Jigawa State-born Minister of Water Resources, Sulaiman Hussein Adamu, is one of the few ministers close to President Muhammadu Buhari. He was Principal Consultant with Afri-Projects Consortium, Management Consultants to the now defunct Petroleum (Special) Trust Fund (PTF), where he was actively involved in the planning and preparation of several major national projects, in such areas as health, education, transportation, agriculture, water resources and energy sectors. Not your archetypical politician, Adamu would rather boast his calling as a consulting engineer even when he’s had his time at some levels in politics. Arguably brilliant with an impressive hold on his beat, the minister appears one of the unidentified critical factors in the current administration. He shared some of the responsibilities of his ministry with THISDAY at his office in Abuja. Excerpts:
The ministry’s mandate is to provide accessible and sustainable water supply to Nigerians. However, potable water remains a challenge with alleged 86 per cent of Nigerians still lacking access to safe drinking water. What are you doing about this?
First of all, let me correct the statistics. Number one, based on the National Water Sanitation and Hygiene Outline Routine Mapping report, which we do in collaboration with the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), 71 per cent of Nigerians have access to water supply, but that is if you are working on the criteria set by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). But if you go by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) criteria, I think it’s a little bit way down.
But the bulk of the people that are still taking the short end of the stick are the people in the rural areas. When I came into office, the statistic was 68 per cent but then over 50 per cent of the rural areas still do not have access to water based on the MDGs.
Secondly, I think it’s very important to understand that the mandate of the federal ministry of water resources is not to provide water in taps for people, it is to manage the water resources of the country.
The responsibility of providing water to the people basically, primarily rests with the states and that’s why you have the state water agencies and rural water supply agencies. So whatever the federal government has been doing over the years, it’s supporting or complementing what the states are doing.
This is because the federal government cannot be everywhere and as I said, the constitution has made it very clear. We do support state and federal institutions and we try to do whatever we can, but the major responsibility is for the states. So there’s the need to invest more and prioritise water supply. If they don’t make it a priority in their budgets and they don’t put the right investment, it’s not going to happen.
But on our part, since we came into office, we have encouraged the states and we complement their efforts to be able to deliver. First and foremost, in 2015 when I came into office, I asked the question, why is it that we have not been able to meet the MDGs which have just ended and we have just subscribed to the SDGs and I realised that everybody was relying on budgetary allocation.
Whatever was available in the budget was what was used. There was no concerted effort to take the bull by the horn, to say , this is the way we want to go, we want to get water supply to our people.
There was no commitment, no prioritisation and therefore, we introduced the programme called the partnership for expanded water sanitation and hygiene which was launched by the vice president in November 2016.
The idea behind the programme is to incentivise the states. Before then, we had got the Federal Executive Council (FEC) in September 2016 to approve a new water policy and with the policy we affirmed that the federal government will support states by up to 30 per cent of their investment for urban water supply and we will support them by up to 50 per cent for rural water supply.
On that premise, we launched the P-WASH programme, a national programme which is essentially for rural water supply and sanitation. And we now said, okay, if you want to do a rural water supply scheme, the federal government will give you 50 per cent of the support.
And we later on refined it to consider it on the basis of local government so that we take a local government, starting with the most vulnerable and then they pick two local governments and we pick two.
Then we go to rural communities in dire need and make sure we provide 100 per cent access water to these communities and you are the one to tell us which communities to work with and we have done that successfully in Kano and Ogun states because they were the first two states to say we are ready to collaborate with you. So we have done a pilot programme there.
Now, we are in 12 states and very soon, we are going to start in another five states. What we are doing is to take two local governments each. If we continue like that , then by the time we finish, then the entire rural communities in a particular LG will have 100 per cent access. We are not talking about major towns.
Then we have established a budget line since 2017 in the budget of the federal ministry of water resources to enable states to come and draw funds for the urban water supply component I was talking about. They can take up to 30 per cent. We recently signed an MoU with Gombe state. We have been waiting for them. Only Gombe state has recently stepped forward. It’s only in the last few months that we have got any state which has indicated interest.
What do you think is responsible for this reluctance?
That goes to show you how much water has been prioritised at the sub-national level because this money, every year, we have been putting like N1 billion to N2 billion in our budget for that to happen. But they have not been forthcoming.
Then we have a diagnostic report with the World Bank. We took an assessment of the water sector and we realised that in 1992, 30 per cent of the Nigerian population was enjoying pipe borne water, but in 2015, when the report was finalised, it had dropped to 7 per cent. So as of 2015, only 7 per cent of our urban settlement was enjoying pipe borne water.
That year, we were to have a council of state meeting in Akure and I immediately directed that the theme should be changed to accommodate that report. We sat with the World Bank about the national WASH action plan which was launched by Mr President on 8 November 2018.
During that launch, he also declared a state of emergency on the water sector. In that plan, there are specific actions that the federal government should take and the states and local governments. The states were to launch the programme in their localities and then adapt it to suit their own needs.
Many of them have done the declaration, but the specific action, there is a lot to be desired. But at the federal level, we have laid the framework for what needs to be done. Again, part of that is that WASH (Water Sanitation and Hygiene) plan is to create a fund. We are in the process of creating that fund under which state governments can come and apply and if they qualify, they can get some funding.
It may be a grant, a loan or whatever because there are so many windows that will be established for them to be able to draw money to invest in water infrastructure in their cities.
We inherited about 43 major water projects. We have gone ahead to reprioritise and re-evaluate them and in some cases, we negotiated the funding arrangements with the state governments so that we will be able to finish them. Some of the projects like Central Ogbia, we finished in record time and we have handed over to the state government.
The most recent has been the Zobe water project that is supposed to supply Katsina. That project was started in 1992.
Why are all these steps not translating into access or being felt by the people?
I think impact is felt in the sense by people in the rural communities, because we’re concentrating on rural communities, but as I said, the federal government effort alone cannot do it. Our own is just like a drop in the ocean. If the states are not investing as they should, although some states are doing that, like Lagos for example, there’s a lot that’s being consistently done.
But what’s happening is that in my analysis, because of the cycle of elections, some states don’t want to take it on. A major water project in an urban city will take five to eight years to complete. And you have to keep investing because the population is increasing, so you need to keep expanding.
The investment is not at par with the population growth. When you have a population of 3 million people and provide water for 1 million people, there won’t be an impact.
Imagine the number of cities in this country. Can the federal government be in all those cities? We can’t. The constitution does not even say we should be there. That’s one. Two, it is an issue of political will and prioritisation. The state governments need to prioritise and take water as a priority.
When you do that for instance, it will solve a lot of your health issues because you will end up spending less on health, but that nexus is not very apparent to some of them. So we can only do what we can do.
One of the biggest challenges we are facing is that there’s so much low capacity and again because of the issue of a lack of political will and inability to prioritise water, some of the water schemes that have been done by the federal government even if done 100 per cent, just for the states to run the schemes has continued to be a problem.
The Central Ogbia project for example, we handed it over in September 2016. A year after we went back, we discovered it was under lock and key. The federal government spent N6 billion on that project and we went back and we asked why. We were told the state government was not able to buy chemicals and diesel to run the scheme. About N2 to N3 million a month.
And that’s not the only one. There are many like that. Some of them were left because they would not even provide adequate security. So some of the equipment was vandalised. Is it the federal government that will go and be manning those water schemes? That is not our mandate and we don’t have the wherewithal to do that.
Let’s talk about the water resources bill. What really is the concern of the lawmakers and what does the federal government intend to achieve?
Well, I really cannot understand because everybody opposed to this bill has been relying on second-hand information. Somebody just woke up and said he doesn’t like the bill and manufactured stories around it and everybody has been re-echoing it.
First of all, for the umpteenth time, the water resources bill as proposed is a combination of four existing laws; the Water Resources Act, the National Hydrological Services Act, River Basin Development Authority Act and the National Water Resources Institute Act.
Stakeholders, way back in 2004, felt that instead of having fragmented Acts, everything should be put under one statute, which is the water resources law. This bill we are talking about, 95 per cent or more, is composed of those four existing laws. The whole idea is just to put them together under one book. So you have sections 1,2,3,4.
Two, what is new in that bill is that Nigeria subscribes to the international concept of integrated water supply management. By that, it means that there must be a harmonious relationship between exploitation of our water resources and the land or ecosystem. Meaning that there should be no degradation of the ecosystem.
It empowers people within the basement to have a say in how water resources in their areas are developed. Before now, we just say we are going to build a dam in a particular location and we just mobilise. Under the integrated water resources management, we have to go and call a stakeholders’ meeting, invite everybody and tell them what we are going to do and we have to do it transparently.
We have to address their fears, carry out environmental impact assessment, social impact assessment and present to them and convince them that this project is not going to harm them or the ecosystem. We have to show the benefits. That’s what it is about.
In 2007, the federal government set up the integrated water resources management commission and all those things were powers of the minister. So the powers of the minister in relation to the integrated in relation to all these were now delegated to the commission. That’s why under the power sector reforms, you can’t operate a power plant without a water licence.
So the concept of licencing came about. People are mining groundwater and taking millions of litres of it, doing bottling companies, providing bottled water, soft drinks and the other beverages and you are not paying a dime for it. The federal government has said no, it can’t be done because in any case, we need to monitor the way our ground resources are managed.
We need to know who’s mining and how much so that you are not depleting this resource and depriving those who want to build a borehole in their house of that water. The law is clear. If you are drilling a borehole for your use or there’s a river passing through your farm, that you can extract to water your farm, you are free to do that. But if it’s in a huge commercial quantity, you must have a licence.
One of the new things is that we want to strengthen that commission because it’s actually only working on the basis of the delegation of the powers of the minister drawn from the water resources Act. But if we refine it, the commission can be on its own. Now, the commission is appointed because I make recommendations to the president to appoint.
But if this law is passed, the commission will be independent just like NERC. There will be representatives from all the geopolitical zones, the president will nominate members but will have to be confirmed by the national assembly and they will be independent so that they can protect our water resources in the country.
What about the allegation that the federal government wants to take over land to push for its RUGA policy?
There’s nowhere in the bill that taking over land is mentioned. It’s all about water resources. In fact, where land is mentioned is the place where the basin development authority is mentioned and it is clearly stated that anything about land acquisition by the River Basin Development Authority must be consistent with the Land Use Act.
That means that they will need to go to the state governments or governors because they are the ones to provide the land or negotiate with the communities and it’s clearly in the bill. So all these talks about taking over the banks of the river for Fulani herdsmen is hogwash. There’s nothing there.
All the freshwater in this country, in the southwest, they flow in from Benin Republic, then River Niger point of entry is Kebbi state, River Benue’s point of entry is from Adamawa state, the Rivers in Akwa Ibom, their major watershed is Mambilla highlands; the rest, River Kaduna, River Hadejia are going eastwards. But the ones going southwards, like River Kaduna that also feeds into Jos, Plateau. The major watersheds are in northern Nigeria.
The point I am making is that if you don’t allow the federal government to be the custodian of our rivers, it means Kebbi state government or Adamawa can wake up one day and dam River Niger or Adamawa will dam River Benue. Then what happens downstream? These rivers go right into the Delta. The only way they can be protected is if the federal government is the custodian of our rivers and it’s already settled in the constitution.
Schedule 64, I think , made it very clear that all the inter-boundary waters that traverse more than one state, just the way you have federal highways is exactly the same way or the way you have the national airspace. As long as it transcends boundaries between one state and another, it’s only logical that the federal government should be the custodian.
It’s there in the constitution. We are not introducing anything new. Most of the people that are making a lot of noise, it’s because they have not read the bill, they listen to some latter-day pontiffs on water. Those guys don’t know anything. They don’t have a clue that this bill is protecting them.
Without this bill, we will have a big problem. If you go to the schedule, you won’t see Nike lake, you won’t see Oguta lake – that it’s under the control of the federal government. It’s within the boundary of Imo state. There’s no problem with that. But River Benue, Niger, Hadejia, Katsina Ala, Kaduna, all those major rivers are scheduled in that bill, the federal government is vested with the power to be the custodian of these rivers. It’s just logical. Anywhere you go in the world, that’s the way it is.
It is the current trend in water resources management because that’s the in-thing. There’s no way you can start a bottling company without getting a licence from the integrated water resources management commission. The commission must go and inspect.
I will give you a typical example, Keffi-Zaki dam, since the era of Shagari, there has been an effort to construct that dam. It was supposed to start in Bauchi state and drain into Yobe state, but the people of Yobe state refused and up till today, because of the integrated water resources management, I cannot go ahead and say, go ahead and construct this dam because we have not reached a consensus with the people of Yobe.
The people of Bauchi want this dam desperately, but the people of Yobe say no. But before now, we could have done anything we wanted. When we built Tugar dam, all these laws were not there. So floodplains in the Yobe region were lost. What happened was just some consensus that there will be some mandatory releases of the dams throughout the year so that it will flow. And those are the kinds of things. It may not stop the project, but when you do the proper study, you can now convince people that this is the way to alleviate some of these problems. That’s one aspect.
Secondly, you asked a question that we were not making much impact on water supply. As long as we are relying on government budgetary allocation, we will never get there. We need private sector investment. Private sector will not come into water supply delivery without a strong regulator who will protect their investment.
Again, if you strengthen this commission, you will have an independent regulator and create the comfort zone for the private sector to invest. We are not saying we are privatising. We are not privatising the water sector, but even in managing water agencies, state governments cannot run them efficiently.
If you bring in the private sector, you do a management contract, they can run them. I can tell you that smaller countries like Cameroon and Niger, that’s what they are doing and there’s no complaint. If you go to Niamey today, even in the poorest location, there’s a tap in the house because they are running the system efficiently.
But I have just told you that only 7 per cent of our population as of 2015 is provided pipe borne water. On the one side, we say we want progress, on the other side, we are playing politics with this issue of development, trying to suppress it.
The third aspect of this bill is the concept of irrigation. We are looking at transforming irrigation in Nigeria. The idea is, again, for years, it has become difficult for the government, especially at the federal level, to maintain our irrigation schemes.
At the downstream end, where you have the secondary and tertiary canals, we have big problems. The farmers are waiting for the government to do it. We are trying to empower the farmers through creation of water-user associations so they can form a collective, contribute money, instead of paying for water use or we can subsidise the water rate they pay, so they can use part of the money to pool funds and maintain the secondary and tertiary canals themselves.
So we are empowering them and we need to, especially because of TSA, and government regulations, we have to have a provision in the law that allows that to happen, so that they can form water-users association, collect money and use it to maintain the secondary and tertiary infrastructure, so that the federal or state governments if they have major irrigation schemes, will just be saddled with the responsibility of maintaining the dams and the major irrigation canals. It’s a win-win situation.
And finally, the fourth one is this WASH fund. Again, we put a provision to create a WASH fund, so that the law setting up the national income or something can be put together and also money coming from development partners can be pooled in a fund. It’s happening in Ethiopia.
So that state governments can qualify based on certain conditions and they can take that money and invest in urban borne water schemes and sanitation projects. What is bad about this bill? But as I said, some people have taken it and given it a terrible political colouration at the expense of the people that really need it so that we can improve the water supply sector.
But we are not resting on our oars, we are communicating with the national assembly. The last time, it was a technical issue, the first time, there was an issue. It was just a legitimate question that senators were asking and it was taken out and given a sectional colouration that northern senators and southern senators are divided over the water bill.
Somebody just had the wits to link it with the RUGA issue. But there’s nothing whatsoever related and I have always told people, please go and read the bill and when you want to read the bill, do it in conjunction with the four existing laws that I have mentioned.
The beauty is that at the end of the day, bill or no bill, as I said, 95 per cent of these provisions are there. The laws are there and we will continue to operate them. As you can see, our operations have not been crippled, but the key issue is that those new ideas, the country would have lost and because the international community is also watching us, we are making a laughing stock of ourselves.
With the interface with the lawmakers, do you think the bill will survive?
Absolutely! It’s mission unaccomplished until this bill is passed and we are working on it and confident that with all the advocacy we have been doing with members of the national assembly, there’s a better understanding. We have said, please don’t listen to these reports, sit down and study this bill and many of them have done so and everybody has said, well there’s really no issue.
But I think that one of the issues that is being contested for instance, is that there’s too much federal government interference and that it is taking too many powers.
There’s really nothing here. As I told you, it’s only logical for the federal government to take charge of water bodies that are crossing state boundaries because that is the way everything else is, like highways and airspace. To me, I don’t see the problem with that.
Even with that, we have made a presentation to the governors’ forum. They have submitted their comments. We have taken those comments. In fact, one of the reasons why the debate has not resumed in the national assembly is because we said we have collated the comments, sent them to the office of the attorney general so that we can have a legal opinion about what they have said.
At the same time, we have engaged a very senior legal luminary, an expert in our laws, to review the entire bill and give an opinion. Once we get all these ones, we move on. We have told the national assembly that they should wait. We are demonstrating good faith in doing this.
But I would like to say once again, if you have a borehole in your house or you have a farm, there’s a river passing, you can water your farm, but you cannot dig a trench and divert the river into your farm. But if it’s on the banks of the river, you can do that. If it’s a borehole in your house, you are free to take the water from that borehole.
But again, this is the only country where you go and drill a borehole and the authorities do not know anything about it. We need to know because we are monitoring the groundwater for quality and for obstruction because we monitor the groundwater through the Nigerian hydrological services to see how much we are depleting our groundwater resources.
We are taking this back to the states the same way that if you want to build a house, you go to your development control agency to take a building permission, we are saying that the federal government will put the guidelines on borehole drilling, but you go to the state authorities to get a permission.
For us, we need information so that we will be able to know where we have boreholes and how much is being taken out on an annual basis so that we can monitor the groundwater. It’s our responsibility as a ministry to monitor the extraction of our water. So what is wrong with that?
What if the bill is rejected again by the lawmakers?
If it’s rejected, as I told you, 95 per cent of the bill exists. We have laws that take care of that. But state governments will lose because there will be no window for them to borrow money, we will continue to waste resources because we will be compelled to be maintaining irrigation infrastructure.
We are working on Bakolori and Kano river irrigation schemes. Kano river lost about 8,000 hectares which is because of a lack of maintenance. Bakolori is much more than that. We have a 6MW power station in Bakolori, but it has not been working. The entire system of irrigation is down, we are now trying to convert them to gravity irrigation.
If everybody will wait and continue to say that the government will do it, okay let’s continue like that. And then this idea of empowering people, empowering you to have a say on how water in your catchment should be done, we are supposed to have catchment management offices and committees, they exist now, it means we can’t have them.
For me, if I were to continue to be minister or any minister for that matter, I have more powers to do what I like, but again we will continue to run into trouble with people and then we would have violated some cardinal principles and conventions that we subscribe to, especially related to integrated water resources management.
Flooding has become a perennial challenge with increasing intensity each year, leading to the loss of lives and many properties destroyed. Although this is not peculiar to Nigeria, why is it something the people have to deal with every year?
Climate change is there. Flood is unpredictable to a large extent sometimes. The most powerful pressure on us is hydrostatic pressure, water pressure. Who can fight the act of God? Nobody.
What we do is that based on existing data, we can predict locations where there will be flood, and we do that every year. Since I came into office, I always unveil what we call the annual flood outlook, where we tell everybody, the states, local governments, we send these reports to them as well.
We say, look, your state or local government is vulnerable to flooding this year. We also share with the ministry of agriculture. We work with the Nigerian Meteorological agency and our agency, NIHSA. At least we’ve done the Kashambilla dam as a flood barrier. You see, one of the problems we are facing is that there’s a National Water Resources Master Plan that has been in existence since 1995.
There are projects that are identified of which Kashambilla dam was one of them, on this flood mitigation measures. But there has been no discipline by previous administrations to follow that plan. If that plan had been followed in relation to this flood aspect, a lot could have been done by now to alleviate it.
But as I said, you can only do what you can do. But one thing we are doing now since we came into office, we are trying to do a master plan study of river Niger and Benue, these are major drainage bases and where we have the highest impact on flood. River Niger for instance, you know, it passes across the Sahara Desert, so it comes with a lot of sediments.
So we are trying to do a master plan, unfortunately funding has been an issue, but we are still working, we are trying to find ways and means. Even if we get this master plan done, the study alone might take two to three years. If we are able to do that, we hope that subsequent administrations will have the discipline to implement.
But it will take 20 to 30 years of consistent implementation to be able to get flood control structures of River Niger and Benue. We have an estimate of about $14 billion, and obviously even if you have the money, the scope of the work is not something you can do in one or two years or 10 years, you just have to continue. So we are hoping that before we leave, we lay the foundation for that and we hope that subsequent administrations will take it up.
This is all we can do, but there’s what states and local authorities can also do. For instance, planning approvals. You know there’s a flood plain or a water course, once water has passed a certain place, it has once attained a certain flood level, believe me, even if it takes a thousand years, one day it will come back to that level.
So once you know this a flood-prone area, it’s only responsible that you should not be building. If you have to, then make sure that you have done the right study and put appropriate structure to divert the water. It’s possible to divert so that you can safeguard that location.
Other people just build illegally and then in the night when they are sleeping, they get swept away, sometimes the rains don’t tell you when they are coming. Every year, we unveil this annual flood outlook, I call on the states again to take seriously development control approvals and also simple opening of gutters and so on, will help a lot in alleviating the problem.
I hope we will be able to do this master plan for River Niger and Benue at least before the end of this administration so that subsequent administrations can continue. If you look at major developed and developing countries, it took them years. They kept on consistently doing certain things they had planned and over 100 years, they are now able to tame the river.
Not that they don’t have floods, but at least they have reduced the level of devastation. But then again, nature works in mysterious ways, and no matter your best efforts, there’s nothing you can do about them.
Nigeria urgently needs to increase food production, and most farmers rely on rainwater for irrigation. However, the country’s dams are lying dormant, raising concerns of their under-utilisation, which is believed to be affecting the fortunes of the sector. Are there interventions in this regard?
Absolutely! Recently, we launched a compendium of our dams, because we have over 400 dams, maybe half of them built by the federal government. But as you said, many of them are lying fallow. We have built these dams. The federal government has done its bit. The idea now is that state governments should be able to use that water to provide water to communities around them and also to expand to do some irrigation so they can support local farmers around.
In some cases, we have so many hydropower projects around them, but successive governments did little to have these power plants but there were no evacuation plans. For instance, if you go to Abeokuta/Oyan dam, they have been lying fallow since 1987, there are so many of them.
But what we’ve been doing is that we are working with the ministry of power, we inherited a directive by the previous administration in 2010, that the ministry of power should concession some of these mini-hydros, but to concession them also without evacuation. There’s a process going on in the mining and power sectors. We are working with them to try and concession those. We’ve successfully done the concession of Gurara, which is 30 megawatts.
We are soon going to concession Kashambilla, another 40 megawatts of electricity. But you can also use these dams for fishery and you can create tourism activities around them. The private sector can also come in. Since I came into office, I have been marketing these dams, I have seen what good entrepreneurs are doing in Oyan dam, even exporting tilapia.
We are busy importing tilapia into the country while others are doing tilapia in our country and exporting it. It’s funny, so we need to see more private sector involvement. If the states cannot do it, let the private sector come in. Even in our 15-year irrigation development programme, we have set aside one million hectares, we want to encourage the private sector to come into it.
But everyone is taking interest in agriculture. Some of our investors, since we’ve done the dams, will come and do some of the canals and so on. But some of them don’t want that. Mostly, they are looking at how to reduce their capital cost. There are potential benefits there, we need to complement each other, the federal government and the private sector.
And there are lots of big corporations that have started, Dangote group is doing well, Olam we are working with them in our river basins and so on. We are beginning to see a lot of interest in that, so hopefully we set the pace. Even our River Basins where we have lands that have not been utilised, we are leasing them out to commercial farmers, we’ve leased over 50,000 hectares to commercial farmers to use.
As I said, the dams are there, if you want to do fish farming, come to us, in no time we will give you whatever hectare you need and we will give you the conditions. The key thing is that you pay for the water rate, surface area of where you want to lay your cages and you must comply with our regulations of preserving the quality of the water. So all these things are available.
Nigeria is still struggling to end the menace of open defecation. As part of efforts to stamp out this ugly habit, President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019, signed Executive Order 009, titled: ‘The Open Defecation-Free Nigeria by 2025 and Other Related Matters Order.’ Two years after, Nigeria still has a very high number of persons defecating openly. Do you think there’s still a possibility of Nigeria being free from open defecation by 2025?
We are very optimistic that it will happen. Even today, we had our steering committee meeting, where we reported. We are supposed to be meeting twice a year to report. His Excellency, the Vice President is the chair of that steering committee and recall we started with one local government that was open defecation-free in 2017. Today, as I am talking to you, we have 71. In the last three months we’ve had 33 local governments that have become open defecation-free.
Before the end of this year, I expect we are going to get close to 100. Yes, we have 774 local governments, we had a setback because of COVID-19 lockdowns. We could have done better. But the rate at which the local governments are becoming open defecation-free is quite amazing and encouraging but there’s a lot of work to be done.
So we remain optimistic. Because some states have gone so far, like Katsina has about 21 local governments, Jigawa has about 18 local governments that are open defecation-free, we are looking for the first state that will be open defecation-free. The race is getting quite interesting.
I am a bit optimistic that we will reach our target. Even if we don’t reach our target by 2025, I’m sure we will reach there by 2030. But we are still looking at 2025, even the FCT launch was done two days ago and their commitment is to end open defecation by 2023, two years ahead of time. So fingers crossed.
For some reasons, you said earlier that the federal government should actually control the rivers. Do you also think that the states and local governments shouldn’t be in charge of providing access to water to people?
There’s no argument about that. Have you ever heard of any state ever being prevented by the federal government from tapping into a river? If you go to Kano, all the major water treatment plants are in river Kano, even in Lagos, it’s Ogun river that’s their major source of water.
So there’s been no problem at all with that. Even though the law provides that where we build dams and so on, if the states are going to use the water they should pay, and it’s gazetted, it’s there. We have said as long as the water is for water supply, we have not been charging the state for anything.
Even though the law is there. We didn’t create the law, it’s been there for ages so there had never been any reason. The logical reason why the federal government should be in charge of water bodies is to protect downstream communities. There has to be some protection, that’s why even as a country, we are a member of Niger basin authority, nine countries are involved.
Because of the Niger Basin Water Charter that we have, there’s no way that other countries can do anything without Nigeria accepting. That’s what the charter says, there must be a consensus between all countries. So there’s a body, this body was set up in the 1960s to protect all our interest on River Niger.
There is a report that in six years, the ministry under you has not awarded new contracts but has only continued with inherited ones even some from 1976, including those awarded by the former President Shehu Shagari administration. Why is the ministry so bogged down with abandoned projects?
Well, It’s a professional judgement on our part. It makes more sense, investment has been made, a lot of investment has been made in these projects, they have not been finished. It just makes sense, and if they are not finished who has benefited? Nobody.
Only the contractor who maybe has made small profits from there, the work he has done before and that’s it. The people that the project is meant for have not benefited anything.
For a water scheme, the same way as in power, if you don’t have the entire system working, you need a source, transmission, storage and distribution. If all these things are not working at the same time, you don’t have a water scheme. The water will not be there, if you don’t have a treatment plant, the water you get at the end of the pipe is not fit for drinking.
It’s the same principle with the power sector and one of the major problems we have with the power sector when the major interventions were made, they were only looking at generation, they didn’t look at the distribution and transmission aspects. So we now invested so much in generation at the expense of transmission and distribution.
So in the water scheme everything is integrated, so we felt that since investments have been made and people have not benefited that we should pause and try to finish these ones. It just makes sense, if I start a water project today, it could take more than five to six years to finish.
And with the kind of budgetary allocation that we’ve been seeing, maybe we will not, and that was what these projects were suffering. Some of them were suffering from very low budgetary allocations. Water projects are capital intensive and they take a long time to manifest, so you need to have a lot of funds that you put in them. We came, we found projects that were started in 1992, 1987 and they have been abandoned for five to 10 years.
These projects are all exposed to the element, so you spend more money trying to clear the bush, getting to the site and so on, by the time that money finishes and there’s no more again for him to continue with the project. So we said no, we took an audit of all these projects.
We inherited 116, we categorised them, some projects we say, these are not viable, we move them, we are not going to continue with them, especially when we realise very little money has been spent on them and they are no longer viable.
Some that we felt will be better handled by the state government, we say to the state government, we can’t do this project, can you handle them, some of them took them and completed them.
We took other projects, the rest we said priority one, two, three. So we’ve been working on priorities one and two and we have finished quite a number of them. Example, Zobe water supply, since 1992 it was started and because of $122 million it was never finished, it had three different contractors along the way.
And we said, we can’t even finish because we don’t have the resources, so we went to the Katsina state government and said look, let’s partner on this. We can do this aspect of the work so that water can get to Katsina, you go and find funds elsewhere and complete it and they agreed.
Today, Katsina has water, so we’ve made a lot of progress. If I had wanted to do like others, I would have said, we want to start our new projects but we would have come back to the same problem.
We will leave office, these projects will not be finished. So for us, it was a practical and sensible decision to do this. We have other schemes like the P-WASH programme which is the rural water supply programme, we have interventions for the IDPs. And sometimes, we get requests from the national assembly and we do some small towns’ schemes.
These are projects we can finish within one or two budget cycles. But any project that takes years to do, we have enough in the ministry so we are concentrating on those ones.
Talking about the River Basin Authorities that are under your ministry, do you really think they are fulfilling their mandate, part of which is to improve agricultural production and rural development? What is seen these days are River Basin Authorities that procure grinding pepper machines, sewing machines, building mosques, town halls, etc under various constituency projects. Should this be the case?
It has been a major issue for us here, but these are constituency projects, they are not projects initiated by the ministry and what we’ve tried to do is to encourage members of the national assembly that if they want to bring any project to us, they should bring projects that are within our core mandate to implement.
Since you took over the leadership of the ministry, how many of the water projects, dams etc that you inherited have been completed and are currently being put to use?
We have completed about 34 at the last count, now we have prioritised about 20 because we realised this administration tenure is going to end by 2023. From the 2022 budget, we’ve started to prioritise again.
When we did the prioritisation of priority one and two projects, they came to about seventy-something, out of that, we’ve finished about 34 and now we’ve reprioritised about 20. I’m not sure we will finish the 20 but maybe between 10 and 15 before we bow out in 2023.
A lot of challenges. Of course budgetary, has been a major problem, as you know the country has been having serious revenue challenges since we came into office, not our fault , but it’s the reality. But we thank Mr President very much. This ministry is grateful to Mr President because there’s a dollar window where he has been able to provide additional funding for us on a yearly basis with which we have been able to complete those projects.
Going forward, we are also hoping to leverage on this to be able to work on those 20 priority projects that we are talking about and none of them is new, all of them are existing projects.
