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On Saturday, Governor Peter Mbah of Enugu State inaugurated a state-of-the-art water scheme designed to provide clean water daily for the state’s residents.
Addressing the public while commissioning the water scheme at Ninth Mile Enugu, the governor said the new water scheme has capacity to deliver to businesses and families in Enugu 70 million litres of potable water daily “and this is but the first phase.
He said, in a few weeks his administration would also be commissioning new pumps in Oji water scheme to deliver another 50 million litres of water daily, noting, “This will give us a total daily delivery of 120m litres in Enugu, about twice the daily demand of Enugu urban.
Governor Peter Mbah during his election campaign promised to provide water for the people of Enugu state in 180 days in office. Mbah said ‘I cannot help but think back to our campaigns before the elections, where it all started.’
Given our vision and mission for the State it became evident to us very quickly that the challenge of water supply is fundamental to the achievement of our objective to take our GDP in the State from the current position of $4.4b to $30b within the next four to eight years.
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‘It was clear to us, that the status of water supply at the time was deplorable. At that time, there had been no reliable water supply in most parts of Enugu State for almost 20 years.’
‘This led to the situation we are dealing with now, where families have to queue endlessly to fetch water from tanker trucks who supply water in a very unreliable and epileptic fashion.’
‘Businesses on the other hand were forced to invest in extensive water infrastructure from tankage to additional reticulation and for large scale users like hotels, hospitals etc. many of them actually had to acquire tanker trucks of their own to afford themselves some reliability of supply.’
‘When we communicated this promise, it triggered disbelief in most quarters and that is perhaps understandable. After all, Ndi Enugu have seen before now countless successive but unsuccessful attempts to address this problem.’
‘Happily for us all, here we are 180 days from that promise, commissioning this project. We are currently supplying water at appreciable pressures to Enugu municipality and I can state here and now that pipe-borne water is here to stay.’
