Nigeria: The Misadventure of Buhari's Water Bill

2 June 2018

The late Afrobeat legend and socio-political rights crusader, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, in one of his evergreen renditions of Nigeria's realities sang that water no get enemy. It was an anecdotal expression of the neutrality of water as substance that can be used by anyone at any time and for any purpose so desired. In a sense, the song spoke to the loyalty of water not to anyone but to everyone. What water does to one it does to all, whether giving life or enervating same. And this could be extrapolated to mean that water cannot be said to be exclusively owned or controlled by anyone to the detriment of another. In other words, Fela's musical narrative of everyday life experiences did not contemplate the colourless substance as a tangible resource that could be held or controlled to the exclusion of others and by which loyalty could be commanded and/or rewards and sanctions dispensed.

But that is what a bill in the National Assembly is seeking to do: imbue the ownership of water which is a God-given and free-flowing resource on the federal government of Nigeria to the exclusion of the constituent parts. From what has been said about the bill, the federal government of Nigeria is seeking to transmute the utility of water wherever found as a gift from God to all of humanity into the realm of resource ownership by the state at the centre.

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