Mozambique: “The city of the empty jerrycans” – Watch

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Mozambique: “The city of the empty jerrycans” – Watch

4:54 CAT | 06 Jan 2021

Photo: Jornal Ikweli

A crisis surrounding sourcing water for human consumption in the city of Nampula, in the north of the country, is rife. A water drum that once cost two meticais is now being sold for prices ranging from 10 to 15 meticais in some places, Jornal Ikweli reports.

The organisational structure of families is broken. People have been chasing after water for a long time, a harassment besetting everyone, including senior state officials, and especially provincial directors.

“The difficulties we face in this fight are enormous. Currently, it is normal to wake up at 2:00 a.m. to go look for water and return to the house at 4:00 p.m.. Even so, we get the water only with great difficulty and in small quantities. We often get water from the well, which is dirty, and yet we use it to wash clothes, cook and bathe,” Mutauanha resident Ms. Giselda Alfredo tells Ikweli.

Giselda complains about price speculation. “The price situation here is very bad. For well water, we pay seven to ten meticais for 20 litres, and for the tap water 20 meticais, but there are others who sell it for 15 or even 10 meticais, which is a comfort,” she recounts.

Another Mutauanha resident interviewed by Ikweli, Ms. Estefânia António, says that “there is a lot of demand for water lately, which means that in some houses there is a flood of people, children, men and women who get up [at dawn] to look for water. Before, I used to sell a 20 litre bucket for three meticais”.

In the Murrapaniua, another Nampula city neighbourhood, demand is also heightened, and prices are similar to Mutauanha.

Celita Invasse, a resident of the Waresta area, views the situation with great concern but holds out little no hope of an immediate solution.

Nampula.Screen_Shot_2021-01-04_at_17.30 — *Photo: TVM*

“This situation is getting worse with these prices,” she said. “How are those with no money going to survive?” “We are asking these owners of wells and owners of taps not to take advantage of the situation,” she replies. “At least, consider that we all need water, and we don’t have the same [financial] conditions.”

Residents of the country’s most populous neighbourhood, Namicopo, in Nampula city , are forced to walk all the way to the Pumping Station Number 2 (EB2) of the W- Fund for Investment and Assets of Water Supply (FIPAG) in order to get a few drops of the precious liquid – a distance of more than ten kilometres.

“We have no alternative,” Zinha Amade says, “At least a person gets water there, even though we leave in the morning and return in the afternoon. This is the situation we face, there is no choice. The wells we used to trust are already dry, even the Namicopo river, where we made some pits to draw water, nothing comes out. The only solution to all this is to pray that it will rain a lot and have water. If it doesn’t even rain, where we are going to fetch it now will not exist. At that point, I don’t know what will happen.”

Falta-de-Agua-em-Nampula-696x418 — *Photo: Jornal Ikweli*

By Alfredo Célia and Esmeraldo Boquisse

“The City of the Empty Jerrycans”

“About 1 million inhabitants live in the city of Nampula,” Kant de Voronha writes in a piece published by Rádio Encontro called ‘The City of the Empty Jerrycans’. “Each of them needs water. In addition, there are factories, industries, hotels, restaurants and gardens that consume large amounts of water. The only dam on the Monapo River that supplies the city of Nampula now has no more water, and even more aggravating is that the rain fails to fall regularly. The population of Nampula continues to grow daily and [water supply] needs to keep pace with population density. How long can we live like this?”

“Every morning we see cars, individuals, motorbikes, bicycles and pedestrians loaded with full or empty drums searching for water. We find huge queues at fountains and taps which still provide water. Much time is spent in the queue, to obtain water insufficient for the household and the needs of the whole family. It is now common to bathe only once a day or simply brush your teeth, comb your hair and set off for work. Some went days without a bath. The entire festive season was spent in the midst of this problem.”.

Watch the TVM report below on the ‘Nampula water crisis in times of Covid”

The drama of the lack of water in Nampula is now heightened. Residents express their concern and fear that if the crisis continues, outbreaks of diarrhoea associated with cholera may soon occur as people are forced to drink water unfit for human consumption.