Life begins in water. Water sustains life on earth. One starts to build a house beginning from the roof to the foundation; or government starts to implement development plans without first providing for sustainable water supply system for citizens, both acts are congruous and anomalous.?Nigerian oil paradox mystery manifests abundantly in Imo state: Imo is one of Nigeria's oil-producing states, yet running water is scarce to
?come by here. In most of the state's capital city, including areas surrounding it, epileptic supply of water from the area's regional water scheme leaves a large fraction of the population without running water; in Okigwe area, water supply from a regional water supply scheme commissioned since 2008 is yet to be optimized; the scheme was built to serve running water to most of the local government areas surrounding it. In Orlu area, including most of its surrounding 12 local government areas with a cluster of more than one million inhabitants, there has never been any reliable scheme to provide running water.?
The late Sam Mbakwe who led Imo state in the past captured the importance of providing sustainable running water supply schemes for the citizens. The ?administration he led mapped out five big regional surface water supply schemes to supply running water to most of the local government areas in each of the five senatorial districts of the old Imo state, namely Aba, Okigwe, Orlu, Owerri and Umuahia. The administration was nearly able to finish four of those water schemes before the military took over leadership of Nigeria in 1983. The penultimate of the water schemes in Okigwe was completed through federal government's assistance during the period of the Achike Udenwa-led administration and was commissioned by late President Yar'Adua in February 2008.?
The foundation stone for Orlu water scheme has never been laid. Imo state's internal politics is mostly believed to have led to that: governor Sam Mbakwe was serving his first term and was engaged by the late Collins Obi from Orlu area in political fisticuffs over who among the two would be the next governor of the state from October 1983. Obi's challenge made Mbakwe livid. Mbakwe won re-election. The rest is history.
Succeeding administrations merely mouthed the Orlu water scheme but never built it. Today, the absence of running water in Orlu has become a scourge; Orlu zone conveys the oil-producing state status on Imo state. In this area, a few families who could afford it resorted to sinking family water boreholes in their premises, notwithstanding the associated hazards surrounding sinking of water boreholes too close to one another, as well as the hazards of poisoning by heavy metals and pathogens associated with ground water, more so, in areas where oil and gas and other mineral exploration and exploitation are taking place. The rest of the population here depends on the muddy, germ-infested tiny streams and rivers in Orlu area for domestic water supply. Incidences of maladies and deaths from water-borne diseases are a daily given here.?
All pleas by well-meaning citizens before the Ikedi Ohakim-led administration to start work on the water supply scheme for Orlu fell on deaf ears. The administration's responses to inquirers were mostly like: if the preceding government led by Achike Udenwa who hails from Orlu could not build the proposed water scheme there, why must people expect his immediate successor to do it? But Udenwa's image makers would readily jump to the excuse that the administration Udenwa led liaised with the federal government which assisted it to complete the long-abandoned Okigwe regional water scheme, and could therefore not have bitten more than it could chew by embarking on the water scheme for Orlu at the same time.?
That excuse by Udenwa's image makers may hold water. On the last official visit of then President Olusegun Obasanjo to Imo state during the last days of ?May 2007, before Obasanjo and then Imo state governor-elect, Ikedi Ohakim, then out-going state governor, Achike Udenwa, pleaded with the federal government to assist Imo state government to build the long-proposed Orlu regional water scheme. Ikedi Ohakim served for four years as governor but there was no mark of the scheme in his administration's projects lexicon. Except perhaps, when Governor Peter Obi of Anambra state pleaded with the late President Yar'Adua during his meeting with Southeast Governor's Forum to reactivate the long abandoned water supply projects for Orlu and others in the southeast.?
So many years ago, the federal government started a now futile attempt to provide water for Orlu through water boreholes. It laid huge water pipes into the ground, but at the end, water hardly passed through those pipes. Before that, water boreholes had existed here for ages but to little or no effect. Use of boreholes to tap ground water may be expedient for small population clusters, provided there is high degree of certainty that ground water in the area's aquifers is relatively free of contaminants. (In a recent study published in the world's leading medical journal, The Lancet, as many as 77 million people have been exposed to toxic levels of arsenic in Bangladesh and are at the risk of early death from use of groundwater. Some Bangladeshi authorities had over the years encouraged the consumption of groundwater in that country. NB: Ground water is supplied through boreholes while surface water ?is supplied through rivers, seas, lakes).?
Surface water is the standard choice and more effective source for water supply in densely or highly populated areas. That must have guided the Mbakwe-led administration's choice of surface water for all of its regional water supply schemes. That administration proposed water for the Orlu scheme be sourced from either Orashi or Njaba rivers or both, and be reticulated to supply water to nearly all the 12 local government areas in Imo West (Orlu) senatorial zone.
The need for continuity in governance needs to be underscored; and what must have been good for the geese must also be good for the gander. Therefore, while there is need to optimize returns from the existing regional water schemes in other parts of Imo state, the scourge arising from the absence of any reliable portable water supply scheme in Orlu area till date makes a poignant case before the present administration in Imo state: the case for it to spearhead the realisation of the last of the five regional water schemes in Imo state. Nigeria's federal government needs to be brought in too to assist in providing this most basic necessity for the inhabitants of an area from which it rakes in revenues.?
Benedict Okereke
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