Nawuni River with destroyed banks |
The Nawuni
River, the main production source of potable water for residents of the Tamale
Metropolis, Savelugu/Nanton Municipality as well as the Tolon and Kumbungu
Districts in the Northern Region of Ghana, has come under serious environmental
threat.
Years of uncontrolled sand winning by building
contractors and owners of tipper-trucks, has destroyed farmlands and the
ecosystem along the river banks including economic and medicinal trees. As a result,
the depth of the river has reduced drastically over the years due to silt which
has incapacitated its water holding ability.
More worrying is the fact that the silting of the
river is posing a great danger to residents of the aforementioned metropolitan,
municipal and district assemblies (MMDAs), threatening the river’s future
capacity to supply the required volume of water to about 400,000 people.
The shallowness of the river has also resulted into
annual flooding of communities along its banks which sometimes have led to loss
of life and property. In fact, this also reduces the amount of water the river
feeds into the Akosombo Dam, the country’s major source of hydroelectric power.
A recent research conducted by the Ghanaian
Developing Communities Association (GDCA) in 29 communities in the Northern
Region, indicates that 190 hectares of land have already been destroyed through
sand and gravel winning activities which has directly affected 177 families. In
addition, 68 percent of all pits that were never reclaimed were dug by
contractors and individual tipper-truck owners.
According to Sulemana Musah, GDCA’s climate
change officer, the perpetrators of these negative environmental practices usually
hire labour from young people in communities close to the Nawuni River where
the sand is mined for monetary rewards.
Some of the communities that suffer from the
debilitating effects of the sand and gravel winning include Datalon in the
Tamale Metropolis and Ying, Kulidanaali, Kodugziegu and Dipali in the Savelugu/Nanton
Municipality as well as Afayili, Golazoli, Yuni and Gbrimkabani all in the
Tolon and Kumbungu Districts.
Other Looming Threats
Ghana has many water
resources, but the amount of water available changes from season to season and from
year to year. Also, the distribution within the country is far from uniform
with the South-Western part better watered than the Coastal and Northern Regions,
(WRC website).
However,
availability of water is decreasing owing to rainfall variability, rapid
population growth, increased environmental degradation, pollution of rivers and
draining of wetlands.
Indeed, Ghana currently suffers from shortages in
clean drinking water, particularly in the Northern Region, where 40% (CWSA,
2009) of people use unimproved sources of drinking water. As a result,
incidences of water-borne diseases such as diarrhoea, hepatitis A, typhoid,
cholera and among others are common.
Waterborne diseases are spread through contaminated
drinking water supply and through inadequate sanitation and hygiene practices.
In the Northern Region, 37.5% of people use unprotected ponds, lakes or streams
for drinking water supply. This problem is exacerbated by a lack of safe
sanitation, again particularly in the Northern Region where 92% lack access to improved
sanitation (VanCalcar, 2006).
The projected population of Tamale alone is about
500,000. Currently the Metropolis requires 7.5 million gallons of water daily.
By 2013, according to the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL), it would require
about 10 million gallons (45,640 cubic meters) daily.
However, environmentalists’ fear that if sand
winning coupled with other negative environmental practices such as open
defaecation and bad farming practices on the banks of the Nawuni River continues
at the rate at which it is going, the GWCL might not be able to meet its target
and the people of Tamale and the adjoining districts will suffer for it. Besides,
not only would the people be deprived of safe drinking water, but fish stocks
and other aquatic life in the river would also deplete.
For instance, according
to Assistant Communications Officer of GWCL Nii-Abbey Nicholas in a recent
interview, it cost the company an amount of GH¢50,000.00 to procure chemicals
such as alum and others to treat the water in order to ensure that it is safe
for consumption. This means that the more the river is polluted, the more
chemicals would be required to treat the water and the public could therefore
pay more for it in future.
He admitted to Savannahnews that the activities of the sand winners definitely was
affecting the production capacity of the Nawuni River which serves as the
source of raw water for treatment hence, considering the fact that the sand
winning was causing too much silting on the river bed.
Nii-Abbey
also
confirmed that GWCL had held several meetings with the sand winners to talk to
them about the dangers their activities posed to the river and the company’s
installations. However, none of such engagements has yielded results and if
that persist, one day the whole of Tamale and its adjoining districts would be
deprived of water because the tipper trucks run over the major transmission
lines when they are going to fetch the sand at the river, he added.
Profile of Nawuni
Nawuni is a
farming community situated about 40km Southwest of Tamale, the Northern Regional
capital. The only way to access the community which is in the Kumbungu District
is by a partly asphalted and dusty road and it takes about one and a half hours
through public transport from Tamale. The community is situated close to the
White Volta River also known by the locals as Nawuni River.
Map of Black, White & Red Volta |
The White Volta River is the headstream of
the Volta River in West Africa. It originates in Burkina Faso and flows into
Lake Volta in Ghana. Its main tributaries are the Black Volta and the Red
Volta. It is also the river that villagers have to cross to get into the
village called Daboya which is situated in the Northern Region of Ghana.
Nawuni was
originally an Ewe settlement, surrounded by an area mostly populated by the
Dagomba people. Today, the community is populated with about half Ewe,
traditionally fishermen and half Dagomba, mainly farmers.
The community's
proximity to a river comes with both its advantages and disadvantages. It
provides a source of water for the community. In fact, it is from Nawuni that
the Savelugu Municipality, Tamale Metropolis as well as the Tolon and Kumbungu
Districts pump most of their safe drinking water from.
The water is
drawn from the Nawuni River (White Volta), sent to Dalun, a bigger community
nearby for treatment before transmitting it to the capitals of the
aforementioned MMDAs for residents’ use. A pipe of clean water is also
transmitted back to Nawuni and is accessible to the community through public
taps. The river is also used for fishing, which is the main livelihood of about
half of the people in the community.
Tamale, the
capital of Ghana's Northern Region, is the third largest metropolis in Ghana and
the fastest growing city in West Africa. The water supply for Tamale as well as
the other districts and their surrounding environs was established in 1972 with
the construction of an intake on the Nawuni River and a Treatment Plant at
Dalun.
The distribution
system however suffered from acute water shortage decades later and the vast
majority of inhabitants of Tamale did not have access to a reliable supply of
potable water. Those that were connected were subject to a programme of water
rationing. The most serviced zone in Tamale only received water for two and a
half days a week.
Thus, the
erstwhile NPP government in collaboration with Messer’s Biwater in 2006 initiated
what was known as the Tamale Water Supply Expansion and Optimisation project to
expand and rehabilitate the existing water treatment works to increase capacity
from 4.5 to 10 million gallons per day; provide extensions to the distribution
network; and a programme to reduce water losses through leak detection and
pressure management.
The improvements
included replacing the pumps in the existing water intake structure; 7 km of
600 mm raw water pipeline, installation of a new treatment plant, replacement
of treated water pumps, installation of a new 22 km of 700/800 mm transmission
pipeline, construction of a 20,000 m³ reservoir at Kukuo Yapalsi and 96 km of
new distribution mains.
Brief Overview
of National Water Situation
According
to former Minister of Water Resources, Works and Housing Alban Bagbin,
statistics on water availability in Ghana from measurements taken on all river
systems namely; Black Volta, White Volta, Oti, Tano, Pra, Ochi, Ayensu, Densu,
Ankobra, and others have it that the average annual volume of water available
is about 40 billion cubic meters (about 9 billion gallons) per year. This is
the amount that is replenished to the river systems annually through rainfall. In
addition to these surface water resources, the country also has groundwater which
quality is generally good, except for some cases of localized pollution and
areas with high levels of iron, fluoride and other minerals, he added.
Speaking to
stakeholders in the water sector in the Upper East Regional capital town of
Bolgatanga, Mr. Bagbin recalled that from 1960 to 2010, the amount of raw water
available to Ghanaians has reduced by a factor of 3. He attributed this to
increase in population. Ghana’s population according to him had grown from
6.5million in 1960 to the 24million now, adding, by the annual population
growth rate, this reduction factor would double to 6 by the year 2050; that is,
the water available to the country would have reduced by a factor of 6! By the
above, it means that the water available to Ghanaians today is only 27% of what
it was in the 1960s, and will be only 16% by 2050.
Aggravating the
situation he said was the pollution of the water resources by human activities
like bush burning thereby exposing the soil to extreme heat and evaporation and
reducing the land to a dust bowl, cutting down of trees to burn charcoal,
improper use of various agro-chemicals for farming, construction, car washing,
dumping of waste into or near water courses and among others.
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