Warom Felix Okello
13 January 2008
West Nile — IT takes two hours to drive on a bumpy gravel road across another district for the rich in Koboko town council to get clean water delivered to their fenced homesteads by water-tanker owners in Arua district, about forty kilometres away.
But the town's poor have to endure the agony of trekking over three kilometres in searing heat and queue for hours at the rapidly drying streams to fill their piled up pots, sauce pans and jerry cans.
For many of the unfortunate women, drained by daylong energy-sapping gardening work and other domestic chores, the suffering is longer and more distressing. Indeed, some of them have to spend chilly and scary nights, camped in valleys as less yielding spring wells gradually fill up with murky water.
This is the depressing reality of the after effects of an acute water shortage in the border town that has pushed the price of water of a 20-litre jerrycan from Shs300 to Shs1, 500 for the 35,000 urban dwellers, majority of whom live on less than a dollar a day.
"The situation is pathetic," said Mr Wilson Sanya, the town clerk.
The local authorities are looking on helplessly as impressive safe water distribution data papered by local government bureaucrats fail to tally with the harsh realities of the current crisis that has ignited animosity between neighbours and friends wrangling over water.
The African Development Bank was to sink Shs4 billion for erecting the first-ever piped water supply in Koboko town. The feasibility studies were done and architectural designs drawn in past years, raising hope for the distraught urbanites that at last quick access to safe and clean water was becoming a reality.
But the town officials are now frustrated that no funding has come through for the scheme that was planned to be operational by October this year.
Potential users had been informed that water reservoirs would be installed in Midia Sub County. Now, there is nothing.
With the onset of the dry spell, seasonal streams from where multitudes of the town's poorer lot used to draw water have since dried up and water, which is supposed to be a necessity, has turned out to be such a pricey luxury good.
Police say they are registering rising numbers of domestic fights and inter-family scuffles at Gbukutu and Maji Muzuri water points as natives exchange blows in the scramble to secure water for desperate families. It is envisaged that the water scarcity and resultant animosity would only worsen in the coming drier months of February and March.
Community health workers have raised concern that the resolve by residents of Bukenga in Midia Sub County, Gbukutu, Nyarilo and Maji-Muzuri areas to fetch dirty water for home use could explain the declining sanitation practices and resurgence of cholera that has so far claimed four lives and infected 55 other people.
Town Clerk Sanya said the failure by ADB to make good its bargain has prompted political and civic leaders to source support from other funders, including foreign embassies.
The district and town council are now in negotiations with the Japanese embassy in Kampala that has promised to chip in assistance to fix the pressing water problem.
Mr Sanya said the current water crisis, which has affected business operations in hotels and lodges would be greatly reduced if the Japanese finance drilling of a number of the promised bore holes.
But the more sustainable solution would be to construct piped water supply infrastructure in the town council whether by the National water & Sewerage Construction or under other ad hoc (project) intervention.
The dire consequences of dried up valleys and streams have frog-leapt from Koboko, near the Sudan border down to the scorching riverside Pakwach where residents in the peripheral Alwi village now compete with livestock for fresh water in the dwindling marshy land.
A catalogue of pitiable planning compounded by low technology and resource constraints have ironically made residents along the River Nile belt from Jonam county down to Rhino camp in Arua district, desperate for fresh water.There are rising concerns that improper management of water resources could constrain the much-touted campaign for national food security.
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