Privatised water company runs into supply problems

Water supply problems in the Gabonese capital Libreville are going from bad to worse with residents used to drawing water from taps in their own homes forced to queue up with buckets at standpipes in the street. It is odd in this oil-rich country that is covered in tropical rain forest to see people hauling empty buckets and water-drums along the roadside and forming queues to fill them up from public standpipes and fire hydrants. “We had no water for a full 10 hours,” one angry housewife told IRIN. “We’ve even had to use bottled mineral water for the cooking,” grumbled a hotel chef. The shortage has been so bad and water pressure so low that on 14 January firemen were unable to put out a blaze that gutted an entire building housing officers of the paramilitary gendarmerie in Gos-Bouquet, a district of Libreville. The water shortage appears to be partly connected to the rapid growth of Gabon's urban population. The privatisation of the state water and electricity company SEEG in 1997 and a doubling of capital investment last year by its new French owner Vivendi, has failed to ensure that supply keeps pace with a rapid growth in demand. At first, SEEG officials were quick to blame the current water shortage on factors beyond their control, such as exceptionally low rainfall and a surge in water demand from Libreville's big hotels during a two-day African Union (AU) summit in Gabon earlier this month. But last weekend they admitted that faulty SEEG equipment was also a big factor fuelling the crisis. A key water pump that supplies Libreville's main water treatment plant had broken down and SEEG Director General Andre-Paul Apandina said it could not be replaced for six months. “The organisation of the summit in our city led to heavy demand of water from hotels,” Apandina said on state television earlier this month. He was trying to placate angry residents who saw their taps go dry while the 10 and 11 January meeting was in full swing. On that occasion, Apandina also blamed the crisis on lower than usual rainfall in recent months. He said this had led to exceptionally low water levels in the Nzeme river, which supplies the capital. The answer, Apandina said then, would be to build more water towers in the city. But he added that there was neither the time nor the money to do that. However, Apandina was back on Gabon's television screens last Sunday to admit that some of the current problem's were of SEEG's own making. He said the pumping system used to bring water from the Nzeme river to the Ntoum water treatment centre which supplies Libreville had broken down and could not be replaced for six months. Libreville is home to more than half of Gabon's 1.2 million population and the city's rapid growth in recent years has put a strain on SEEG's ability to keep it adequately supplied with electricity and water. The city had a population of 580,000 in 2000, according to official statistics. Some town planners reckon that over the past five years this has swelled to 680,000. However, Libreville's urban infrastructure has failed to keep pace with this expansion. SEEG currently serves only households with a combined population of 422,000 in Libreville. One official source told IRIN this meant that about one third of the city's residents had no private access to clean drinking water. “While Gabon has abundant supplies of water, it is not distributed equally,” sociologist Christian Ndombi told IRIN. The head of the rivers department at SEEG, Louis-Georges Ozouaki, said that low rainfall currently meant the company was only able to treat 112,000 cubic metres of water a day, well below its treatment capacity of 126,000 cubic metres a day. The company also defended its investment record, pointing out it had invested 12.1 billion CFA francs ($ US24 million) on extending water distribution in 2003, nearly double the 6.3 billion ($ 12.5 million) spent in 2002. But it is dealing with a sceptical public. Last April hundreds of Libreville residents massed to protest against SEEG’s refusal to release the results of quality control tests performed on its piped water. “We were never given the percentages of iron, calcium or nitrates, or data on the water colour, or whether it contained pesticides,” said Nicaise Moulombi, who heads a non-governmental organisation called Croissance Saine Environnement (Healthy Growth Environment). SEEG said it was working hard to ensure that water quality met standards set by the World Health Organisation (WHO) by carrying out weekly checks across the network. Libreville is not the only town in this lush and densely forested country to suffer water supply problems. In December, officials connected a rare typhoid outbreak in Oyem, near the northern border with Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, following persistent disruption to the town's water supply. Around 50 cases of the water-borne disease were registered in December in Oyem, a town of 35,000 people. Julien Meye, a doctor at the endemic diseases service in Libreville, told IRIN that the disease first appeared in Oyem following several months of disruption to the town's supply of drinking water. The deputy mayor of Oyem, Emmanuel Obame Ondo, blamed the privatisation of water supply services for the breakdown in distribution, saying SEEG, had failed to extend water pipes to newly built areas. In Libreville, Marcel Ngoua, a doctor and advisor at the Health Ministry, told IRIN that “Gabon does not face dramatic water distribution problems.” But he added that aid groups had urged the government to work on repairing broken pipes that flood certain districts. The water utility in 2002 sold 48.5 million cubic metres of drinking water. Sales rose 6.8 percent in 2003 to 51.8 million cubic metres.