The people of Gunjur have been at the receiving end of ‘unsafe’ drinking water for five years thanks to severe neglect on the part of National Water and Electricity Company (Nawec), a report by the public utilities regulatory authority has declared.
In a frantic bid to curb further health implications from the defective water supply, Jamilatou Saidy of PURA postulated Nawec has been mandated to provide ‘pure and clean water for the people of Gunjur by bringing water tanks’ prior to the completion of new borehole at Nyofelleh which is expected to meet water quality standards.
This move, in her telling, is to provide people with pure and clean water in the interim since Nawec indicated it will take them three to four weeks to address the water issue.
Jamilatou saidy added: “We had a meeting with Nawec and they promised it will take them one month to solve the water problem in Gunjur. Our purpose of coming here is to find out what can be put in place in the interim for supply of pure and clean water in Gunjur. As soon as the Alikalo and his team allocated us places, tanks will be put at all those places”.
Also addressing the meeting, the ward councillor Momodou Charreh Jibba emphasized the need for greater awareness on the part of citizens regarding their rights.
Village development committee chairman, Tijani Bojang, thanked PURA for their swift response in addressing ‘this serious issue since we cannot do in the absence of clean water’.
Manchester University-trained Gunjur native and scientist based in Saudi Arabia Ahmed manjang who took the contaminated water sample to PURA stated:
“People are dying as a result of what we eat and what we drink, so we have to be vegilant and we should be careful. Am really grateful for your coming as regulatory body. I thank you for that but I would want to see results”.
NAWEC is expected to disconnect Gunjur‘s current water supply system from existing boreholes and connect it to a new borehole in Nyofelleh, the process of which is to take four weeks. In the interim, water tanks will be placed in stratehic locations in Gunjur where residents can fetch water for drinking.