Lagos residents at risk from contaminated water(I)

In this report, KUNLE FALAYI looks into the likely contamination of water supplied by the Lagos State Water Corporation to some parts of the state and the likely effect on public health and the lives of residents who get their daily water supply from the source

The boy could not have been more than five years old. But as he stooped with his bare bottom on the edges of a canal-like sewer beside the rail tracks at Ijora Badia, a densely populated slum in Lagos, the grimace on the boy’s face showed the urgent need that stomach upset had forced upon him. He had to relieve himself fast.

In 40 seconds, the boy was done. He made no attempt to clean up as he pulled up his pants and ran back barefoot to his mother’s shop.

In front of the shop which is just four metres away from the canal, the boy’s mother conversed freely with a few other residents. It was clear that what the boy had just done was not new.

That canal is not just a toilet to many residents living and doing business around it, it is also a drain for butchers who dispose cow blood and entrails in it from Ijora-Badia’s meat market.

But despite its dirty state, at least 10 water pipes ran through it, linking storage tanks that serve residents of the area drinking and cooking water.

Many of the pipes, it was noticed, had been patched and repaired with rubber stripes wound around them to cover up leaking parts.

Unfortunately, the residents have no idea that for many years, they might have inadvertently been drinking the same wastes they have passed into the sewer.

In Nigeria, access to safe drinking water is still so much of a challenge that out of the 868,000 Nigerian children which pneumonia.org estimated to die every year, a quarter – a whopping 217,000 – are victims of water borne diseases.

The United Nations Children’s Fund has a more alarming statistics indicating that 335,000 Nigerian children die annually from unsafe water consumption and poor sanitation.

UNICEF’s fact sheet on water and sanitation states, “More than a billion people (worldwide) do not have access to safe water and well over two billion people live without adequate sanitation. At any given time, more than half of the developing world’s population is suffering from one or more of the main diseases associated with unsafe water and poor sanitation.

“For children, the chances of survival dwindle in the absence of these essentials. Every day, 6,000 children die of water-related diseases. Young children are the first to get sick and die from waterborne and sanitation-related illnesses—including diarrhoeal diseases and malaria.

Water merchants or merchants of death?

One reputation associated with Ijora-Badia is the fact that a larger part of the slum is built on a landfill site, a reason it is impossible for the slum dwellers to sink boreholes in the area.

This feature of the area, however, has become a goldmine for water merchants who see a way of providing a service, albeit in a deadly way, to residents while laughing all the way to the bank.

Very common around the rail line of Ijora-Badia are water pumps of different sizes installed at various corners by water merchants, who run pipes over several meters to other parts of the community where their storage tanks are located.

But to avoid regular destruction of the pipes by pedestrians, the merchants run them through sewers, drains and gutters, which are repulsive to sight. Years of accumulated wastes have turned the drains into black, brackish mixture of different kinds of deposits that emit horrible smell.

All over most parts of Ijora-Badia, the situation is the same, numerous pipes criss-cross the slum like overfed reptiles.

“The water sellers are our only choice. How many people do you think can afford to buy sachet water here even as cheap as it is?” a young man told our correspondent as he bought water from one of the storage tanks of a water merchant.

Water packaged in 50cl nylon sachet sells for N5 at Ijora. It will take 50 of that to fill a 25-litre jerrycan, which the merchants sell to the residents for N50.

But sadly, death could be as cheap as N50.

N10,000 per month for illegal connection

Itunnu Olusigun, one of the merchants who sell water at Ijora, demanded whether our correspondent was from the Lagos State Water Corporation. Her face had creased into a frown as if in protest when our correspondent approached her.

“I thought you were from the water corporation because I don’t owe for this month,” she said.

Olusigun would later explain how merchants had come to take the place of the water corporation at Ijora.

“We pay N10,000 a month to Lagos State Water Corporation officials. They supply us the water through their main line and we use our machines to pump it to the tanks from which we sell to the people. But the pipes belong to us. We lay them ourselves,” she said.

Asked if there was any guideline from the LSWC or inspection of how water vendors lay their pipes in the area, she said she did not know since she had never heard of such thing before.

The LSWC’s facilities in different parts of the state produce a combined 170.4 million gallons of water per day.

But it is ironic that Ijora-Badia where unregulated water merchants have a field day is less than one kilometre away from the headquarters of the LSWC.

While Olusigun was speaking with our correspondent, she sighted and pointed out a LSWC official well known in the area who spoke with our correspondent under condition of anonymity.

He said, “The Water Corporation cannot take on the responsibility for supplying water to Ijora-Badia. This is a slum and as you can see, it is almost impossible to take up that kind of responsibility because of how disorganised this whole place is.

“The water sellers are the ones who take up that risk. We supply them the water and they sell to the people. How they do it is their problem. But they must not fail to pay their N10,000 monthly due.”

In one of the many unnamed street corners at Ijora Badia, which our correspondent passed through, spurting pumps fed water into a Storex tank and here, the situation is also the same. The pipes were also repaired with rubber stripes running through a murky drain filled with sewage.

When our correspondent took a sample of the water in the tank, the young water seller, who thought he wanted to drink the water said jokingly, “You will pay o.”

Asked if he thought the water was safe to drink, he laughed incredulously. “What else do you think we use it for? It is clean water from the water corporation!”

When the young man who identified himself as David Akugbue was asked whether he was aware that the gutter water might have permeated the wrappings around the damaged part of the pipes, he shook his head.

“If you know how we tie the pipes properly when they leak, you won’t ask that kind of question,” he said.

But Akugbue is just a vendor. He probably had not heard of the process called ‘back siphonage’ in plumbing.

According to the US’ Environmental Protection Agency’s website, back siphonage occurs if a water pipe breaks, pressure drops to the extent that a back flow suction is created. The suction sucks in the contaminants surrounding water body from outside the pipe.

According to water resources expert, Mr. Michael Ale, who is the Chief Executive Officer, Male Integrated Science Nigeria Limited, it could be very dangerous to submerge water pipes in gutters because of the possibility of infiltration of contaminants if the pipe gets damaged.

He said subterranean installation of pipes is the best.

Ale, who is also the President of Nigeria’s Association of Drillers, said, “You cannot see water pipes lying anywhere in developed countries. Burying them deep in the ground is still the best and safest option. A pipe that gets broken when lying on the surface or lying in a drainage may pose serious health risk to the people.

“Lagos is considered the best state in the country in terms of water infrastructure but if this kind of thing is happening in Lagos, you can imagine what would be going on in other parts of the country with less regulation. I think Lagos lacks adequate capacity to manage the enormity of this issue.”

It is impossible to get statistics of the rate of child mortality in Ijora-Badia because as Dr. Toju Aluko, a doctor who owns a clinic around the place put it, many of the residents of the area would prefer to administer herbal medicine on their children when they fall ill than take them to the hospital.

“We see cases of diarrhoea regularly in our clinic. I have no doubt that it is a result of the consumption of contaminated water. But many of the residents here would not even come to the hospital. It is not the water alone; there are so many unhygienic practices around Ijora,” he said.

My world collapsed when my son died from diarrhoea – Ijora-Badia resident

A resident directed our correspondent to the home of 28-year-old food vendor, Mrs. Khadijat Akibu, an Egun woman from Badagry who said she got married at Ijora-Badia.

In June 2014, her life seemed to have collapsed when her only child, four-year-old Akeem, started stooling and it not stop for days.

“People kept telling me that it would subside on its own. I used many local herbs. It would seem as if they were working, the stooling would reduce, then it would increase again,” Akibu said.

The woman who seemed to have got over the initial grief for her late son broke down again when she was narrating her ordeal to our correspondent.

She said, “I later had to take Akeem to a private clinic. But at that stage, he had become very lean. They told me that it was diarrhoea.

“The nurses at the clinic blamed me for not bringing him to the hospital on time. But my husband was usually out of town. I had the challenges of money at the time.

“He was put on a drip for a day. He was given injection and drugs and was discharged the same day. Akeem died the following day.”

Akibu said she did not know whether her son got the disease from the water they drink.

“It is the same water the vendors supply us here at Ijora that my son and I drank. I still drink the water,” she said.

According to the Country Representative of WaterAid Nigeria, Dr. Michael Ojo, the rate of child mortality in Nigeria is too alarming to ignore. He said many of the child deaths could be prevented with improved access to safe drinking water and improved hygiene as simple as hand washing.

But Ijora-Badia is not the only place where the practice of running pipes through dirty gutter is common in Lagos.

At Ojodu area of Lagos, Victor Olufadeji, a banker, was surprised when he first moved into his new apartment at Ishola Bello Street, to discover that the water supplied to the house was from the Lagos State Water Corporation.

He said, “I was glad to pay the N720 that each apartment in my house is levied every month. But I began to observe that my body itched me anytime I left the bathroom. I then began to have rashes all over my body as well.

“A dermatologist I consulted said the problem could only have come from the water. I used Luckily, I was not drinking the water but I used it for cooking. As soon as I started adding disinfectant to my bath water, the problem stopped.”

When our correspondent visited Olufadeji’s home, it was discovered that the pipe that supplies water to his house was submerged in murky, brackish water in the gutter in front of his house.

He has now made plans to relocate the pipes from the gutter. Meanwhile, our correspondent has taken a sample from the water in his house to see what the chemical composition might be.