Salamatu Aremu, a 28-year-old mother, knew it was time to do something drastic about her three-year-old daughter’s strange illness when she woke on Tuesday morning in November 2021 to see her daughter pooping and vomiting for the fifth day in a row.
Before dawn, the child’s situation became so severe that she could barely walk. Salamatu strapped her daughter to her back and headed for a primary health centre in Alapa, a town about 9km away from her community, Onire, in Asa local government area of Kwara State.
At the health care centre, the attending Nurse confirmed that the child was suffering from Cholera.
“The nurse said my daughter’s sickness resulted from the continued drinking of contaminated water. After spending all my savings and selling some of my valuables to treat her, I was forced to borrow an additional N10,000 from friends or risk losing my daughter to Cholera.”
She explained further, “We had to travel to Alapa every day for almost a month while she was in the hospital because our community does not have a hospital. “The closest place to us is Alapa,” Salamatu said, the strain of her ordeal evident in her voice.
At Onire, Salamatu’s community, it is common to see women and children trekking the 10 minutes distance to fetch from a stream, the only water source in the vicinity.
When Dataphyte visited the community, Salamatu and two other women, one of whom identified herself as Maryam Azeez, were on their way to the stream. They are accompanied by Salamatu’s husband, who holds a cutlass in his right hand to resist any attacks from the herders who also frequent the stream to get water for their cattle.
The stream is murky and cow dung can be seen around the banks of the stream, making its water unhealthy for drinking. But Salamatu and all other residents of the Onire community have no other water source apart from the stream. They grew up drinking, cooking and washing with the polluted water.
Maryam told Dataphyte that she and her children had been frequent visitors to the hospital due to the stream water they had been drinking.
“Sometimes in 2020, during the pandemic, one of my children had abdominal pain and a dry cough. When we got to the hospital, the doctors said he had Typhoid Fever, and we were warned to stop drinking the stream water. “But can we stop fetching from the stream when we have no other water source here?” The 32 years old woman asked rhetorically.
She continued, “For a few weeks, we complied with the directive. We stopped drinking the water and started buying ‘pure water’. But the recent hike in the price of ‘pure water’ has made it a luxury that we can no longer afford.
“We now buy a sachet of water for N20, but last year it was N10.” Consider how much we will spend on the water as a family of seven (7) in a day. I drink at least 6 sachets per day, which means I will be spending N120 per day drinking water, and I don’t have that kind of money.
“So, to deal with this, I have to resort to boiling the water before drinking or cooking with it. And it takes us 10-15 minutes to boil the water we use, after we add alum (potassium aluminium sulphate) to purify it,” she added.
And fortunately enough for Maryam and her family, according to United States Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, boiling is the surest method to kill disease-causing organisms, including viruses, bacteria, and parasites in water.
Residents of the State Capital face Similar Challenges
Like Onire, a suburb in Asa local government area of Kwara, getting safe water to drink in many communities in Ilorin, the state capital, is also very challenging.
In Ita’du community of Ilorin East local government area, 38-year-old Afusat Abubakar cannot afford to sleep past 4am each day because she and her two kids, Balikis and Rukaya, must be among the first set of people that will reach the well in front her house to fetch water for domestic use.
So also for Haleema Yusuf, who operates a local food eatery, waking up as early as 4 am has become a routine. She walks about fifty feet for water, or she must be ready to spend N600 daily to buy water from vendors to run her business.
At the well, it is the survival of the fittest among residents. Whoever gets there first gets the cleanest water. They use the water for bathing, washing, and other domestic chores.
But for residents who cannot afford to buy water because of the recent hike, they drink the well water, which, according to Mrs Yusufi, “is unhealthy because it has no cover to prevent dirt from getting into it.”
“I do not drink the water from the well. I only use it for cooking, washing and bathing. But I have many of my neighbours that cannot afford pure water like me because it is costly now. It is the same water from the well they drink after allowing it to settle for a while,” she added.
The story is also similar for the people of Ajegunle area, Idi-Ape, Ilorin. Nihimatallah Adio, who was found fetching water from a well 25 feet away from her house, said clean water for house chores has been a significant problem for the past decade she has been living in the community.
“Though recently the government gave us tap water for about five to six hours every week, the water is not enough. Most times, I will need to sacrifice two hours just to fetch two buckets of water because of the long queue at various tap spots.
Children Tend to Suffer the Most from Absence of Potable Water
Poor access to clean and potable water in many households across Nigeria has contributed to the spread of waterborne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and several others.
According to UNICEF, children bear the brunt of this lack, “While all can feel the impact of water scarcity, no one suffers more than the most vulnerable children. Children and families living in vulnerable communities face the double-edged sword of coping with high water scarcity levels while having the lowest water services, making access to sufficient water especially susceptible to climate shocks and extreme events”. Over 29% of Nigerian children experience high or extremely high water vulnerability. This means that 3 out of 10 children in Nigeria do not drink safe water daily.
N6.5 billion Down the Drain, Yet no Potable Water
In 2018, a report noted that the Kwara State Government had invested N6.5bn in the Ilorin water reticulation project since 2009. According to another account, N3.736bn was spent during Dr Bukola Saraki’s administration, while Alhaji Abdufatah Ahmed’s government had spent N2.395bn on the project. It was also added that the government would spend an additional N858m from the State Infrastructure Development Fund on the water project.
Upon investigating the said water projects, Elites Network for Sustainable Development(ENetSuD), a Civil Society Organisation, found that in most places where the project was found, the water project was not working and according to residents had not worked since the day it was set up. The water projects are functional only in a few places, according to ENetSuD.
To verify ENetSuD’s claim, Dataphyte visited nine communities where the projects were erected—Oja-Oba, Emir’s road, Balogun Fulani, Ita-Ajia, Kankantu, Jagun, Alagbado, Ile-Alawo, Amule GDSS, and Abayawo. It was observed that all the ten taps had been vandalised and seemed abandoned. Their poor state would make anyone doubt these taps were built barely 4 years ago.
According to Mr Roheem Sulyman, a resident of Alagbado community, “The tap spoiled not long after it was commissioned and since it has been abandoned. A project that gulped billions of naira should work for at least 10 years, but this water project could not work beyond the moment of its commission.”
“We now face many problems due to the absence of potable water in our area. Some of us(the residents) have been spending our hard-earned money to drink safe water, yet our efforts are insufficient. We need the government’s intervention,” he pleaded.
Similarly, a shop owner, who sells table water just beside the tap at Kankatu, told Dataphyte that she had been there for over a year but had never seen water come out of the tap.
At Jagun, there are four broken taps. The water project erected four years ago had been turned into a mat dryer. “This project is a big scam. The government only wasted public funds on this useless project,” said Sa’adu Aliyu, a vulcaniser who works very close to the tap.
Kwara State Commissioner for Water Resources, Mr Abdulwahab Femi-Abgaje, said in a phone conversation with Dataphyte that electricity and incessant breaking of pipes had been the significant challenges his ministry is facing in their mission to make potable water accessible to Kwarans.
He said, “Despite these challenges, the government is not relenting.”
The government may not be relenting, but the scarcity of water persists in Kwara and the burden both financial and physical is relentless.