Lagosians should wary of water from low table

A significant percentage of the 20 million residents of Lagos State, Nigeria’s commercial capital and business hub, rely on boreholes for their daily supply of water for drinking, cooking and other uses. Unknown to most consumers of borehole generated water; borehole drilling has deadly implications for the environment while the water produced in the process is often hazardous to health. The Executive Secretary of the Lagos State Water Regulatory Commission, Mr KabirAbdullahi, once again drew attention to the dangers attendant on widespread illegal drilling of boreholes across the state at a recent deliberative conference with professional borehole diggers in the state.

Mr Abdullahi cited water from boreholes shoddily drilled by quacks as being a major cause of rampant water borne diseases in the state. He explained that, considering the high water table in Lagos, most boreholes are too shallow, making them vulnerable to seepage and other forms of surface pollutions dangerous to health. In his words, “Sometimes a person would hire a quack borehole driller to do a job for him. However, when the borehole is drilled, it would be situated at a spot which is close to a neighbour’s soak-away but they would not know because the soak-away would be on the other side of the fence. We have seen cases where the sewage is emptied into the water supply of another compound and people start getting sick, contracting typhoid and other diseases”.

Extensive and illegal borehole drilling is also said to be responsible for such a negative climatic effect as the intrusion of salt water from the Atlantic Ocean into fresh water bodies in parts of the state making borehole water increasingly salty particularly in the Lekki/Victoria Island belt. The depletion of underground water due to the proliferation of boreholes also increases the susceptibility of the state to serious land erosion and even collapse. We can thus understand the determination of the Lagos State Water Regulatory Commission to license all borehole contractors and vigorously tackle illegal borehole drilling.

Yet, the fundamental cause of the problem is the lack of access by millions of Lagos State residents to potable water thus forcing them to resort to boreholes as an alternative. Lagos State currently has a total installed water capacity of 210 million gallons per day while the demand is for about 540 million gallons per day. This is expected to increase to a demand for 733 gallons per day by 2020 when the mega city’s population is expected to hit 29 million.
The state already has a Lagos Water Master Plan targeted at providing at least 745 million gallons per day by Y2020. Towards this end, work is on-going on phase 2 of the Adiyan Waterworks to complement the first phase constructed 23 years earlier. Water authorities in the state project that the mega city requires at least six similar water schemes to achieve water sufficiency for all by 2020. Meeting this target will, however, imply the investment of no less than $3.5 billion in the provision of water infrastructure.

Given other equally pressing demands in critical sectors including health, education, housing, electricity, urban renewal, transportation and security, among others, Lagos State is clearly in no position to fund the provision of sufficient potable water for its huge population alone. This explains the state government’s inevitable decision to embrace Public-Private-Partnerships (PPPs) as a strategy of mobilising private capital for rapid modernisation and development of infrastructure development across sectors.

While such creative infrastructure financing initiatives are commendable, we must continue to emphasise the imperative of special funding for Lagos commensurate with the huge revenues derived from the state into the national coffers. The prime position of the state in the country’s political economy arising from her massive population, strategic geographical location as well as her roles as commercial capital, financial hub and industrial nerve centre also demand that be considerably strengthened fiscally in accordance with genuine federalist principles.