NAWEC Vows to tackle water challenges

The Gambia National Water and Electricity Company (NAWEC), vows to tackle challenges that people are facing in lack of enough water supply. They therefore apologies to all customers and believe to solve it but needs time.

These were revealed at a press conference held at the NAWEC head office yesterday in Kanifing.

Baba Fatajo, the director of NAWEC explained that they are still struggling with lot of challenges in term of service delivery and  he think it is only clear went they reach out to the people tell them the constraints that they have and what they are doing to tackle those challenges.

“We still want to apologies to our value customers that we still have these challenges that may take some time before we can give you 24 hours water supply for the reason that we still have significant gap between the supply and the demand. To solve the problem, we are embarking on a major project of 22.5 million dalasi. The contractors and consultancies are on the ground and have gone very far with the design surveys, now is the question of once it is done and prove by the consultant then they will go to procurement but it will take some time between one year plus,” he said.

He said they have registered some improvement in the electricity services, saying “even though we have our main challenges but our focus now is water.”

He added that over the past years they have observed that a significant gap between supply and demand, as a result there are pockets within their cooperate areas that are really not having the desired services in term of water supply.

He said the problem was compounded of the loss of some of their productions boreholes due to some people who were vandalizing their boreholes and those are the main borehole that raises impact on their capacities.

“The first borehole that went down, we were losing over 40 million liters of water every day.  Can you imagine we are struggling to meet the demand; much more went you have such huge production capacity out of flitch. The problem was also compounded by the cost of quality issues, we had to short out. Some of the borehole around Fajara area is density populated area and that of the quality has gone down significantly and we don’t want to compromise that because we want to go by the standards that we have been given to our population.”

He lamented that most recent they have serious challenges of blockage around cape point Bakau; he added that is part of their network and the water people did a wonderful job by tackling it.

“We are taking step gap measures to at least pick on the lost productions by drilling more boreholes. We have been able to apprehend the man who was vandalizing our boreholes in Brikama and is now helping the police in their investigations.

Regarding to electricity, he said they are trying to meet the demand but they still have some challenges that they need to tackle and electrify the country.