After water summit, what next?

On Monday February 18, 2013,the federal Ministry of Water Resources organized a Presidential Summit in Abuja. The event was well attended as it attracted the nation’s number one citizen and a host of other dignitaries described on the occasion as stakeholders.
They made pronouncements which showed expert knowledge of the challenges of managing water in a complex and large society like Nigeria. As in most subject areas, inadequate funding was identified as a major constraint. Although the water sector gets an average of N39 billion in our annual budget, President Jonathan himself acknowledged that the sector requires a commitment of N350 billion.
In a way, the summit can be said to be a good initiative; if for nothing else, it illuminated the scope and challenges of our water needs. That appears to be how far we can go in being charitable about the summit. This is because there is no evidence that any progress may come the way of water resources with the same budget as that of last year, which is one tenth what the summit says is needed to fix the sector. That government has many needs and cannot meet them all at a go is a good argument; it is however a different ball game if government does not disburse its funds proportionately to its needs.

File photo:

Nigerian woman fetching water from a local pond, which is a source of drinking water making her susceptible to Guinea worm larvae infestation.

We need to reduce drastically the budget supposedly meant to secure lives and property. After all, when last did anyone feel safe in our clime? The last time I listened to one of our brilliant economists, I gathered that a whooping sum of N921billion was set aside for that subject. I hope it is not so this year because in spite of the generous provisions, we are yet to reduce if not overcome bombs, kidnapping, armed robbery etc.  It is thus not wise to continue to give to security, a budget that is bigger than that of 12 other Ministries combined.
In addition, I had thought that with the huge sum, Nigeria would have joined the League of Nations engaged in security by intelligence where advanced technology is used to gather data. I have looked forward in vain to such things as the use of forensic labs to crack crime; rather I continue to see outdated strategies premised on the use of armoured carriers and guns.
In contrast, customized remote cameras are installed in other parts of the world to unravel criminals more than one kilometre away from a given location. But in our beautiful capital city-Abuja- many of the 4-lane streets are still being blocked to prevent criminals from gaining access to strategic locations and buildings. What this suggests is that our security personnel are still not too far away from the sophistication of my forefathers- the Benin warriors- who sought to use woods and ‘dane’ guns to stop the British from invading our city in 1897! In the circumstance, we are the wiser for it if we can deploy some funds from our security budget to areas like water, agriculture, health care etc. That is exactly what we need, not summits.
Those who do summits all the time like the managers of our education sector have proved us right over time. They are always brainstorming the falling standards in education without a change in the sector. Of course what summit will help students when150 of them are admitted into a course whose facilities are designed to accommodate not more than 50?
Similarly, water summit cannot alter the fact that less than fifty percent of our people have access to clean water. What the summit can do and has already done is to throw light on what needs to be done. We obviously donot expect a 100percent coverage in the next one year but we can step up progressively till we get there. Talk shops will unfortunately not facilitate such stepping up. What is required is proper funding. The option of relying on international donors to assist is not in itself a bad idea, but events have shown that such donors support only those who are proven to be poor. Their support to nations that donot get their priorities right is usually feeble.
Is Nigeria really poor or is our dilemma caused by poor governance? At the last summit, Governor Babangida Aliyu of Niger State appeared to have answered this question when he imputed that our governments have not handled the subject well and called for a legislation that empowers people to sue government for failing to provide water and other essentials.
Although we donot know which government the chief servant was referring to, we are aware that water is a subject for all tiers of government and that only one in five rural households in Nigeria has clean water while most families collect water from unsafe sources, such as rainfalls, ponds, streams and rivers.
For instance, there is a report that in Tundun Wada, Jos, people urinate at one end of a stream and fetch water from the other end of the same stream to produce ‘Burukutu’. If the reason for not investing in the management of water is because such issues donot prick our collective conscience, we are again approaching an aspect of water that will rattle us all shortly and that is flooding.
According to Dr Anthony Anuforo, Director General of the Nigerian Meteorological Service (NIMET), the coming rains would be heavier in parts of the country than the one of last year which almost sacked half of us.  In the past, we handled the predictions of NIMET casually while providing so much to crime prevention under the guise of saving lives and property. At the same time, thousands of Nigerians died through flooding due to our failure to use our dams to hold back excessive water.
Now, if we opt for summit and fail to see our water problems as pressing and more worthy to be provided for, let no one in authority seek to exclude himself from blame in any flood disaster this year because we have once again been professionally warned. Indeed, if those in government donot embrace ‘prevention is better than cure’ let them not visit affected families to show empathy because that would be ‘governance by condolence’