The Enugu State water cooperation has assured that efforts are ongoing to ensure that Enugu residents will get adequate water supply which will lead to revenue generation to the tune of over One Hundred Million naira monthly for the state.
This was disclosed to newsmen by the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the cooperation, Engr. Innocent Diyoke on Wednesday, 7th of July, 2021.
Diyoke maintained that all that’s needed to fully commercialise the water sector is on course with the $50 million grant from the French Development Agency (AFD).
“This funding is already in place and is being used to expand the Enugu Water supply system including the production centres. As we speak, the consultant for detailed engineering has commenced work and has already worked for one month, he has 5 months to complete the studies, design and produce working drawings and tender documents for complete rehabilitation and revamping of the Oji River and Ajali production stations as well as the transmission lines from Oji and Ajali to Enugu. This will involve laying 12km, 700mm diameter pipelines, extension of pipelines in Enugu to areas that aren’t yet served as well as the complete rehabilitation of the distribution system and changing some of the aged, old asbestos pipes that are prone to bursting and breaking and this is on board and in the next one or two years, Enugu will be flooded with water from that project.
“The AFD project is addressing the complete water system. The water demand in Enugu today stands at 150, 000 cubic metres and the capacity production of both Ajali and Oji river is about 120, 000 but when the AFD project is completed, we will be getting over 180,000 cubic metres per day.
“The idea of AFD project is that water will be fully commercialised and the cooperation will be self sufficient and will show that water is an economic good as well as social good. We want to commercialise the sector because residents are willing to pay provided there is water. The target is to make as much as N100, 000, 000 every month when this project comes in place in the next 1-2 years.”
Diyoke also said that while they are waiting for this project to take off, the state government isn’t resting and doing all that’s necessary for Ndi Enugu to have adequate water supply.
According to Engr. Diyoke, since the Board was inaugurated, there has been a tremendous increase in water supply in the state as a result of the rapid repairs of most of the facilities by the state government.
“Water supply in the state was very low as a result of the breakdown of pumping equipments at the production centres at Ajali and Oji River Stations. The Board quickly went into action and undertook a rapid assessment of the existing systems and came up emergency rehabilitation measures that needed to be done to improve water. supply immediately.
“The result of the assessment was forwarded to the Governor who graciously approved the funds for these repairs and as we speak, these measures have improved the water supply from 10,000 to over 40,000 cubic meters daily.”
He also said that the same rehabilitation work was done at Nsukka “which had only one functional borehole but currently, four are working and in the next 2 weeks, six will be working as the Governor has released the funds needed to make this happen and the pumps are already on site and will be installed shortly.”
“In the last few months, the government awarded a contract for the rehabilitation of the crash programme boreholes, which will see the repair of 12 of such boreholes and the Governor recently awarded the contract of N600m for this project. The work is ongoing and the 8 of the boreholes have been recovered and ready for testing. This will further improve the water supply in Enugu.
Similarly, the Managing Director of the Water Cooperation, Engr. Martin Okwor said the cooperation has set up a “Rapid Response Team” that will be “responding to the bursts while the AFD projects comes in to replace these weak pipes.”
