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Water for Sale! The Leadership Challenge

Bankole Olubamise, Acting Executive Director, DevNet, Lagos  Nigeria.

“We have not inherited the world from our forefathers, we have borrowed it from our children.”
Kashmiri proverb

Sustainable development, which means meeting our current needs without jeopardizing the needs of future generations, requires a deep understanding and skilled management of the various components of the earth’s environment. Proper management of the world’s freshwater supplies is important if we want to meet our current requirements for water as well as leave enough for future generations. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), an agency of the United Nations, ‘Africa and Asia have the least amount of water available per person…current estimates are that more than one billion people do not have ready access to safe drinking water. Poverty and lack of adequate water are closely related.’ In view of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and Nigeria’s National Economic programme (NEEDS) which places emphasis on poverty alleviation, we must be concerned about our water resources especially when we take into context the growing population of Nigeria and the UN population growth projections which predicts a doubling of population by 2050.

It is for this reason that the recent World Bank Loan for Water Projects in Lagos and Cross River States of Nigeria attracted the attention of NGOs, especially those with interest in water issues. The concerns range from interest in understanding what the projects seek to achieve, as well as understanding the conditionality attached to the loan; not least is the interest in knowing how the loans will be applied. This interest is further accentuated by the fact that developing countries have been under serious debt overhang. In fact, the Jubilee 2000 movement for debt cancellation has been a major feature of NGOs in this part of the world. It is also trite to mention that these loans when collected have never been applied to the projects for which they were sought in the first place, and even if applied the projects were either abandoned or badly implemented through a coalition of reasons, the most virulent of which is corruption.

Thus, NGOs sought and got a meeting with Alexander Mcphail [World Bank task team manager] and his team from the World Bank in Lagos. The meeting was set up to discuss a World Bank proposed Terms of Reference for a NGO utility feedback structure where the World Bank would hire NGOs as consultants. The NGOs strongly objected to the proposal. However, the meeting completely deadlocked when it was found that information provided on the Project Implementation Document provided by the Bank left out important details of the proposed loan. It was revealed that a leaked version of the more extensive (internal) World Bank Project Advisory Document (PAD) was available. A new meeting was scheduled in order to discuss the discrepancies and way forward. At the end of the rescheduled meeting, the following concessions were achieved:

1. NGOs will be represented on the Project Implementation Unit,
2. An NGO liaison Officer will be appointed at the Project Office,
3. The World Bank and NGOs will continue discussion on terms of reference for a feed back mechanism.

Following the meeting various strategies are being put in place to monitor the water project. The most important of this strategy for now is to form Community Water/Utility Board (CWB), as an intervention mechanism in the face of the purported privatization of water by the Lagos State Government, as well as a community-based initiative to monitor the World Bank Loan in the two states. This proposal is a great departure from the past where the communities normally rely only on government information sources for information about its activities or as has recently become the norm, relying on NGOs to intervene. The CWB initiative will be a broad-based coalition of community-based groups, NGOs and local residents associations.

The Goals of the Initiative will include amongst others:

• Ensure cheap and affordable water in Lagos and Cross River,
• Ensure service delivery by water/utility and regulator,
• Craft a Citizen’s Charter and defend the citizen’s rights enshrined therein,
• Challenge rate increases, fight for reduction and refund of overcharges,
• Ensure access to information about water quality/services,
• Promote tougher consumer protection laws at the state level and in consultation with others-at the national level,
• Promote consumer rights education, training and capacity building,
• Promote the health, welfare and prosperity of water/utility consumers,
• Ensure effective and democratic representation of water/utility consumers,
• Protect the interest of water consumers.

A move is already on to put structures in place for the efficient establishment and smooth functioning of this CWB.

In the World Banks’ PAD on the Lagos water project, the authors acknowledge that nine previous water projects have failed or underperformed. It further states that there is an element of risk involved in this particular project. Civil society activists therefore need to be very vigilant. Pointers are already signaling things to come. All efforts to reach Mr Olumuyiwa Coker, the Managing Director of Lagos Water Corporation in recent times have been unsuccessful. This to me is an indication that the state government has no intention of being transparent about this project. The onus is therefore on the civil society to put the government on the spot. We only hope, for their own sake, the World Bank will be willing to cooperate, at least so that they can report for once, that they succeeded with this loan. Forty years from now, when this loan should be due, I don’t want my children to ask me, “why did you allow the state government to take this loan which never performed?” I am afraid of that possibility, and so would be willing to do everything to make sure this project does not go the way of similar ones.

For me, I believe leadership is critical for sustainable development. Sometimes it’s not as if we do not have good programmes and policies, or that there are no institutions to support our developmental processes, but it’s sometimes – in my view most times - a problem of leadership. This is a time for civil society leadership. The challenges of the future require us to be up and doing. We must engage the government and the international community and institutions in ways never done before.

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