The Minister of Water Resources, Alhaji Suleiman Adamu, has cautioned state governments on paying “lip service” to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) issues and urged them to prioritise the issues on their development plan.
Adamu told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in New York that the Federal Government was doing enough but the state and local governments had been paying lip service to WASH issues.
He said he had been canvassing for states to involve more in WASH for the past seven years, noting that the Federal Government has put in place so many incentives to encourage the State Governments.
“In 2016, having realised that we have not achieved the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), we were supposed to meet 75 per cent but we were at 68 per cent.
“We were at 68 per cent when I came into office and MDGs ere ending them, I asked, why did we fail to meet the targets of MDGs?
“We realised, we were all relying on budgetary allocation, and we looked at the statistics and realised that we had 68 per cent coverage at the national level.
“If you disintegrate the data, 50 per cent of the rural areas were not covered,’’ Adamu said.
To address this gap, the minister said the Federal Government came up with the ‘Partnership for Expanded Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (PEWASH)’ Programme to increase water coverage.
According to him, PEWASH is a national collaborative instrument towards improving access to water and sanitation specifically in rural areas.
Adamu said that PEWASH was designed for two things, primarily to address the issue of access to water, sanitation and hygiene for rural communities, but at the same time to incentivise states to invest more.
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“With the PEWASH programme, it is on 50/50 bases, the Federal Government will contribute 50 per cent while the State Governments will contribute 50 per cent for Water Scheme and we’re working with 21 states now,’’ he said.
In addition, Adamu said that in 2018, the ministry did a diagnostic report that showed that water supply was in the decline, saying that the report shows that only 30 per cent of Nigeria’s population in 1992 had pipe borne water.
“The percentage dropped to seven per cent in 2015, so it shows that the sector is in serious crisis.
“And that was when we now launched the new National WASH Action Plan which was launched by President Buhari on November 2018 alongside that launch, he declared a state of emergency on water sanitation and hygiene.
“This is a sector that is in crisis and he requested all states to join the Federal Government so that we move together to change the indices.
“After that, we now established a new budget line to support states, which again to practically use the National Water Resources policy, we put a new budget line so that states can come without urban water supply schemes and investments. “
