The Director-General of Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA) Dr Clement Nze has expressed concerns over the destruction and vandalisation of monitoring wells and installed data logins used for the assessment of groundwater resources.
He spoke during the National stakeholders’ workshop on drafting groundwater assessment strategic plan in Abuja.
Nze maintained that NIHSA has suffered setbacks in discharging its duty of assessing the nation’s surface and groundwater due to insecurity in the country.
He further outlined the efforts underway to ensure proper development and management of groundwater water resources.
According to him “The importance of having groundwater monitoring wells cannot be overemphasized. It shows how the groundwater is fluctuating and helps us to be able to give informed advice. But what happens when the agency installs or drills some monitoring wells, put our instrument there and some communities would convert it to boreholes for drinking water, vandalize it or some hooligans would outrightly steal it. This has reduced the number of monitoring wells we are having.
“For instance, in Port Harcourt a foreign firm was given a contract to do, even when this monitoring well was in a water board premises, while expanding the road, they used bulldozers and destroyed the well. It happened in Lagos too. Although the Lagos State government has replaced it at their own cost.
“Now what we do is to carry the Communities along by holding stakeholders meetings with each community’s head and youths to sensitize them on the importance of these equipment and do a proper handover.”
The NIHSA boss also faulted some state governments for their neglect and failure to properly fund water management in their respective states.
“We have been calling for collaboration between the federal and the state, and even the honourable minister of water resources, Dr. Suleiman Hussein Adamu has done tremendously well to ensure that the various tiers of government get adequate water supply.
“In Sokoto, we have a number of dams that have huge amounts of water that are in store there, provision is in store from the ministry of water resources so that raw water can be exploited, treated and supplied to the citizens.
“For instance, one state in the Niger Delta refused to disburse just 3 million naira monthly to buy chemicals to treat the water. You can just imagine how much revenue they generate monthly and yet they cannot afford 3 million naira monthly to do water treatment. Meanwhile, the reservoir was built by the federal government.
“It is appalling to say that the state governments don’t have money to provide water for the citizens. We are not even saying it should be given free. Nigerians are eager to pay for such facilities if water is available and accessible to them.
“States should step up efforts and identify well with the federal government. 80 percent of the world population depends on groundwater for different uses. This workshop is quite apt to enable us to develop a groundwater assessment strategic plan for Nigeria to ensure that we are not losing groundwater indiscriminately. There will be a crisis in no distant time the way people are indiscriminately drilling boreholes without regulation,” he said.