Nigeria’s Ministry of Water Resources says so far, it has completed over 30 water supply projects across the country,
Minister of Water Resources, Suleiman Adamu, stated this on Thursday at the weekly Ministerial briefing organised by the Presidential Communications Team at the State House, Abuja.
According to Adamu, the current administration led by President Muhamamdu Buhari, inherited a total of 116 projects and the ones so far completed include 12 dams, 16 irrigation and eight hydropower projects.
He said: “We inherited about 166 ongoing and abandoned projects and we took a strategic decision that we are going to concentrate more on completing the projects that we found. So, we have not been in the habit of starting new projects.
“After we did a technical audit in 2016, we prioritized them into high, medium and low and that has been what has been driving us. Water infrastructure is a money guzzler and part of the reason why most of these projects were not completed was because there was no adequate financial provision so we thought that we had to find other sources to find the money that will enable us complete these projects and we had to think outside the box.
“We introduced the water sector roadmap which is what has been guiding us; it’s a 15 year programme, which we deliberately did for that long because you cannot have a snapshot of the water sector, it’s a dynamic and organic sector. Water goes with population growth, so whatever you are doing, you have to keep doing it.
“We have over 200 dams in this country with a capacity of 11.2 billion cubic meters for irrigation, 900 million cubic meters for water supply and 18 million cubic meters for hydropower. Out of the 37 dam projects that we inherited, we have completed 12 and 20 more are prioritized for completion by 2023 if we are able to get the required funding; we had a little setback because of COVID-19,” he said.
He said the Buhari led administration has been able to add a total of 146 million liters of water to water supply across the country per day, reaching 12.5 million people in the process, in the last five years.
“All of the projects we have completed, we inherited them. Substantial amount of money had been spent on them but abandoned and if a water project is not completely finished, 100 percent, it is not a project, it is zero work done because the water will not get there,” he said.
The Minister said the ministry has adopted the use of solar power to facilitate water supply instead of depending solely on electricity.
Giving a rundown of some of the hydropower projects completed, the Minister mentioned Kashimbila dam in Taraba State, Galma in Kaduna, Ogwashiuku in Delta and Adada in Enugu State.
The Minister noted that Nigeria has a lot of potentials for irrigation farming, which can help the country achieve food security.
“Under our new plan, we have identified that the country has about 3.14 million hectares of land suitable for irrigation and that’s a potential and on the basis of that, we developed in 2016 a new programme; National Irrigation development Programme that is aimed at raising the federal government’s infrastructure assets form the current 170, 000 to 500, 000 by 2030 so that by then, at least half of the country’s potentials would have been achieved.
“There is no way we can achieve food security without Nigerian growing food all year round. If you have irrigation you can produce rice three times, sometimes even four times a year depending on the location and that is why irrigation is very important, sometimes it is a solution also to drought,” he said.
On open defecation, the Minister informed Journalists that the country has been making slow but steady progress in achieving its target.
“This administration launched the Open Defecation Free Nigeria roadmap in 2016 and since then we have moved on to inaugurate the clean Nigeria use the toilet campaign in November 2019, followed by an executive order No 9 by the President and before then we had celebrated the first Local Government Area to be 100 percent open defecation free, that was Obanliku Local Government in 2017 .
He explained that now, there are 62 Local Government Areas in the country that are open defecation free, which he said makes Nigeria far from the target.
