Published 5th May, 2022

By Lolade Olu-Ojegbeje

Over 5,000 residents of Warawa community in Warawa Local Government, Kano State, have now been forced to share water with animals due to water shortage in the area.

According to TrackaNG, a public accountability monitoring body in Nigeria, residents of the community draw water from the same river their animals drink from.

During the dry season, the inhabitants trek over three kilometres to neighbouring villages to access boreholes. Sometimes, in those villages also, there is no water because there is no light to power the boreholes available.

According to residents of the community, the community has recorded several cholera outbreaks, with women and children as the biggest casualties. They also revealed residents still battle other life-threatening diseases due to the consumption of water drawn from the river.

Their children also miss school because they spend a greater part of every day trying to fill their kegs and other containers with water. There are times these residents would spend the entire day searching for water and still would not get any.

“The only time they have ever helped us was when our representative noticed we were contributing money by ourselves to fix the non-functional existing borehole in the village. Then he gave us N90,000. But some months after we fixed it, it went bad again,” said Mallam Ali, a resident of the community.

“We are begging the government to assist us. This water issue is a very big one affecting all of us. Both the young and old. They should help us and give us original boreholes. Not the one that won’t work or stop working after a few days or a month,” another resident, simply identified as Adamu, said.

Uadamen Ilevvaoge, Head TrackaNG, told FIJ that: “We visited the community on April 4 and nothing has changed in the community.”

FIJ sent a mail sent to Kano State’s Ministry of Water Resources but it had not been responded to at press time.

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