Safe drinking water and sanitation, experts say, are indispensable to sustain life and health, and fundamental to the dignity of all.
In 2002, the United Nations (UN) Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights adopted General Comment No. 15 on the right to water with Article 1 stating that “the human right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity and that it is prerequisite for the realisation of other human rights.
Comment No. 15 defines the right to water as “the right of everyone to sufficient, safe, acceptable and physically accessible and affordable water for essential personal and domestic uses.”
Yet salvation from these basic tenets remains a far-fetched dream as clean and potable water is still proving to be such an elusive natural resource to millions of people around the world.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates show that 884 million people do not have access to improved sources of drinking water, while 2.5 billion lack access to improved sanitation facilities.
According to WHO, the figures shed light on a worrying situation, but the reality is even much worse, as millions of poor people living in informal settlements are simply missing from national statistics.
Missing out in these statistics could be thousands of people in villages along the eastern shores of Lake Chilwa in Zomba, who are still trapped in the long struggle to access safe drinking water.
Namalele and Chinguma are two villages in Nsombi beach area in T/A Mkumbira along the lake.
A visit to these places makes one shudder with pity by the grim challenges related to water and sanitation.
Starting from business places to dwelling houses, people largely use the untreated muddy waters from the lake for daily needs.
“If you look around, it is disheartening,” said 49-year-old Patuma Rajabu, a resident of Namalele village. “The sources of water here are extremely unsafe, but we have no choice.”
Apart from the lake, other sources of water are muddy swamps whose grey waters from a distance look as thick as oil.
Then there is one borehole whose water is salty thereby forcing people to use for washing and cleaning purposes only. Unfortunately, there is only one borehole to serve a population of close to 2,500 people.
Two boreholes that were sunk sometime back broke down due to corrosion caused by the salinity of the underground waters. As such, many people heavily depend on the unsafe waters from the muddy swamps which offer little or no comfort at all.
“The water is stagnant, it is unprotected and unsafe since we share it with animals,” said Rajabu adding that sometimes they find dead animals like cats floating in these swamps.
The water that is relatively safe, according to the locals, is the one that filters through bulrush from the lake up to the shore after the rains.
Many people here believe that water trapped in bulrush, a tall reed-like waterside plant of the grass family known as Manjedza or Njedza, is fairly safe than that drawn directly from the lake.
Unfortunately, this water – which is as brown as tea – is in short supply this time around.
“We had poor rains this year. The water levels in the lake were so low to push some of the waters upland through the grass,” she said.
Village headman Namalele feels that people in his area and surrounding villages of Chinguma, Ngotangota and Lungazi are literary living a horrible life.
“This seems to be like a cursed place because everything to do with water for domestic use is not a pleasant story,” chief Namalele said.
His pessimism and negativity is quite understandable. As a traditional leader, he stands amid the cry of a shoreline full of tormented souls, yet the wells of his wisdom are void of answers to the plight facing his subjects.
Amid this hue-and-cry is the irony that the areas lie along an expanse of waters in the basin lake, the proverbial tale of suffering amidst the plenty.
The growing scarcity of clean and potable water is also imposing high costs on the poor and vulnerable. Some people are cashing in by drawing water from Mozambique and selling it in the area.
The sight of men pushing bicycles with a heavy load of yellow plastic gallons filled with water is all too common.
“We draw the water from Mnembo River in Mozambique and sell it here at K150 or K200 per 20-litre gallon and K50 per 5 litre bottle or bucket,” said 31-year-old Ketison Namusa from Nyumwa Village in T/A Kawinga, Machinga.
The journey to Mnembo takes an average of one and half hours on foot and 30 minutes on a bicycle. Namusa, who resides in Nsombi for business purposes, travels three times a day to this river and back. He sells an average of 24 gallons a day.
Although the safety of this water is not guaranteed, Namusa said it is much better than the water in Nsombi.
“It is tasty and it’s not dirty. Even villagers in Mozambique drink from the same river,” he said adding that many businesses like restaurants use this water.
But while business people manage to access this water, the majority cannot afford it.
An average family requires about five gallons of 25 litres each for domestic use, according to Rajabu.
That means spending an average of K1000 a day, which is an outright economic crucifixion even to city people in white-collar jobs.
The absolute dependence on unprotected sources of water is leaving many people in the area vulnerable to waterborne diseases like cholera.
Available statistics from the Zomba District Health Office (DHO) show that there were 105 cases of cholera with zero-death in Nsombi from December last year to March this year.
Malawi Centre for Advice, Research on Rights (Carer), with help from Democracy Consolidation Programme (DCP), is empowering communities in Nsombi to demand their rights to development on a number of needs including access to clean water and sanitation.
“People here, like everyone else, deserve a better life irrespective of where they live. This area is often regarded as a hard-to-reach place but that’s no excuse to deny people here their right to development,” said Pacharo Namatumbo, Malawi Carer district coordinator for Zomba.
There are no easy answers or ways when it comes to solving the problem of access to clean and potable water in Nsombi. Provision of boreholes has proved to be unsustainable because of the acidity levels of underground waters.
The only possible way that many people here feel could save the day is an idea that floats in the air ambitiously.
It borders on asking government and international organisations to construct a storage tank for water that could be pumped from the river in Mozambique. The water could then be supplied as a treated resource to the villagers through pipes.
But its feasibility is a whole different ball-game altogether, which may take another century to spruce up the people’s realisation of their dignity through the right to water.
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