Early Evolution of Water Supply in Nigeria

Early Evolution of Water Supply in Nigeria

Public water supply in Nigeria started in the early 20thcentury in only a few towns and was managed at the lowest administrative level. Amongst the early beneficiaries were Lagos, Calabar, Kano, Ibadan, Abeokuta, Ijebu Ode and Enugu (FRN, 2000). The schemes were maintained with revenue from water sales with virtually no operational subvention from the government. With the creation of regional governments in the early 1950s, the financial and technical responsibilities for developing new water schemes were taken over by these regional governments who assigned supervisory manpower to oversee operations and maintenance.

The regional governments were however slow in setting up independent bodies to develop, operate and manage the water supply. The first water corporation was formed in the western region in 1966 which took over all the assets and liabilities, including the existing staff. The staff of the Water Division of the Ministry of Works was also transferred to the new corporation.

The Federal Government got involved in the management of water resources in 1976 when the Federal Ministry of Water Resources and the 11 River Basin Development Authorities (RBDAs) were created. The purpose of the RBDAs was to provide bulk water, primarily for irrigation of dry season farming in some selected project sites mostly located in rural areas of the country.

They were not involved in any way in the domestic water supply. Today, all the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja have water corporations or public utility boards managing their public water supply. Their efforts are supplemented, in many cases, by local governments who supply water to small villages within their jurisdictions.

Following the adoption of the National Water Supply and Sanitation Policy in January 2000, the Nigerian Government considered the provision of water supply services to be the domain of the Federal, State and Local Governments. However, the public sector was not successful in meeting more than a small portion of the demand for water by residential and commercial users. Services were critically in short supply. For example, out of the 85 million people living in urban and semi-urban areas, less than half have reasonable access to reliable water supply (FRN, 1991).

Many urban households, often the poorest, end up purchasing water from private vendors at a higher price than the public supply. A few rural communities were provided with hand-operated boreholes and wells which yield little or no water during the dry seasons due to incessant breakdown and fall in the water table. Water supply services, where they exist, are unreliable and of low quality; and are not sustainable because of difficulties in management, operation and pricing as well as due to failure to recover costs. Many water supply systems show extensive deterioration and poor utilization of existing capacities, due to under-maintenance and lack of funds for operation. Additionally, the high cost of imported equipment especially in terms of a depreciating currency and inadequate cost recovery policies contributed to large financial deficits in many State Water Authorities (SWAs).

This left most SWAs dependent upon state subventions to finance the operations and maintenance of their water systems, to service debt and to finance new investments. But the states’ own financial constraints often limited the amount of recurrent capital subventions, requiring the SWAs to defer maintenance and limit new investment. Fiscally, both in small towns and rural areas, the focus must be on phasing out of subsidies for maintenance altogether and restricting such subsidies to partial capital costs to engender greater community ownership. From the foregoing it becomes clear that water supply has suffered a serious management setback despite government efforts at improving the water sector, leaving the poor rural dwellers not benefited much from this noble plan. It was realized that public water supply was not only urban biased but in many cases fail to meet the increasing demand.

The idea of hand pump borehole came to bear in the preceding decades. UNICEF AND WHO (2009) revealed that rural water coverage in Africa was 45 per cent compared to 40 per cent in 1990, still leaving 237 million people unserved. Meanwhile, urban water coverage in Africa was much higher at 83 per cent in 2000, with only 37 million urban dwellers unserved.

It is clear that rural areas of Africa are lagging significantly behind urban areas in water supply. This fact, coupled with high poverty levels in many rural areas and depressed levels of service sustainability, indicates a critical need for focused attention to the provision of potable water to rural communities in Africa. There is the need therefore, to addresses domestic water supply in the rural context only and many of the issues explored may not be appropriate for urban or semi-urban areas. There are a number of reasons why the sustainability of water services in rural Africa is generally quite low. Some of these are related to environmental and technical issues, while many are related to social and management issues.

Currently, many rural water supply projects and programs focus on the goal of increasing service coverage through the implementation of new water systems and facilities. It is essential that this is accompanied by adequate attention to the crucial aspect of sustainability if any gains are not to be short-lived. Rural water supply provision in Nigeria and indeed in many developing countries is characterized by low cost, simple technologies which can be operated, maintained and financed by poor rural communities or households. The choice of technology for improved water supplies is dependent on environmental, socio-economic and political conditions, includes: Protected springs; Hand pump equipped boreholes and wells; Rainwater harvesting; Hand-dug wells; Gravity-fed systems; and Small-scale pumped systems. There is no single technology option which can be used in all situations and each technology has specific advantages and limitations. This is because of the relative ease of access to water that does not usually need treatment prior to drinking. In the past two decades hand pumps have become the principal technology for supplying water to millions of people in rural communities in Nigeria. According to World Bank Group (1997), despite this low level of sustainability, hand pumps are likely to remain a major method of delivery in rural water supplies, as they are still considered most appropriate and popular solution in many case. This is mainly because of the relative ease of access to water and does not require treatment prior to drinking. Wells and boreholes with hand pumps were therefore promoted as the most viable option for rural water supply in many developing countries. In the past two decades hand pumps have become the principal technology for supplying water to over one billion people in rural areas in at least 40 developing countries (Peter, 2004a).

Despite this popularity of the hand pump, there are evidences that it has failed to deliver satisfactory levels of sustainability. In 1994, Diwi Consultant and BIDR estimated that 40% – 50% of hand pumps were not working, and according to (Peter, 2004b), there are currently approximately 250,000 hand pumps in Africa, less than half of which are operational. On the whole rural water supply in Nigeria has had many problems and unable to meet the challenges and have not contributed effectively to health, economic, social, and cultural development of Nigerian rural communities as many rely on self-water supply for both domestic and irrigation purposes.

Safe water is one of the most important felt needs in public health in developing countries in the twenty first century (Sobrey, 2003). The year 2005 marked the beginning of the “International Decade for Action: Water for Life” and renewed effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to reduce by half the proportion of the world’s population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation by 2015 (WHO/UNICEF, 2004). It is estimated by World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) that 1.1 billion people lack access to improved water supplies (Moe, 2006).

A lot has been said in the literature as pertain the effective water supply and its distribution in promoting industrialization and the rapid integrated transformation of semi-urban areas, however water engineers have expressed a variety of opinion on how effective the water supply system and its distribution in promoting economic development. Mbamali (2002) identified the general objectives of distribution of water supply system as:

1. To ensure the availability in sufficient quantity and to the required specification to take care of present and future needs.
2. To maintain adequate flow rates and pressure in the supply lines to meet all peak demands (including that for fire protection).
3. To achieve the most economic pipe sizes for the system.

It is indeed however that the water supply system must need the above objectives in order that an effective water supply and its distribution for a semi-urban water supply scheme is achieved through certain requirements which includes the following:
i. Routine maintenance
ii. Right choice of materials
iii. Availability of materials
iv. Avoidance of breakdown of system
v. Sufficient source of quality water