States crippling Nigeria’s access to potable water, sanitation —Minister

Minister of Water Resources, Mr Suleiman Adamu, recently spoke on the importance his ministry attaches to water. He revealed the problems bedevilling the sector and declared that competition for water resource is becoming stiffer due to increase in population. He also discusses the challenges being faced with the drying Lake Chad, among other challenges. ADETOLA BADEMOSI presents the excerpts:  

In your view, what led to the failure of Nigeria to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the water and sanitation sector and how does your Ministry intends to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?

Lots of rural areas still do not have access to water so if we take the percentage of rural dwellers you will be disappointed besides that, there was no achievement as far as sanitation was concerned, in fact it was a complete disaster, we retrogressed, there was nothing to show. We just need to step up things, so this was the situation I found when I came. We are committed now to meeting the SDGs seriously, we don’t want to fail like we failed in the MDGs. We have taken a number of measures. Number one, we have launched a new programme, Partners for Expanded Water Supply Sanitation and Hygiene (PEWASH). Through this programme, we want to ginger the states because essentially I want people to always remember that the responsibility for providing water supply to consumers rests with the states and local governments not the federal Government.  Our responsibility is to provide bulk water which they can now tap and use to treat water and collect revenue in the various towns and villages. The states have not been able to do this and most of the failure to meet the MDGs was because the states did not invest as much as they should invest in the area of water supply and sanitation. So we have introduced the PEWASH. The idea behind the PEWASH is that the Federal Government will provide support, but it is not a hundred percent support. We are supporting, but we are saying the states should do more so it is a conditional thing. If the states are ready to invest more, then the Federal Government will put a matching investment. This is just to stimulate them to make sure that they are alive to their responsibilities. Beyond that, we are also saying that budgetary allocations cannot be enough. Even if you combine the entire budgetary allocations for states, local governments and federal government that will not be enough to meet the SDGs. We need to galvanise the whole of the country and therefore PEWASH is not about the states and the Federal Government intervening, we are also trying to mobilise the entire society, we want organisations to use their corporate social responsibility funds to invest in water and sanitation. We want individuals to also support water and sanitation. So, we want the country to begin to see and think that water is the most important agenda and if we get it right with water supply, we can reduce our health crisis by up to 50 per cent or more because most of the basic diseases are just related to water. We also note that there are lots of challenges in water supply delivery and because of the huge investment cost, 60 to 70 percent of            water components has to be imported and you know what it means with the fluctuation of the exchange rate. It is very difficult and the dwindling resources of the states may hinder their capacity to invest so much money in water. But I still put the blames mostly on them because they don’t plan their water schemes, they are always looking for quick fixes. So instead of the state governments coming to invest the four-year or six-year development plan for water, they will rather do boreholes here and there so that they can get quick wins as you will call them but those are not useful in the long run. They come and commission with a lot of fanfare. Every politician wants to commission his own project within his tenure. This is very wrong, communities are there forever and they are expanding in terms of population. We should be thinking medium to long term in our planning for water resources development. In the last 20 years or so, there is failure in that direction. So, we want states to go back to long term strategic planning not the same way we are doing the roadmap because it is not about Buhari’s administration. Buhari’s administration may last maximum of eight years, but we are putting a 15-year plan so that subsequent administrations will come and see a plan on ground that is already existing and they just continue to improve on it until we get to where we want to go. These are some of the challenges and finally we hope to get our water resources bill passed to law that will bring in the opportunity for the private sector to invest in water delivery in the country. We think this combined efforts will help us achieve the SDGs, but relying solely on budgetary allocations for states, local government or federal government will not work.

Considering the theme of the 2016 World Water Day, “Water and Jobs,” how many youths have the ministry taken out of the streets or secured jobs for?

It is very difficult even though this is water sector and we say water and jobs, water resources activities are not things that take place in months, it take years to germinate so it is going to take a lot of time for us to achieve what we want to achieve. All I want to say is that the United Nations studies have shown that 70 per cent of all existing jobs are water related, so already the jobs are there, but let me say that our own deliberate plan to get people off the streets we have done it not under water supply perse, but we are doing it under the office of River Basins. We know that we have up to 12 River basins. In the last one year or less, we have launched the Graduate and Youths Empowerment schemes in nine out of the 12 River basins and the idea is to bring the young graduates and the unemployed youths into irrigated agriculture and agriculture in general so we are spearheading that. We are taking a batch of 50 at a time and very soon, we are going to sign. In fact we have had a final meeting with Songai Farms in Cotonou, we are going to have a final agreement with them. Each of the River basins will have a Songahi model farm and that is going to be replicated in all the Senatorial districts of the country, so it is work in progress, so also under PEWASH, we have opportunities of what we call water and sanitation entrepreneurship, we want to create a situation whereby people can own their own water schemes. You can go to a bank or a motor park, drill your own borehole or have your own water scheme with a toilet, you can earn a living out of it. If you travel all over the world, you will see all these things, why can’t we have such in Nigeria? So we want to fill that void by creating water and sanitation entrepreneurship and when we do that, I am sure in a couple of years when we come back, we should be able to give you some figures but now all I can tell you is that it is work in progress. We are very confident with our approach and we feel that we have made a lot of progress in that regard.

Many believe that the River Basins are just redundant, they are expected to be at the forefront of the sector’s activities. What is the government doing to ensure they live up to expectations?

Well, what you are saying is right. The River basins have been in comatose, bastardised, but what we are doing first of all, we have changed the management. Now, we are putting professionals who know about irrigation, water resource management, who know about development, to man the River Basins. Number two, we have an agenda, many years ago the umbilical cord between the Ministry and river basins was detached so the ministry was not really overseeing what they were doing as such, now we have changed that, we are putting a lot of focus in what they are doing. We are taking a lot of interest in what they are doing, we are scrutinising their budgets very well and for the first time in many years we have insisted that the river basins give us a four-year strategic plan each one of them. So they have all produced their plans. Last year, I personally sat down with each of the river basins, went through their budget line by line to ensure that only projects that have relevance to agriculture were included in their budget. If you checked last year’s budget, River Basins are made to renovate class rooms, renovate health centres, buy sewing machines, buy tricycles, provide street lightings these are not their business. We are getting a lot of problems because River Basins were the darlings of our National Assembly members, but we are trying very hard to convince them that if we must do what we are supposed to do, they are supposed to support agriculture, to be the backbone of dry season farming, they have to implement their mandate to the letter and not be bothered with additional and projects that are totally irrelevant to their mandate. We are working very hard on this. Besides, we have already identified that the river basins will form the back bone of the agriculture agenda of this administration to diversify the economy. So it is a must that we must get them to work the way we want them to work. We are now getting them to take responsibility for catchment issues. In the budget this year, we have encouraged them to buy a lot of hydrological equipment for data management, collection which is part of their mandate which they were not doing before. We have allowed them to invest more in equipment, you know under the technical committee on privatization and commercialisation, all the non-water assets were sold so all their heavy plants and equipment that they used to maintain their irrigation were all sold. We are encouraging them to restock, and you will see this in the budgets that they are buying equipment. Above that, we have restored the agenda, there has long been a decision that the river basins must be commercialised, we will start with partial commercialisation and then we go full commercialisation. I just played host to the new Director General of the Bureau for Public Enterprise. Last year, I inaugurated the National Committee on Privatization subcommittee on River Basins which I was supposed to chair. That directive was given since 2008 but not implemented. I reactivated this last year under the current administration the committee which I chaired and we also inaugurated the technical subcommittee to produce report for us. We discussed and we are moving ahead to work towards getting the commercialisation of the river basins. It has been agreed that the river basins will never be privatised, but we feel they can be viable if they are commercialised and we are working towards that. There is a lot of work in progress, I can tell you that the new management is up and doing and enthusiastic. We have also restored agriculture extension services to the River Basins and we have specifically an Executive Director, Agricultural services in the river basins and their task is to reactivate the agricultural components.

What is  your ministry doing to ensure that all abandoned dams in the country are completed?

I am sure you would have seen from some of my outings that our priority is to finish all ongoing projects, that is non-negotiable. We met a very many crucial, projects for this country in dams, irrigation, water supply, hydropower which we must finish, but talking about the dams, I am also very much concerned. I was in Bakolori. We have built quite a number of dams at Federal Government level and it is for the states to now tap from these dams and provide water for their communities, but they have not done so, because the Federal Government does not own the water boards, we are not supposed to run water schemes. So the states have not been alive to their responsibilities also. There are two particular locations now that I can tell you the Federal Government built a dam, went to the extent of building the water treatment plant, one of them for seven years in Ondo State it has never been put to use. If we are going to put the plant to use today, it is going to cost a lot of money to even commission it because rats have eaten the cables, maybe there are some vandalisation, some of the equipment are supposed to be kept under a certain temperature through the water circulating, it has not been there, they have been exposed to the element. After spending huge amount of money, we will now require a lot of money to reactivate these things. All the state needed to do was to do its own bit, do the transmission lines, storage reservoirs and distribution pipelines within the towns and they have not done it. What can the Federal Government do? We have the whole country to cover. We have huge amount of water that is causing a lot of flood, we have areas of scarce water that we need to manage also. There are lots of areas that see rainfall for only two to three months. I have heard of a story of a man in Niger Republic who was 17 years old and heard some people discussing of rainfall and asked what does it feel to rain that he has never seen rainfall in his life, he lives in the Sahara. We have these problems, we have a lot of issues to deal with so we expect the states to also do their bits but when they don’t do their bits; they resort to drilling boreholes in different communities. It is not helpful, it is not solving the problem and that is why you don’t see the water in the taps.

How does the Ministry intend to encourage dry season farming?

There is no country that can say it is serious about agriculture if it cannot cultivate all year round, except you don’t have the water resources. We have more than we need in terms of water resources. Nigeria is blessed with abundant water resources, per capital we have a lot of water the only problem is that some areas have too much while some areas don’t have as much, but this is something we must recognise and that is why as part of our programme the roadmap, we also have a component of irrigation , we have a 15-year irrigation development programme, this country has 3.14 million hectares of potential land for irrigation. Not even up to                 10 per cent was being utilised and most of it was developed by the Federal Government. The former irrigation was developed over the years , it is just about 130,000 hectares, out of the 130,000 half of it is not working. One of the biggest irrigation systems we have in the country is the Kano River irrigation project. It is supposed to be 22,000 hectares, actually they developed about 15, they have not used the 22,000 hectares. As we are talking one third of 5,000 hectares is not cultivated during drying season farming. Do you know that 5,000 hectares is a lot of land but for the support of World Bank under the trimming project, we hope that by 2020, we would have covered the 5,000 hectares. Our target is that by the year 2030, we are moving from this 130,000 hectares to 500,000 hectares through Federal Government intervention. Few months ago I was at lower Anambra irrigation project, if it is working properly can produce 10 per cent of the annual requirement of rice we need in this country. But guess what, for almost 20 years now, they are not using the place during the dry season because they cannot afford to buy diesel and there is a brand new rice mill that was built free of charge by the Japanese Government and was handed over to them. It is locked up with lizards just crawling all over. Now, we are trying to look at how to convert the pumping system to solar system so that they can have water. By my calculations, they can produce 750,000 tonnes of rice every year if they farm two to three times. The farmers even told me that if they have enough water, they can farm four times in a year.

You talked about the water resources bill, how far?

First and foremost, this country does not have a comprehensive water bill like most countries. Almost all the major countries of the world have their water laws. We don’t have a comprehensive water law, we have bits and pieces of the water resources act here, we have river basins act there. So for the first time an idea was brought that we should put all these laws together under one package so that we have a comprehensive water law for the country. There are other issues, there are conflicting laws, we have some environmental laws that are conflicting with the water resources law. We have some acts of the national inland waterways that are in conflict with the responsibility of ministry of water resources. All these things needs, to be harmonised. Besides, we need to manage our catchment like I told you earlier we had to acquire hydrological data gathering equipment. All these things that are happening, the situation of dams, we don’t have catchment systems so people are deforesting, there is overgrasing and there is not much interaction between the local and federal when it comes to issues relating to water resources. So, we need to trickle down and make sure everyone is involved so that we can protect our water bodies. If we have catchment management systems, all these deforestation we can manage, because deforestation is the one causing the situation of our dams because there is no vegetation cover. So when it rains, the soil is being eroded and it finds itself into the lakes and it stops there. We looked at regulatory issues, we don’t have so much regulatory activities going on. We are talking of Public-Private Partnership. Once there is enabling law for public private sector to come in, we need to have an enabling law guiding this. This proliferation of boreholes will be regulated. He gets to drill a borehole with a lot of fanfare after some months, the boreholes are not working or you find in a small cluster in an estate everybody is busy drilling his own borehole without minding the interference that is going on underground, depleting our ground water resources of there are lots of things that have not been going on well in the water sector and the law intends to address all these issues.

How soon should we expect this?

It is before the National Assembly, we are engaging with them and very soon we hope that a public hearing would be held and after the public hearing, I am hoping that before the end of the year, the bill will be passed into law and then we can proceed.

The Lake Chad according to reports have reduced to about 10 percent and experts have continued to raise the alarm on the need to save the Lake from extinction. What is Nigeria doing to save the Lake?

Nigeria  is a member of the Lake Chad Commission with a number of countries Nigeria, Niger, Cameroun, Chad, centra Africa Republic and Lybia. Of course because of the turmoil in Lybia, they have not been participating actively. We are very much at the receiving end of this so we have a lot at stake to ensure that the Lake Chad does not go into extinction. First of all, Nigeria during the Obasanjo administration committed $5million for the feasibility study of the inter-basin transfer project that we have identified as one solution to the problem of drying of the Lake. That study was finished in 2012 but on reviewing the study we realised that more work needs to be done. That study only said that it is possible to have the inter-basin transfer, there needs to be more studies to be conducted, a more detailed feasibility study and eventually a detailed design of the project. So where we are now, Nigeria has encouraged the signing of an MoU between the Lake Chad basin commission and a company from China, we call it Power China. This company is responsible for the inter-basin transfer, China is doing exactly the same thing. They are transferring water from Southern China to Northern China. Just like Nigeria, the Southern China has more water than the North. The Northern part, some areas are semi-arid so they are transferring water. The total canal that they built is about 2,500 Kilometres and that is phase 1. So that same company that is involved in it, we entered into discussion with them, this was anchored by this Ministry and now they are doing a further study on the lake on that inter-basin transfer project because we are saying that we need to bring water from the Congo basin into the Lake Chad because there is excess water in the Congo basin going into the Atlantic ocean. All we need is about 5 percent of that water to be able to recharge the lake. Thank God because of climate change issues, the countries within the Congo basin are also supporting this idea of replenishing the lake but it is a huge project, it is going to cost a lot of money. The pre-feasibillty studies suggested that we need about $14billion to do that project. Not all these countries combine can put up that kind of money. Then in the process we thought, Okay every time we go to the forefront we discuss Lake Chad people are keeping a straight face, they don’t like to hear that $14billion so we now came up with the Idea that why not have an international conference on Lake Chad so that we can bring this problem to international attention. It is not just a climate issue, it is a security issue, the security challenges we are having in the North East, I can guarantee you substantial of it has to do with the drying up of Lake Chad because the youths there have lost all opportunities, all hope. There is no economic opportunity there. So we are  working with UNESCO and we are hoping that at the end of August or September or hopefully before the end of the year we are hoping to have a national conference on Lake Chad that conference we aim to achieve two things, one is to bring the problem to international attention so that if and when eventually we need to do the inter-basin transfer the international community is already aware of the gravity of the situation and it would be easier to mobilize fund to implement that project.

Secondly I say from my technical point of view maybe we shouldn’t straight jacket ourselves into thinking that the inter-basin transfer is the only solution. There are lots of ideas in the world, while don’t you use the conference to open up the platform for scientists to come and really look at the problem and maybe they may be able to come with a better alternative. There is something in the construction industry value engineering, achieving the same thing that you want to achieve with less maybe that conference can serve as a value engineering or probably it may reinforce the submission that the inter-basin transfer is the only solution that we should go for so it will give us more confidence to be able to go into the world and seek for more financial assistance to be able to implement this project. And this project I must warn is a generational project, the study alone , the planning will take years but eventually for it to be implemented it is also going to take years if not decades. But what is important is that we must do some thing about the Lake Chad within 20 to 30 years. I am not sure with the situation of climate change, I am made to understand that all climate change models that have been generated have indicated that the sahel region that you can never predict the whether like this forecast and say this Is what will happen in 10 years or 15 years. Yes they have succeeded in many other different places that in view of all the data they have gathered they can say with confidence this and that will happen in 10 years but it is not like that in the Sahel. So to me that is even more serious. If this Lake has shrunk by more than 90% in the last 40 years I don’t know what is going to happen in the next 50 years. The Lake may go. The likelihood is that we wake up one day found out that the Lake Chad is gone. So we have no option than to find every solution that we can to make sure that that lake remains alive and feeding the communities. Again, from the Nigeria side, you know a substantial part of the lake was in Nigeria we are able to plan about 60,000 hectares for irrigation under the Chad basin development authority. But we were unable to do that the water is not there. So we are also looking at our own internal inter-basin transfer we have identified one that is expected to take water from the Gongola basin to the Southern Chad area. The study has been done by this Ministry and we are looking at various options whether we are going to put it under our budget or we are going to get some international support to implement that. If we implement the project we can get water to Alau dam that will guarantee water to Maiduguri and environs but there is more than enough water for us to divert into the South Chad irrigation area and we can recover most of it. Even without the Lake Chad, we will be able to support the southern Chad area with water. So we are working on it. If you look at the roadmap, it is one of our trans boundary projects so it is one of the key projects we want to pursue.

What would you say are your major challenges and success stories in the last two years?

We inherited so many uncompleted and abandoned projects which we must finish. We have a plan now but the second challenge is funding. If we can get the required funding as at when necessary we would be able to deliver on most of them. Other challenges I think  are  personal. I came from the private sector though I had a privilege to work in the public sector before but I left at a very junior level as a civil servant. I went into private practice but it has been very difficult working in the public system because I find it very slow, too many bottlenecks but we are getting by. I met a Ministry that is supposed to be a profession Ministry but people are not thinking and acting professionally but I think we have succeeded in boosting their morals probably they have seen that they have a Minister they can speak with in the same language.  I don’t know but I am getting a lot of cooperation now and everyone is alive to his responsibilities. These are some of the challenges and one other challenge is that we are doing a lot at the Federal level on water, sanitation and irrigation but if we don’t get the states to complement our efforts it is very difficult. Aligning our priorities with the states is very important but it is always difficult for the states to align with the centre. Like the SDGs. unless we get the states working with us hand in hand and that is the biggest challenge every government comes and every chief executive of a state has its own agenda. You know there is better stability at the federal level than it is at the states. If we get the states to align with us more often especially on matters relating to water supply, sanitation and irrigation we will be able to do better.

Our successes? I think is for you to decide. All I know is that we are work in progress. We had an agenda first of all when we came we had a retreat we came up with some key areas that we are going and we know that we are implementing every aspect of that agenda. We have done reforms in the Ministry, we have reformed the River Basins I don’t have much to fear about them I believe we have to give them time. I said we would turn them around in 24months. We have launched new programmes which we are focusing on the SDGs trying to correct our mistakes from the past, we have succeeded in getting the first local government free of open defecation in this country, we are working to get more free defecation communities, we hope that by 2025 everybody will have a toilet.

 

 

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