By Morlai Sesay
The Mountain Community in Constituency 115 (Wellington), on Saturday, 10th February 2024, held a stakeholder meeting on how to ensure sustainable water supply in the community. This engagement arose after the community grew more prominent and busier; therefore, the need for stakeholder engagement to provide a sustainable water supply is paramount.
Speaking about the purpose of the event, Honourable Lawyer Alpha Amadu Bah, representing constituency 115, updated the gathering that the purpose of his visit is to engage all stakeholders, especially those who have been at the sharp end of supplying water to various households in the community and how to set up an effective structure that would manage water supply in the community.
According to Bah, clean water is already difficult enough to come by, with so many polluted sources already in existence, and the weather and environmental conditions in Sierra Leone do not help. He stated that Sierra Leone only collects a fraction of freshwater compared to countries of a similar size. It is incredibly challenging to find enough clean water to meet demands during the dry season, which peaks from February through April but tends to last half a year throughout the colder months. Rainy summer months, says Bah, are not always ideal for water collection since intense rains and flooding contribute to pollution. Heavy rains fill wells with wastewater that typically runoff, contaminating water that once could be used for drinking. While it is difficult to control the weather patterns, he urged the people of the Mountain Community to take charge of the source of pollution to stop the contamination of water sources during the rainy season.
"With a few things I have said about the challenges that come by if we fail to take up responsibility, this move today, as I said earlier, is to make sure that we have a well-structured committee that would effectively man the water supply in this community. The complaints I have received about how things are done, ranging from mismanagement of funds and many others, influenced my visit here today. The primary objective of this meeting is for all stakeholders and people present here today to come up with their concerns so that we can all have a unanimous agreement on who is to spearhead the new committee that will be set up", he said.
Nat Koroma Junior, the Deputy Chairman of Ward 405, disclosed that pipes had gone missing in the community without the current management bringing anyone to book. According to Koroma, there are instances where people would have to pay for water supply, but the management has most often betrayed the efforts of people who comply with payment. Another area he emphasized is that some people have gone five to six months without having water in their homes, yet the current committee has not done anything about it.
not fools to be paying our hard-earned money without getting any supply. The receipts are all with me at home and would justify the yearly payments I made, but all efforts have nevertheless been in vain. It came to a period when I had to think about setting up a team to spearhead water supply management in the community because the current management is far from meeting our demands", he maintained.
Isatu Koroma, a community member, said she is pleased with the idea of such an engagement. Koroma stated that she hoped that the management would be set up could alleviate their suffering regarding an adequate water supply in the community. She affirmed that the money the community people have been paying has not been reflected in any community sector.
Koroma explained, "With all the money people have been paying for this water, we have not seen any tangible development in the community. We spend more than the facility we receive from the current management, which has always bent on mismanaging our money. I am pleading to the stakeholders present to ensure that a new management committee is set up with proper monitoring so that the pain we had suffered in the hands of the past management committee could not repeat itself".
With the various concerns considered, the meeting ended with stakeholders allowing each community section to provide two representatives to form a new management committee. With the new committee that will be set up, it was disclosed that they would be obliged to give reports about their work every three months and that the public would be duly informed about their exercise.
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