Democracy of water

even the parts of Nigeria bounded with water lack access to god and adequate water

By Kayode Komolafe
The fact that water is a socio-economic right was brought to the fore again last week as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) released a damning report on the global access to potable water. Embodied in the report are similarly grim statistics such as the ones on primary school enrolment and HIV prevalence among young girls.

According to the report, only 47% of people living in rural areas have access to safe drinking water as against 75% in the urban areas. The report which is to herald the 25th anniversary of Children Rights Convention is entitled “The State of the World’s Children 2014 in Numbers: Every Child Counts – Revealing Disparities, Advancing Children’s Rights”. The report is also coming at a time the UN marks the 30th anniversary of the standardization of the global statistics on the state of children. This is another chilling reminder that this soul-dispiriting story   has been with us for long.

The focus here today is on democratisation of access to potable water. By any stretch of imagination, safe drinking water is far from being a luxury. It is one of those items that should not be left to market forces for the sake of equitable distribution. Safe drinking water is not a substance that should be available to just some persons; it should be available to everybody. After all, more than 70% of every cell in the human body is made of water. Simply put, water is life itself. The socio-economic cost of lack of access to safe is enormous. It has been estimated globally that over 4, 000 children die daily because they lack access to safe drinking water. Among   those who have survived, over 900 million still do not have access to clean water. Indeed, water-borne diseases   have killed more people than the violence in wars and other conflicts since World War II. In Nigeria, the national shame of episodic outbreaks of cholera and other water-borne diseases has persisted because water is never reckoned with as a human right. And this is a violence of sorts on the people. 

So the implicit sense of urgency in the matter is indisputable. In yet another United Nations’ report, it is also stated that lack of access to safe drinking water costs Nigeria and other African countries about $28.4 billion yearly. Experts say that this figure represents 5% of the Gross Domestic Product of the continent (GDP).  And proportionately, Nigeria, of course, has the largest share of this avoidable misfortune.   According the Water Resources Minister, Mrs. Sarah Ochekpe, the water infrastructure is so poor that “there is hardly any city with 24/7 water provision”. She identified the challenges of the sector as those of efficiency, professional management of utilities and funding among others.  Other experts have also identified poor data management as central to the problem. 

At the fundamental level, however, the challenge is that of sincere and rigorous implementation of water policies by the federal and state governments. This should start with a philosophical change in the frame mind of the policy makers and those implementing the policy: they should be persuaded by the reality that in the genuine interest of the majority of the people access to safe water is a basic human right. Water is not just another commodity!  The global context of this advocacy should, of course, be well appreciated. The problem of management of water resources is a universal one that worries strategic thinkers.

The fear of diminishing fresh water resources has been accentuated by rising population. And policy disarticulation is not helping matters in some climes such as Nigeria.  In fact, an expert predicted some years ago that if some wars were waged in the 20th Century because of oil, some other wars might be waged in the 21st Century because of fresh water resources.   The shift in policy orientation that would make those in government see water, as an indispensable factor of living should be an imperative in the Nigeria of 2014. It would require more than paying lip service to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to meet the target of access to safe by all children and their parents wherever they live in Nigeria.   

Democracy should not only be about asking the people to vote periodically for politicians who speak their language or claim to practise the same religion; democracy should also be about socio-economic rights of the people. Democracy is deepened when the people enjoy such human rights as the access to potable water.

It is doubly regrettable that the latest report which says 53 out of every 100 persons in rural Nigeria has no access to potable water is coming four years after the United Nations declared water as a human right. In campaigning for the vote for the declaration at the UN, former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev used the platform of his non-governmental organisation to make an important intervention. It is worth recalling this statement, once quoted by this reporter on this page, as a reminder to governments of their responsibility for the quality of life of the poor.

Gorbachev wrote a piece in the American newspaper, International Herald Tribune, entitled “Right to Water”, arguing inter alia: “There is tremendous political will and popular momentum behind the movement to formally declare safe water and sanitation as human rights. We must seize this moment and translate our enthusiasm into solid, binding legislation and action at the national and international levels…” So it is not enough to lament; policy must be driven in favour of making water a human right. The statistics in this report do not suggest that this country has made any remarkable progress since the universal declaration of water as a human right.  Yet access to safe drinking water by all is crucial to genuine poverty reduction.