Water crisis hits Bamenda

If Water is life as it’s said to be, one can conveniently say there isn’t enough life in Bamenda, capital city of the North West Region. Getting drinkable water in the city has become a big nightmare.

It’s been several months now that residents of Bamenda have witnessed inadequate supply of pipe borne water resulting from what has been described as inefficiency and poor management by those in charge of infrastructure that supplies the City with water.

As we report, the gravity of the situation has degenerated severely and is keeping the region’s Administration very worried, almost to a breaking point. To avert any unprecedented uprising from the public, the government, through the Bamenda City Council, BCC, in collaboration with the Army Rescue Unit in Mullang, has resorted to rationing what is available to locals of the municipality. Heavy duty trucks can be seen crisscrossing Bamenda daily to ration water according to schedules frequently announced on local FM radios that must be strictly respected if homes must get drinking water.

When the situation first began getting out of the control of municipal authorities, the Region’s governor, Adolphe Lele stepped in and began using the Army Rescue Unit, to ration water to various neighborhoods of the city.

Despite that effort, the problem remains largely unresolved. There was some welcome relief and hope when at the beginning of this month, the city witnessed some heavy down pour of rain. Residents had thought that complimenting the rations with rain water should help a great deal. But to their disappointment, the rains have instead made the situation worse.

Streams which served people with considerable volume of water have become very dirty owing to rubbish that is carried from the streets by rain water and deposited into it.

The situation is even more difficult for people who depend solely on pipe-borne water for all their day-to-day activities.

It is however, somewhat better for those who own wells. Some of the well-owners are in fact now making brisk business as they sell water in varied quantities to those who have no other source to depend on.

The situation has reduced some to looking like madmen on the streets as they carry empty containers of different colours and sizes to their various job sites just in case the taps there flow that day.

People who queue up with huge containers to receive water, at scheduled distribution centres, sometimes end up getting no drop of water to take home.

As if this isn’t enough, homes without pit toilets now suffer very poor hygienic conditions because of the stench emanating from the toilets – which, of course, cannot be properly taken care of owing to the water shortage.

For the same reason, most public toilets in Bamenda have become unbearably dirty and utterly unusable attracting a possible disease epidemic. Already, there has been a reported increase in the rate of typhoid disease cases in the city.

The one and only prayer in the hearts of most residents of the City is for the rainy season to come in full gear, so they can have rain water on regular basis to depend on, at least for the time being.