, however, said the
rationing will continue up till end of 2011 when the project is
expected to be completed. The director also hinted that other districts
in the FCT will have water supply restored, as plans to lay pipelines
in some satellite towns have advanced.

The areas to be affected by the
rationing, according to a time table which was released by the board,
include some parts of Asokoro, Maitama, Karu/Nyanya, Garki area 11,
Gwagwalada and Bwari.

The affected areas, according to board, are on higher topography of Abuja and requires much pressure to get water to them.

But some residents of the city
were not particularly bothered with the announced rationing. People in
Nyanya and Karu said they were already used to water scarcity and have
since devised means of addressing the gap. They said water rationing is
a non- issue in the area.

“Water supply from the taps has
not been constant here. We have been buying from water vendors and have
also been fetching from the well, so water rationing is not a problem
here,” said Nwayieze Okeke, a resident of NIA senior staff quarters in
Karu.

In Gwagwalada, the story is not
different. Matthew Ikoh, a civil servant, said “right from time, we
have not been having stable water supply; but this rationing has made
things very critical for us in Gwagwalada. We don’t have the water at
all, so we rely on mai ruwa (water vendors).

Mr Ikoh said the most important
thing is for the people to get water, without necessarily being
bothered with how safe it is. Water is sold at the rate of N20 for 20
litres.

“It is not a palatable situation,”
he said. “It is like Gwagwalada problem is very peculiar. In the Abuja
city, there is constant water supply even before the rationing; but in
Gwagwalada; they give us for like four hours. Now that there is a
problem, we do not get water up to one hour and that is once in two
weeks. People buy sachet water more now, as you can see people carrying
it in bags on the street. However, it is also good business for water
vendors and the sachet water sellers. They drink and use the mai ruwa
water for other domestic activities,” he said.