Katsina thirsts whilst Honcho chases shadow

Sir: I did my National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) in Katsina, Katsina State, and that town turned out to be a great place to live and go to in the mid-1990s. Thus now I could empathise when the news media report that Katsina thirsts for potable water, that which should not be a problem in the second decade of the 21st century but, alas, it is one huge scalable hurdle that we have simply ignored.

The combined 16-year stint of Governors Umar Musa Yar’adua and Ibrahim Shema of the PDP ensured that potable water was piped to households in urban areas where the need was greatest but the four-year stint of the APC governor, Ibrahim Masari, tanked every good deed the PDP executed, and now plumbing works are rusting away all over town and isn’t Katsina the home state of President Muhammadu Buhari?

If there were Katsina visionaries at all, they would have realised that a town on the edge of the Sahel is one that needs urgent water management culture and sustainable exploitation of groundwater reservoir-sources but this APC government covers up its gross incompetence by playing to the gallery in dishonest fashion.

Now, all the efforts (time and resources) expended to put certain chieftains of the PDP down this past four years would have been committed to a national programme of potable water-works centred on the Niger-Benue confluence at Lokoja whence potable water would be piped to major urban centres in the far north; this is simple visionary planning that escaped the honcho at the top, and this is sad indeed.

• Sunday Adole Jonah, wrote from Department of Physics, Federal University of Technology, Minna, Niger State