By Idrissa Bangura

There has been a hue and cry of water scarcity in the Fourah Bay community, east of Freetown.

This has created negative impact on  the public especially school going children who lost precious times on studies as they go  in search of water for laundry, for cooking, for bathing and for other uses.

Reports say that people in that community have gone weeks without access to water and this strange phenomenon has warranted them to fetch water through some old, cut pipes along drainages on the streets of the capital.

This practice of them has a lot of negative effect on their lives considering the unhygienic nature of the waters coming from unknown points at some gutters with rubber pipes interwoven with pieces and rubbish.

Even though government has been saying that overpopulation in the city is the main reason that is contributing for water crisis there are other factors that point to government’s weaknesses by failing to provide purified and accessible water to citizens.

Some of these unresolved challenges that account for a poor service of water distribution to households in Freetown are traffic number of pipes connected to the Guma Dam, a reservoir which was built to serve a small group of people in Freetown of about 700 back in the 1880s.

The dam, however, has overstretched its limit due to Freetown’s burgeoning population. With over traffic pipes, guma dam is coupled with other serious challenges made possible by human activities such as tree cutting; charcoal burning, land brushing for homes, on the hill parts close to where the dam is.

And over the years, the influx of people from various parts of the country has resulted to the scarcity of water in Freetown and its effects are showing on communities like Fourah Bay where Africa’s one oldest hospital is located, PCMH (Princess Christian Mentality Hospital).

Years past and even now, PCHM or Cottage hospital has experienced low water supply within its periphery. It is common to see days past with doctors, nurses, patients, hardly see a sachet of water or water on some bowsers in the compound.

As water crisis signals early this year than in the past years, citizens of Freetown are urging government to tackle this issue   immediately before it reaches to a rock- bottom. Dry spells of water abundance from underground and low rain fall shown in 2023 are signs of climate changes in Sierra Leone and in the world.

Many Sierra Leoneans who are aware of the old-aged water crisis in the city would always castigate government for not prioritizing the issue by working to addressing it speedily.

They say, they think that, the Maban fresh water at Songo village (north-west which is approximately about 40 miles away from the capital ) would have sufficed Freetown’s residents’ worries about water supply.

And that Maban fresh water would have long salvaged the problem of water shortages in Freetown but that is only if government had utilized that water source to supply water to residents in the city.