THE MULTI-BILLION WATER MESS BY ABDULMUMINI ADEKU.

ASA DAM IS ONE OF NIGERIA'S WATER RESOURCED BASED LANDMARKS

THE MULTI-BILLION WATER MESS

BY ABDULMUMINI ADEKU.

The global war on commercialization of water via privatization of a gift from mother nature is now on.

The aim of the campaign is targeted at frustrating moves or steps been taken to maximize state profit from water rather than add value to its quality.

Water if allowed to be privatized ,unchallenged will no longer be social good but will face a regime of sky rocketed pricing aside from it  being a pipe for wasting scarce resources.

If left unchecked ,Lagos may soon become the emblem of water grabbing tactics now being promoted  by the world Bank ,The  International Finance Corporation[I.F.C] and its other partners.

Following the continued pressure on the Breton Wood based institution  ,the World Bank was forced to cancel I.F.C.’s advisory role in the project,yet  feelers suggests that the Lagos state government has continued to work day and night at making water privatization a  reality .

Water is supposed to be an integral part of Nigeria’s human rights laws and it even  voted for it at a United Nations summit couple of years back but till date it has refused to activate this aspect of its laws.

Taking a cursory look at situations in Africa ,the bill is believed to have passed several stages in the Kenyan Parliament   yet things have not worked according to script.

One of the main situation here is that individuals cannot even sponsor private bills, In Ghana the situation is still very tensed up as in Tanzania where privatization of water is being done through the back door.

Public-private sector partnership has failed globally and because this was okay in telecommunications does not mean it will work in all the other sectors.

There is a conscious effort towards grabbing utilities in The Ivory Coast ,.Ghana and elsewhere in Africa by the World Bank and it’s allies via water privatization.

Based on official figures released by Nigeria’s Ministry of Water Resources ,the nation’s water requirements should be met by 2015 yet findings show that the nation was still far off in this regards.

There is an African gender policy but till date despite it being ratified by Heads of state and  government during an African Union summit it is not been promoted even in Nigeria.

In discussing the issue of water ,gender related policies are vital as women are seriously involved in the usage of clean water for domestic purposes and this should go simultaneously with sanitation without which we will all fall prey to diseases such as Cholera, Dysentery, Malaria Fever, Typhoid Fever  among others.

Lagos state alone is the fifth biggest economy in Africa and if the promoters of the water privatization scheme escape and are  able to fulfill there pledges on the project then the entire African continent should prepare for a very harsh time soon.

The struggle for water is not a tea party ,in reality private entities virtually control those in government hence making the issue very serious indeed.

There is a program within the African Union Called Pillar,which is about how African  leaders can help to facilitate processes for vested interests as against the wishes of the people.

What is being experienced now in Africa is no longer about land grab but water grab as if you buy a land every  resource on it now belongs to you.

So some of the problems we have in the North East is due to water scarcity ,infact there is a report about  states that by 2025,conflicts in Africa will be precipitated by 50 percent if there was no solution to the water crisis.

The money put in by the present regime on Ogoni environmental clean up should set the tone for the clean up of the waters of Nigeria into the future.

The market cannot provide human rights otherwise how can it be stated that water is human rights and it will still be determined by market forces.

Rather than the so called Public Private Partnership ,we should look at other creative and noble ways to serve the people better.

In some places ,both beasts and man use the same water source thus raising fresh worries and questions ,this is unacceptable.

It is vital for citizens to continue to advocate against the privatization of water as an enterprise otherwise one day ,air could be bagged and sold to the citizens as well in the name of private, public partnership.

It is inherent and inbuilt to know that water is recognized  as a human right globally as when people visit their friends at home the first thing that they remember to give to them in patronage without  requesting money for it is usually water.

Privatization’s debate did not just start in a day  ,it started by way of promoting the art of consumerism as water is now seen as a form of product or souvenir.

Water is today seen as gold mine as it is seen as something  that could be packaged in the form of direct foreign investment .

If water is privatized ,what happens is that the capital pumped into the project by the big corporations must receive dividends or  some forms of profit.

Now a massive campaign to advocate for the usage of clean water when food is eaten is been started and not necessarily towards public finance promoting its privatization.

In a highly developed society like Rome,Italy ,there are taps with water on the streets  with the people using them but here in Nigeria  the public tap systems have long disappeared .

There have being several cases in which the people had to protest thus leading to the attention of the entire globe as people died in clashes with law enforcement agencies.

Privatizations has been coined into words like public private sector partnership and yet the cardinal objective of reaping the people off does not change but its nomenclature.

Gradually there is a paradigm shift on public private partnership  due to ideological differences as efforts are been made to prove that the private sector only manages it to get profits.

Recently ,The Indonesian law over ruled the World Bank over its water policies in that nation.

It is key to prioritize water as being essential so that those on the other side of the divide will get a clear message as to the kind of world we actually want to live in.

The richest political parties in the world are the world bank and the International Monetary Fund as there  are no political  associations anywhere  in the world that are as funded as this two.

Under every nation’s law of Sovereignty  ,power belongs to the people and as such the people should be allowed to decide for themselves what the government should do.

Citizens from now on should try to invest on people who will go to public office and do the will of the people rather than the other way round.

Water privatization at the moment is still not up to the scratch but when the real privatization comes up even the vendors we see now will be regarded as illegal and if not they will be given conditions that they cannot meet up with.

In a new research by the World Bank on Lagos,Nigeria,it is now being said officially that water theft was becoming rampant on the streets of major Nigerian towns and cities.

At the moment all the public water systems in a place like Benin City have all been removed by the state government due to privatization.

Boreholes  built  in a house by its owners under a privatization scheme will subject each citizen to a big tax regime ,hence fighting this new scourge is similar to the war against the Boko Haram insurgency.

In march,2015,The Environmental Rights Action ,organized a major rally that led it to shut down Ikeja and its environs.

Recently ,even Lagos based monarch attested publicly in discussions with advocates on water  that the last publicly ran water taps on the streets of Lagos was when Alhaji Lateef Jakande was Governor of the state in the 1980’s.

The Philippines has the oldest water channeling system of modern times in the whole of Asia. Reports of the private firms  that invested on the Manila Water Project  said it was a huge success but when you juxtapose this on the fact that poor communities remain then it is quite obvious that it was a failure.

It was said to have being the biggest water privatization project in the whole world at the time it was privatized through the World Bank’s efforts.

The private sector will not come if there was no money on the table as one of the pitfalls of the project at the time was that 50 percent of the work force at the Manila Water project were relieved of there jobs to go into the labor market.

Usually water pipes in slums are above the ground hence poor communities end up paying more.

Most of the huge corporations have the database on the performance of there investments and when they discover things did not work out ,they try to shift the goal post by looking for who to blame for there own faults.

The people of Philippines paid heavily in the water privatization scheme of Manila as it spent  on communication especially  on the field of advertising.

Rising from the two days international water summit that the citizenry should galvanize their energy  towards fighting against water privatization ,not just in Nigeria  but beyond our shores .

Rapportteurs   like Honourable Wale Okediran,Nnimmo Bassey ,Satako Kishimoto, Greg Akili, Priscilla Achapka, Uche Onyeagucha, Joe Okei-Odumakin,Godwin Uyi,Shayda Naficy, Bishop Akolgo, Oluwafemi Olabode, Leonard Shay Quartey, Phillip Jakpor, Nathaniel Mayer did not mince words at all.

A Speaker at the event lamented the horrifying water problems in Ghana.

He talks:”In the late 1980’s ,the government embarked on water related reforms,rural water was ceded to communal sanitation agency,before then there was the Ghana Water Company Limited and it faced the same problems with water bodies in Nigeria”

“The world Bank advised the government to help privatize water and this led to an increase in water tariff leading to a massive protest”

“the issue was investigated and a national forum was called for and eventually they gave control of the Ghana Water Corporation to two foreign concerns ,when a coalition on this issue was formed this led to a concerted effort by the citizen as they become fully aware of the implication of privatization”

“The world Bank said at the time that Ghana should continue privatization as they will be ready to fund it but eventually they both had to back out  due to a very big protest both in Ghana and the United states of America”the Speaker agonized.

At the moment,235 cities in 15 years have rejected in very strong terms the issue of privatization of water and this has benefitted not less than 100 million people globally.