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Water management: Disaster in waiting
2006-10-10 09:11:30
By Editor
It is not in doubt that water resource is a crucial component of any development virtually affecting all realms of life – industrial, agriculture, transport, education and power generation among others.
However, despite the importance attached to water, societies, governments and individuals seem to utilise or exploit the resource without due regard to principles of sustainability.
Like other parts of the world, the East African Region has in the recent past taken the full impact of wasteful and unsustainable exploitation of the environment in relation to water resource.
Prolonged drought, famine and the current persistent electric power crisis affecting the region is the apparent aftermath of wanton destruction of the environment resulting in dwindling resources.
This is manifest in drying up of hitherto all seasonal rivers, drop of water levels in the lakes in the region and worst of all, the siltation and drying up of water levels in the region’s hydro power generating dams.
For the sake of the future generation, economic prosperity and posterity, there is need for attitude change, sound policy formulation and legislative reforms in water resource utilisation.
This is requisite at individual, community, national and regional levels.
But with indications that water ministers in Eastern Africa are set to establish a regional coordination centre to collect information in the water sector, which will feature the policy environment, infrastructural status and shared water resources in the region, a ray of hope is the horizon.
We applaud the initiative because the centre will be crucial in collecting information from Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Kenya, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda in order to unpack targets and commitments of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM).
Even though it is our hope that the strategy and centre will seriously take into account sub-regional and national economic and social realities.
It is our informed view that the establishment of the centre is timely and will serve towards environmental conservation and sustainability.
The cost of wasteful and water mismanagement is enormous to the national and regional economies.
Haphazard water utilisation in the region has just been an environmental disaster in the waiting.
And this, we believe has been facilitated by the inadequate information on the water sector in the region.
We are optimistic that with the centre in place and functional, experts would be able to develop uniform indicators in the region to monitor progress in water supply and sanitation coverage.
As opposed to the past, we believe the centre ought to agree on a regional water infrastructure development plan, which will contain key development projects with political approval. In fact, this will greatly enhance water security in the region and contribute to the attainment of the MDG targets.
Besides sharing the regional water infrastructure plan with multi-lateral funding agencies, it is important to set up appropriate management institutions for transboundary water basins in the region other than the Nile Basin Initiative which pursues cooperation on the Nile River.
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