Hon. Aliyu Ahman Pategi, Chairman, House committee on water Resources totally agrees with the maxim that water is life. In this interview with Amina Alhassan Ahman and Emma Okereh, he expressed worry that budgetary allocation to the sector is steadily on the decline, warning that government must change its attitude if the country must make progress. He also revealed that over 200 water assets have been abandoned by the federal government.

Nigerians would like to know what laws the National Assembly especially, the House of Representatives, where you belong, has been doing to ensure that water supply is available to the people?
Yes, am happy you raised the issue of law-making and its relationship with the availability of water. For us Nigerians, it is not the law that has prevented the availability of affordable water to the people.

The reason why the teeming masses of the nation do not have access to safe drinking water is because of inconsistency of government policies in the sector.

You are aware that during the days of former President Yar'Adua, the then minister of the water resources, Abba Ruma felt that the responsibility of providing water should be shifted to the state and local governments, but we know that water, even though we have abundance of it in Nigeria,  needs to be captured and collected through the water retaining facilities.

If you  look at the population centers, like Lagos, Ibadan, Sokoto, Gusau, Kadunaor  Ilorin, most of these centers including Abuja, billions of naira are required for Dams to be constructed to retain the water.

I will give you an example. We are happy that we are enjoying water supply in the Federal Capital Territory. The reason is that  government had to spend billions of naira to construct the Gurara water transfer project to provide water to the city of Abuja.

It has been transported through pipes for over 70km from the Gurara Dam in Kaduna state. You see, this is the enormous funds required to ensure that the water we have in our homes are brought to us. Large amount are required to put in the infrastructure that would provide safe affordable water for our people.

Now we have several laws within the sector. Some of them are even international; some of them have been promulgated by the United Nations. Most of the laws state that water is a human right. It is the responsibility of the government to ensure that the people have free access to safe portable water. It's a right.

In a developing nation like Nigeria experts have cited that over 67millions of Nigerians still don't have access to safe drinking water in the year 2012.

You are aware of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) strategy and you can see that a lot needs to be done by all tiers of government, and the federal government has the most resources to ensure that water retaining facilities are constructed.

The Kainji Jebba Dam is over N60 billion and we have several dams like that littered all over the country. Many of them have not been completed, some of them are near completion, while some are even 95 percent completed, but the extra funds required to fund these Dams are not there to complete them. So a lot of money is being tied down.

The people are suffering for lack of access to water, yet the funds required to complete these water projects are not being provided by the federal government, year in and year out.  This is really the problem we are facing in this sector.

And unless something drastic is done, the problem will still be there. If you look at the budget of 2012, about 70billion was proposed.

When the proposal from the president came to the Committee on Water Resources, we looked at it, noting that N39billion was proposed for the entire water sector, which included over 250 Dams we have in Nigeria.

It also included the water supply department of the ministry, including the drainage department of the ministry, the reservoir department and the collective 12 river basins, around the country.

This amount was not sufficient to complete these projects, which the government itself initiated at the center. It is for this that we have consistently  and severally insisted that policy makers in the ministry of finance and budget office as well as those who are in the position of authority, that something drastic should be done to make funds available for the completion of these water projects. The situation is pathetic.

You mentioned that in the 2012 budget, about N70 billion was proposed, while only N39billion was approved at the end of the day. Can we say that government does not look at water as a priority?
No. That is not what I meant.  I said progressively over the years, the amount allocated to water resources in this country have been going down.

In the budget that was passed it was N70billion that was passed in 2011. In 2012, the proposal that came to us was only N38billion, but in the wisdom of the committee, members insisted that each member of the committee should bring their zonal intervention fund to water sector, so that they can have project to bring back to their people.

And for that amount of over N40billion was given to the sector collectively by members and senators. It is this quantum of money that the finance ministry has refused to release to the ministry itself, the river basin and the agencies of the water sector. There are three agencies of the water sector that receive zero allocation in the second quarter.

I will give you an example, the senate president is from Benue state, and the Benue River Basin is the one in charge of Makurdi. Can you believe that the finance ministry only released N22million to the Lower Benue River Basin Authority? What do you expect them to do with this money? These are the issues that we have raised and are the cry of Nigerians.

You know that associated to good health is through drinking water. Can you imagine the suffering of the teeming masses in the villages, where children of school going age are told to go the stream sometimes for 2 to 3km with buckets on their heads to go and fetch water from the stream?
We are still living in that age in the year 2012, and we are three years away from achieving the MDGs. unless we want to lie to ourselves, there is certainly no leadership.

There is no way to move the welfare of the people forward, this is why our message has been consistent so long as I remain as the chairman of the committee of water resources I will keep impressing it on government  that their responsibility to the Nigerian people must be carried out.

As a fellow up, this attitude of the budget going down, is it as a result of the level of importance attached to this sector now?
I had insisted that this sector must be funded by the federal government because we are close to the people and we know the communities that lack access to portable drinking water.

This is why we have equally insisted on the construction of dams, because dams are multi-purpose since they are used not just for water supply to the population centers, but also used for irrigation for agriculture purposes to grow crops and as a nation.

We have always maintained that as part of government policies that we need food security and that the amount we used in foreign exchange to import food is too high. We are importing everything left, right and center.  The farmer that is to till the soil needs to be healthy. 

You cannot be healthy if you don't have access to safe drinking water and very sanitary condition to live. Equally, if you have irrigated field you can be assured of food security and it will reduce the burden of importing most of this food stuff.

We still import rice when we can be self-sufficient and even export rice.

The state governments had pay close to nothing for the bulk of water supply to the population centers. Now, the Goronyo Dam supplies water to the entire Sokoto people, how much does the state government pay?
The Gurara Dam that I told you about supplies water to Abuja, how much do they pay for the management of the dam, nothing.

So if the state governments can come together to fashion out something with the federal government to ensure that something is paid so that other Dams can be developed and other water assets can be developed and the existing one can be maintained.

Honourable, you know the relationship between committee chairmen in  the National Assembly and the chief executive officers in  the parastatals and agencies. Some Nigerians will say that chairmen of committees romance a lot with these CEOs, which a times weaken their oversight function abilities. What is your take on this?
Well, a synergy is expected between the committees of key sectors and the heads of the MDAs that oversea these sectors. We must relate and I certainly don't think that there is any problem in that area especially, for my committee.

  As chairman of a committee, what do you think should be done to make these committees stand on their own, independent of the MDA they oversee?
We come down to the issue of funding again. The committees of the National Assembly are poorly funded, like my committee has had some referrals from the floor for investigation.  There is no sufficient fund to carry out some assignments. I will give you an example. 

We did an investigative tour of the Goronyo Dam, when the stairway collapsed. I had to fund it personally and I have another four referrals to go through and there is no fund.

So you see running a National Assembly is expensive, but the people must be aware that when we ask for this fund they should be patient with us  and not castigate when we ask for what we need to deliver the task ahead.

The US congress spent close to 4billion dollars a year and how much do we spend in National Assembly and how many are they, look at it. If we should function effectively the people must accept the fact that democracy is expensive.

In the course of your oversight function, are satisfied with the deployment and disbursement of funds in the Water Resources?
When they don't even have enough, how can we now begin to say that we are not satisfied with the disbursement of funds? Of course there are one or two cases of managing directors  of river basin authorities that have left their money till around December before they started awarding contract and not paying contractors. 

We have come down very hard on them. The little you have you must give to the contractors to start working. I don't want the situation where contractors will leave the sites because when they come back they will ask for more funds as a result of the time difference for remobilizing back to the sites.

Is there any law that is governing these river basin authorities?
Yes. If you look at the river basin authority under the military, some of them employ close to 3,000 or 4,000 people. Now most river basin authorities just have skeletal staff of between 100 and 300 and some even less.

The reason is this, the military in its wisdom decided that some of the functions of the River basins should be taken over and the river basins themselves should be privatize.

River basin was so well equipped in the past to the extent that they have bulldozers. They constructed their own roads. If you are building a dam for instance, there is no need awarding the portion that has to do with opening up the road between the dam and the population center.

The river basins were equipped before to carry out that road project, since they have the equipments and expertise that was required to take some of these

River basin before has the reach to build these boreholes that we are talking about, they could do simple tares, by collecting water from some villages. Now they can't do any more, those equipment were sold out. A number of workers have been dispatched to other ministries. Work schedule has been limited. 

That is why river basins, which were even use to run school within the offices and hotels, where people can come in and stay are now a ghost of what they supposed to be