Water One World Solution, an international, non- profit organisation based in the United States of America, in its recent report, estimated that 3.5 million people die annually from water-related diseases. The report added that as many as 135 million preventable deaths will occur by 2020 if there are no proactive actions to improve clean water and sanitation supplies. Even though the projected year is still some distance away, the people of Obubra Local Government Area of Cross River State, have already begun to record preventable deaths on a yearly basis as a result of lack of access to safe water. INNOCENT DURU, who visited different communities in the expansive local government, reports.
Water is often said to be life because of its invaluable role in the existence of every living thing. But, for many communities in Obubra Local Government Area of Cross River State, water does not only give life, it also brings death. The river which serves as their only source of getting water, also kills their members on an annual basis. This is the paradoxical and befuddling situation the people have been grappling with over the years. Should they abandon the river and prevent their people from being killed by it or continue to get water from the river and go on losing their members to it? This is the knotty question the embattled people are yet to find answers to for many decades.
For residents of Ovono, Apiapum, and adjoining communities, the only source of water is the expansive river that separates the state from the neighbouring Ebonyi State.
The state, according to the residents, derived its name from the river as people, before roads were constructed, had to cross the river to neigbouring communities. The entire population depends on the river in which people bathe, wash clothes, motorcycles and to get drinking water. Added to these unhealthy practices that contaminate the water, is the open defecation that takes place by the bank of the river and surrounding hill which ends up in the river, especially during rainy season. Contaminated water and poor sanitation, according to the World Health Organistion (WHO), are linked to the transmission of diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea, dysentery, hepatitis A, typhoid and polio. UNICEF currently rates Nigeria among the five countries contributing to half of the global under-five deaths caused by diarrhoea because of poor access to water, sanitation and hygiene
The crowd that mills around the river from morning till nightfall tells it all, that the river is the people’s saviour because without it, they wouldn’t have had anywhere to get any form of water supply for their daily needs.
“This water is our messiah. It saves us from epidemics because without it, we wouldn’t have had water to bathe, wash clothes, cook and do other things. If this were the situation, you can imagine the magnitude of environmental crisis we would have in the whole area,” a resident said in appreciation of the marvellous uses to which the river is put in the community.
But, the story does not end on that joyful note. Walking side by side with the joy that comes with enjoying regular water supply from the river is the annual sorrow of losing members of the communities, children in particular to the river.
Findings showed that there is hardly a family in the area that has not had one or more members drowned in the river in the course of going there to fetch water.
Discussions around the havoc that the river unleashes on the people is one thing that Obia Agbor, 50, does not want to engage in. On two occasions, his children who vivaciously went to fetch water from the river for the family , did not return alive. “I have lost two children, a male and a female, to the river and that is how it happens every year. That was a very dark period in my life because I lost my two jewels that I had been struggling to raise. My heart bleeds each time I am made to remember those horrible days that I wished they never existed. There is no year that at least 20 children will not die in the course of fetching water from the river. It is disheartening. No one will see two children die one after the other for just going to fetch water from the river and be happy.
“The unfortunate thing is that we have no control over the situation; even when we lose a child, we don’t have any alternative than to send other children to the river to fetch water because that is our only source of getting water. I am not happy with the condition we are living in here. I have travelled widely and known that the situation here is abnormal. In other places, people have one source of water supply or the other.”
Another parent, Nwosu Eyami, warmly welcomed our correspondent, who had travelled over a long distance to arrive at his abode to seek his view on the predicament of the people. Within a few minutes of revealing his mission to Eyami’s house, his initial friendly mien changed. He looked enraged and paused for a while as if trying to overcome a sudden shock. Within a space of time, he got himself together and retorted: “I lost my first daughter to the river. You know what it means to lose your first child? You may not know except you experience it but I pray you don’t. My deceased daughter was my source of inspiration. She was obedient, hardworking and brilliant and I treasured her. Losing her in that manner took a part of me away.
“My pain is that I can’t stop other children from going there to fetch water. The river helps us and also causes untold pains to us. It gives us water but kills our children and destroys our farms, houses and other valuables. When our farms are destroyed, we go hungry for a very long time because we are mostly farmers. The children’s education is always affected each time flood sacks us from the community.”
The counternance of Monica, another parent who lost one of her children to the river, spoke volume of the strain that the demise of her child has put on her. She looked sick and incapable of talking. After some persuasion, the distressed woman snapishly said: “I lost my son when he went to the river to fetch water. I wish I could stop my other children from going to the river since that unfortunate incident happened but it is not possible. If I stop them, how would we get water to use, especially now that we are in dry season?”
Aside from the annual loss of children to the river, Exodus Egba, who has also lost a child said most of the children always suffer from water-borne diseases. “This is the only source of water to us. We annually lose children to the river when they go there to fetch water and also bathe. I lost my son to the river recently. During the rainy season, we often suffer from severe stomach ache, catarrh, cough and typhoid fever because flood brings all manners of dirty things to the river.
“It washes all manners of things, including human wastes, from different places into the river. When we drink the water, it brings us sicknesses. It always has telling effect on the children in particular as they also stool severely. When this happens, we take them to the clinic for treatment and where there is no money, we do self- medication.”
Showing our correspondent some newly laid pipes in the area, Egba said: “The government has started laying pipes in the neighbourhood but we don’t know how soon they will complete it and start providing safe drinking water for us. We pray that the project will not be abandoned and when they complete it, it will not be a political gesture to sway the people and score cheap points.”
On his part, Moses Ayo Enang, 60, said: “ I have been living here since 1972. I have not lost any child to the river, but I have so many people that have lost their children to the river. We drink it, use it to cook, wash, bathe and do other things with it. Most of us are poor and cannot afford to buy pure water.
“We drink this water. At the peak of the rainy season, the river overflows its bank, rises above the hill separating it from us and destroys our houses and farms. We always flee our homes each time this happens. We have always complained but nobody cares about us”.
Even though, the children were seeing gamboling around when our correspondent visited the river, a chat with them showed they were inwardly disturbed. The countenance of one of the children, who simply gave her name as Esther, triggered pity. She was sweating profusely as she tried to ascend the hill with the heavy gallon of water on her head.
“This is the seventh time that I went to fetch water from the river. It is not an easy task at all. I have lost one of my siblings and several friends when they went to fetch water, just the way that I am doing. When one is fagged out like this, one always finds it extremely difficult to make any resistance when the water wants wreak havoc.
“My colleagues and I are always haunted by the memory of our deceased siblings or friends. When we come to the river, especially during rainy season, one cannot be too certain of going back home alive. You may be fetching water and the next thing you will see or hear is that your sibling or friend that you came to the river together has drowned.
“You will only cry and cry. The next day, if not that the same day, you will return to the river to fetch water again because whether a sibling or a friend died, water must be used in the house and it is only from this place we get water,” she said
The fear of what lies ahead as the rainy season approaches eats Tony up. Wearing an emotional look, he said: “If I have my way, I would not go to the river again because of the horrible things that happen here every year. If the graves of children that have died in the course of fetching water here were to be erected on the river, there would be no place for us to fetch water again because the number is too many and always increasing.
“As the rainy season is fast approaching now, some of us that are playing together now will perish in the water. It is a fact and not a curse. It is what we have been experiencing every year. At times, when I come to the river, it is the images and voices of my dead colleagues that echo in my ear. If we were to have good sources of water supply in our neighbourhoods, we would not be going through this horrific experience.”
While she is equally disturbed by the number of her peers that die in the river annually, one of the kids, who simply gave his name as Sunday, decried the condition of the water which he described as a gentle killer of the residents.
“The water is not safe for drinking but that is all we have to drink, bathe and do everything. Unfortunately, it is in this same place that our people bathe, wash their clothes, motorcycles and other things. During the rainy season, flood washes all the excreta done in open place in the neighbourhood into the river and we still fetch it to drink because there is no alternative. The only solution is to buy pure water, but a large percentage of our parents hardly can feed us not to talk of having the resources to buy pure water.
“Some of the old people will tell you that the water is okay and that they have been drinking it long before their forefathers were born, but from time to time, you find some of us suffering from all manners of sicknesses because of the terrible water we are consuming. Our community is not a village, yet, our condition is worse than that of people living in rural areas. With what you have been told about how children die like rats every year at the river, could you imagine the number of promising children that have perished here?”
The words of UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, resonated when our correspondent visited Ababene and other communities that suffered a fatal outbreak of Guinea worm some years ago. Expressing concern about the danger of water scarcity, Ban Ki Moon in 2010, said: “More people die from unsafe water than from all forms of violence including war. These deaths are an affront to our common humanity and undermine the efforts of many countries to achieve their developmental potentials.”
Moon’s statement captured the development in these communities. Never had any challenge claimed the lives of their members like Guinea worm did few years ago. The communities lost both young and old, males and females to the lethal disease and are till date, still traumatised by the ugly experience.
Unlike the other communities that have a river from which they can easily get water for their daily use, the people of Ababene and adjoining communities have no river. They only have pockets of small holes in the ground from which they scoop water.
What came as a good news to our correspondent, wasn’t in any way a cheering one for members of the community who are living in palpable fears because the challenge that led to the outbreak of Guinea worm in the area is still much with them.
“The condition we have found ourselves here is regrettable. If you had been here when Guinea worm ravaged the community, you would have known what we are talking about. Even though, the menace has long gone, the memory not only lingers in our minds, it instills fears in us. We are daily traumatised by that nasty experience because we still don’t have safe drinking water.
“How do you want families who lost their loving children to quickly forget the unsavoury experience when the problem has not even been addressed? Everytime we drink this water, something is always there to say ‘Guinea worm is coming, Guinea worm is coming’. When you hear this strange voice, you will be tempted to drop the cup out of fear.
“Because of the insensitivity of successive governments to our predicament, Guinea worm sneaked into our serene community and unleashed terror on everybody. It made the strong to become a vegetable, and made the wise to become foolish.”
Reliving his experience in the hands of the disease, a resident who identified himself as Oden Amon, said: “I suffered the disease for about three months. I urinated and defecated on a spot. I couldn’t walk and always used my buttocks to crawl. The thing smells badly. You can’t afford to stay in the same place with the victim and it is always a calamity when it affects the whole family about the same time because nobody will be there to assist the other.”
Another victim, Ovat Esek, also shared his experience thus: “Guinea worm is a terrible disease that one should never pray that his enemy should suffer from. Once it comes into a house, everybody contracts it. When I had it, it took about four months before I was cured of it. During this period, I couldn’t go out. I only moved within the room because the pains were severe. A whitish discharge like pus and another like earthworm were always coming out from the spot of the disease.”
The village head and secretary of Ababene Traditional Rulers Council, Chief Amon Obo, said they still have fears that the problem could rear its head again because “we are still drinking the same water that caused the outbreak of Guinea worm in the entire area. The only difference here is that the water is being maintained now unlike before. It is not easy for us in this area to get water this dry season. A woman can go to fetch water early in the morning and spend six hours before she can get her container filled. It takes a lot of time to scoop the water and to make matters worse, the population is more than the sources where the water is being scooped.”
He further said: “The government was treating the water for us before but now, they don’t do it again. We have 16 hand pump boreholes and two solar types but none of them is functional. As we speak, there is acute water scarcity in the whole neighbourhood. This makes life unbearable for us. We want an urgent solution to this challenge which portends great danger to the entire community.”
Buttressing Amon’s view, a retired army officer, George Erim, said: “You will not know the enormity of the challenge we are going through except you experience it. What we are saying is like scratching the problem on the surface as words cannot adequately describe our pains and frustrations. Women and children wake up as early as 4am to queue for water and may not leave there until afternoon. There are some containers that have been here for more than a day because the owners couldn’t get water to fetch.
“How, in your view, would such families attend to their domestic needs that require water? The World Bank water project started about a year ago to check the acute water problem bedevilling the entire area. We believe that this will bring an end to our difficulties if it is properly and sincerely done.”
Some of the children, who spoke with our correspondent, lamented that the time they spend queuing to fetch water eats so much into the time they are supposed to use for their studies.
“We trek for one hour to get to where we get water and trek one hour back home. When you get to where you will fetch the water, you will still queue for several hours. This causes many of us to miss lectures,” one of the children said.
Another said: “We hardly have water to bathe, wash our uniforms and other clothes not to talk of having enough to cook and drink. We do go to school without bathing and even stay for a whole day without bathing. At times, it crosses a day, because it is when we have water that we bathe. This affects our education a great deal. We have little or no time to go to school and when we manage to go, we have no time to attend to our assignments because we have to hunt for water.”
Bemaoning the fate of the people, an environmental activist, Comrade Eta Samson, said the problem is not peculiar to the people of Obubra. “A recent report I read said many sub- Saharan Africans get less than 20 litres of water a day, while two thirds have no proper toilet. By contrast, the average Briton uses 150 litres a day, while Americans are the world’s most profligate using 600 litres a day. Poor people in this part of the world waste much of time walking miles to fetch a small quantity of water. A UN report estimated that 40billion hours are spent fetching water each year in sub-Saharan Africa which is an entire working year for all the people in France.
“The water they even get as we have it in Obubra is contaminated, spreading diseases that kill people or leave then unable to work. The UNDP estimated that nearly half of all the people in developing countries at one time or the other suffer from illnesses caused by bad water or sanitation and that 443million school days are missed every year. Is that not the case in Ababene and the adjoining communities where innocent children spend the energy and time they need to invest in their studies on queuing to fetch water at streams?”
A psychologist, Okoh Abe, said: “The people have a huge psychological problem in their hands. They will always have anxiety whenever their children go to the river because they are not sure they will return alive. And when you constantly have such, it affects your health. A good number of this people are prone to having high blood pressure. They probably did not tell you this.
“After sometime, some of them will begin to see calamities as a norm. Human life will not mean anything to them again because they are used to seeing people die like cockroaches.
“It is also not out of place for the other people that had an outbreak of Guinea worm to feel the way they are feeling. Their experience has affected their psyche. This is worsened by the fact that they are still consuming the water that caused the crisis. The government will need to be fast in addressing their problems to save them from further trauma. They will need to send officials there to do the needful and allay their fears.”
Succour, however, appears to be coming the way of the beleaguered communities as the state government said it is already putting measures in place to address their problems. Speaking in a telephone interview with The Nation, the state’s Commissioner for Water Resources, Gabe Oji, said the people will begin to enjoy pipe- borne water beginning from June.
“We are establishing one of the biggest waterworks in Obubra. We are presently carrying out massive construction which would end very soon. The water project itself is located in Obubra and it covers the whole area. By June this year, water will be flowing in the whole of Obubra.”
On what the government is doing to avert a reoccurrence of Guinea worm in Ababene and its environs, Oji said: “Guinea worm is caused by lack of access to safe water. When there is pipe-borne water for the people, they will have no reason to worry about Guinea worm. They really have no reason to fear. They will have pipe-borne water soon.”
