Gabchiyari: Agony of a Bauchi Community in Dire Need of Potable Water

By Bashir Hassan Abubakar

Year in, year out 22nd March is being globally observed as World Water Day (WWD). It was a day set aside by the United Nations (UN) to bring attention of the World on challenges of accessing potable water by humans. Selecting a day set aside by the UN to project the role of water in the lives of human beings, animals, plants etc re-echoes the saying that “Water is Life”.

Sadly, as important as water is in our lives, communities, especially those in developing countries are still grappling on how to overcome the challenges of accessing this important component of human survival with little success.

According to a new analysis carried out by UNICEF, 78 million children in Nigeria are at the highest risk from a convergence of three water-related threats – inadequate water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH); related diseases; and climate hazards.

The statement said that in Nigeria, one-third of children do not have access to at least basic water at home, and two-thirds do not have basic sanitation services. Hand hygiene is also limited, with three-quarters of children unable to wash their hands due to lack of water and soap at home. As a result, Nigeria is one of the 10 countries that carry the heaviest burden of child deaths from diseases caused by inadequate WASH, such as diarrhoeal diseases.

Again UNICEF Nigeria, while marking WWD some few years back said “children without access to safe water are more likely to die in infancy and throughout childhood from waterborne diseases. Diarrhea remains the leading cause of death among children under five years of age in Nigeria. Waterborne diseases also contribute to stunting. A stunted child is shorter than she or he could have been and will never be able to reach her or his full cognitive potential. Lack of safe water and sanitation also makes children vulnerable to other threats beyond health. Many children in rural areas spend hours daily collecting water, missing out on the opportunity to go to school”.

One may not fully comprehend the negative effects of the above analysis until he or she actually sees it physically as communities struggle to get potable water for consumption and other domestic uses.

Recently, just few days to the WWD 2023, a select group of journalists from Bauchi State, Nigeria were on a field visit to a community in the state to ascertain the level of pain and despair the citizens are encountering in trying to access potable water.

With an estimate of over 6 million people, whose larger population lives in semi urban and rural areas, access to potable water in Bauchi State is grossly inadequate, thus subjecting the people, especially those in the rural areas, to untold hardship and lose of productive man hours in the course of fetching water.

In Bauchi State, according to Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey of 2021 (MICS 2021), access to improved sources of drinking water is 55.9 percent, while use of basic drinking water services stands at 55.3 percent, which is below the Region’s and National average.

A Day’s Trip to Gabchiyari

When the select group of Journalists set out on the field visit, little did they know what awaits them on the Journey. Gabchiyari is a hard-to-reach (HTR) community,  in Darazo Local Government Area of Bauchi State, ordinarily the 25km trip to this community from the LG headquarters couldn’t have taken more than 15-20 minutes but due to absence of accessible road, the trip took the journalists the best part of 2 hours, using circuitous routes to get there. Twice, we were stuck in the sand and we had to alight and pushed our vehicle out of the sand dunes that dotted road.

With a modest population of about 200,000 people, Gabchiyari community is basically an agrarian habitat and cattle rearers colony.

The first sight we came across at the point of entry to Gabchiyari community was a commercial borehole where cattle, ruminants and human beings jostled for a space to be served with water for a fee.

The sanitary condition of the commercial borehole sight is better imagine than seen. There is no drainage or pipe where waste water could be drain. So, in the absent of that, cattle dung mixed with waste water makes the borehole sight unhygienic and prone to contaminating the water gotten from that particular borehole. But that sanitation challenge is obviously the least of their problem. For the residents of Gabchiyari and environs that could afford to pay for the services of the borehole vendor, the fact that they could get the water was more than worth the risks of possible contamination.

In the course of interacting with the people at the site of the borehole, a resident of the village vented his anger at the journalists, challenging us on what value will our visit add to their community. The resident, whose name could not be gotten said that, “as far as i am concern, you people are just here to gloat over our plight of inadequate water supply and absence of other social amenities”. When we informed him that, what we were doing may trigger change for the better in the community, the youth just brushed our explanation saying, “many like you people have been coming with all sort of promises of better life for us and yet, nothing has changed here in Gabchiyari”.

The frustration, despair and feeling of neglect was so glaring on the face of that young man that, further explanation could have degenerated into fracas between him and the visiting journalists, and so , we left the borehole site and went further into the community to gather more materials for our reports.

As we get into the center of Gabchiyari Community, we came across two hand dug wells that were not producing water. Some of the community members said that at the moment, the wells were not producing much water because it is dry season, but that even during rainy period the water level is nothing to write home about and the depth of the wells have made those sources of water supply less user-friendly to inhabitants of Gabchiyari and surrounding hamlets.

The District head of Gabchiyari Community, Mallam Muhammad Garba, while welcoming the Journalists, said that the man hour being spent by residents and surrounding hamlets in seeking for water from paid boreholes is taking its toll on the citizens of the community.

“Our community is a hard-to-reach area whose water challenges is being compounded by the absence of road. Surrounding hamlets travel between 3-5 kilometers to access paid potable water. So, you can imagine the productive hours spent in just getting water for domestic use”.

“Ordinarily, it will take about 20 minutes to get to Gabchiyari from our LG Headquarters, but due to absence of feeder road, it takes an average of one and half hours to get here, that is if the vehicle does not get stuck in the sand dunes that dotted our terrain. It is even worse during rainy season”, said the district head.

Mallam Garba then appealed to Bauchi State Government and other stakeholders to open up the community for ease of transporting their farm produce and also attract development for the community.

The Journalists got a first hand experience on the negative multiplier effects of inadequate water supply in Gabchiyari community. The water challenge affects basic education’s enrollment, retention and transition.

This assertion was buttress by a resident of Gabchiyari who is simply known as Sarkin Makafi (Leader of the Vision Impaired). According to him, the distance and number of hours children spent in fetching water for domestic use does allow them to attend school. What Sarkin Makafi said was evident in the number of pupils seen in school during the field trip. Though the only school in Gabchiyari have a sizable number of blocks of classrooms, it was disheartening to observe that only two of the classes were put into use due to low number of enrollment of pupils. The dilapidated and decaying structures and fittings of the block of classes also compounded the enrollment drive in the community.

The ward development committee (WDC) chairman of Gabchiyari, Aliyu Alhaji, while further giving credence to role water supply plays in the education of the children said that, lack of adequate water affect school enrollment and retention, because the children spend school hours seeking for water and thereby missing school or abandoning it all together.

According to the WDC chairman, those children that made the effort to fetched the water and still attends school, you discover that they attend classes late and were usually fatigued to comprehend any meaningful exercise in class.

The Responsibility of water supply in Nigeria as captured in the National Water Supply and Sanitation Policy are  shared among the three levels of government. The Federal Government is in charge of water resources management, state governments have the primary responsibility for urban water supply and local governments together with the communities are responsible for rural water supply. But it is clear from the foregoing that Local Government Areas and by extension some State Governments are not taking that responsibilities seriously if the plight of Gabchiyari community is anything to go by. Government at all levels needs to urgently provide funds for the provision of improved water supplies of better quality and greater convenience to the citizenry.

UNICEF Nigeria, as critical stakeholders on issues that affects children and women also aligned its message in commemorating WWD 2023, calling on Nigerian Government at all level to make huge investment in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene( WASH) sector.

UNICEF Nigeria WASH officer Dr. Jane Bevan was quoted as saying, “I believe we need to rapidly scale-up investment in the sector, including from global climate financing, strengthen climate resilience in the WASH sector and communities, increase effective and accountable systems, coordination, and capacities to provide water and sanitation services, and implement the UN-Water SDG6 Global Acceleration Framework.

“If we continue at the current pace, it will take 16 years to achieve access to safe water for all in Nigeria. We cannot wait that long, and the time to move quickly is now. Investing in climate-resilient water, sanitation, and hygiene services is not only a matter of protecting children’s health today, but also ensuring a sustainable future for generations to come”, said Dr. Jane Bevan”

But all hope is not lost as disclosed by the Darazo LGA Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Coordinator Ibrahim Mohammed Hassan.

He said that the Bauchi State Government have mainstream the LGA into a WASH project under the African Development Bank intervention signed by the State Government.

The WASH Coordinator was also quick to add that the only water scheme that will be productive in Gabchiyari community would be a motorized or solar powered borehole.

“It takes a minimum of 90 feet before we could hit water level here. This is because of the topography of the area. So, you can see that a hand pump borehole will not serve the purpose here”, Hassan said.

Conclusion

Clean accessible water for all is an essential part of the world we want to live in. There is sufficient fresh water in Nigeria and the earth as a whole to achieve this. But due to poor funding or decayed infrastructure and bad governance, every year, millions of people, mostly children, die from diseases associated with inadequate water supply, sanitation and hygiene. Water scarcity, poor water quality and inadequate sanitation negatively impact food security, livelihood choices and educational opportunities for poor families across Nigeria and the world at large. Government should set standards for drinking water quality and with its partners to implement various technical and financial programmes to ensure drinking water safety. Also efforts must be geared towards the provision of potable water to all, thereby leading to an increased productivity of individuals.

The three tiers of government should tap into the rich and abundant water resources in the country by executing water projects in all parts of the federation yet to be reached.

Though the provision of water supply is capital intensive, it is a basic necessity for the well-being of citizenry. In view of this, government at all levels can individually venture into water supply through Public-Private-Partnership arrangements in order to ensure adequate production, distribution and perhaps sale of potable water to all.

Above all, the Federal Government should implement fully the provisions of the approved 2000 Nigeria’s National Water Supply and Sanitation Policy.
End