ENVIRONMENT-MALI: City Runs Out of Water

By Almahady Cissé Reprint | | Print |

Almahady Cisse

KIDAL, Northeast Mali, May 14 2003 (IPS) - "Taking bath, which most people always take for granted, has become a luxury here,” says Ahmouden Ag Ikmass, deputy mayor of Kidal, referring to the acute water shortage in the region.

"We don’t have the luxury of taking bath every day,” says Aicha Wallet, a resident of Kidal, a town some 1,585 kilometres northeast of Bamako, the capital of Mali.

"To save water, we use less than two litres of water for bathing," she says. ”We don’t have any choice as we prefer to avoid the long queues and the fistfights that always erupt at the water pumps."

Lack of water, says Ikmass, ”has created insecurity in our streets and homes and around the few spots where water is available. Lately, a number of people have been hurt in scuffles over a few litres of water and have been referred to clinic for treatment”.

A tour of the city confirms Ikmass’s fears. Long queues of individuals, assembling around the few water points all day, have made the city to acquire the nickname ”The Three Bs”: barrels, bottles and buckets.

Captain Issa Coulibaly, commander of the city’s gendarmerie force, says fighting often breaks out when someone gets too smart and thinks he can jump the queue.

Others like Fanta Kane Maiga often pay the price for being patience. Maiga, a teacher, says: ”Yesterday evening, my daughter gave birth. Since 5 O’clock in the morning, I’ve been waiting at this pump and haven’t been able to get a single bucket of water with which to wash her linens. It’s a real shame,” she says.

Kidal, which is also known as Adrar des Iforas, is too rocky for agriculture, and too arid for rain. Kidal has a population of 77,000, mostly nomads, who eke out a living on the region’s 260,000-sq-km rough terrain.

”We have always been living with the fear of a permanent water shortage. The scarcity of water always keeps us thirsty, kills us sometimes, ruins our plans, destroys our environment and depopulates our region," says Ikmass.

During the hot season, the temperature, sometimes, climbs over 50 degrees centigrade.

To alleviate the water scarcity, the Minister of Mines, Energy and Water Resources, Ahmed Diane Semega, launched a new project on Apr. 17, by, ceremonially, swinging the pickaxe into the ground to bring potable water to Kidal.

Egleze Ag Foni, the region’s top administrator, says 35 percent of Kidal’s water points are non-functional. ”More than 117 villages out of 200 do not have access to clean running water,” he says. The villagers depend on dilapidated wells, most of which have collapsed, he adds.

”We are very short of water for our agricultural needs. With droughts, the list of wells that have dried up is also getting longer and longer,” he says.

Resourceful families fulfil their daily needs on less than 20 litres of water. A 20-litre tank, which costs 10 CFA (about 1.6 U.S. cents) at the pump, can be resold for between 100 and 500 CFA (between 16 and 83 U.S. cents) to city dwellers, says a water vendor in Kidal.

”Such suffering will soon be a thing of the past once the water project, which we’re working on, is completed,” said Semega, when he visited the city last month. The project will provide the city with potable water, via a 500,000-litre reservoir of pumping station.

It will cost 1.5 billion CFA (about 2.5 million U.S. dollars). Eighty percent of it will be financed by the Khartoum-based Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA), while the Malian government will pick up the remaining 20 percent.

Mali, with a population of 10 million, covers 1,240 million square kilometres of land, most of them desert. Mali is one of the poorest countries on earth, with 65 percent of the population living on less than one U.S. dollar a day.