Adamu: Why 54m Nigerians Don’t Have Access to Portable Water

By Dele Ogbodo

The Minister of Water Resources, Mr. Suleiman Adamu, said on Tuesday that over 54 million Nigerians cannot get portable water to dink.

 While fielding questions in a radio programme in Abuja, he said government at all levels did not plan their water schemes and projects in tandem with the country’s population growth.

Acknowledging the challenges in the sector, he said: “There are many problems why we don’t have tap water, I will say that we are not planning our water scheme in tandem with the population growth in the country.

“For instance, I was living here in Abuja in the 1990s and the water scheme was for 500,000 people and at that time, but then we were already 1.5 million people.”

Adamu who admitted that the present water problems and shortages started about 20 years ago in Abuja and in other cities was due to the neglect of the water infrastructure.

 He added: “We don’t upgrade the infrastructure to allow in accordance with the population growth and over time we do not maintain and replace all system and some of the pipes in kano and Lagos were laid during the colonial times.

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