Ghana to import water soon

Ghana’s potential importation of water from neighbouring countries seems to be at hand. All is not rosy on this side of the fence and it may be time water importation is considered.

Ghana is no desert country, but certain unfortunate events may be overtaking us. In fact , how could anyone even think of this?  Ghana, with our rivers flowing full all-year-round and in the rainy seasons having our towns flooded, can easily get into this situation.

It may then sound strange for Ghana to even contemplate importing water to a few Ghanaians unless you ponder over these few facts:-

Ghana is already importing bottled water.

• Ghana’s water bodies are dying according to water quality experts

• Ghana has begun planning the desalination of sea water

• Ghana’s water distribution system is largely dysfunctional.

State of the Nation on water resource?

What is happening? Ghana is in a water crisis! The MP for Kade, Mr Ofosu Asamoah, was  recently lamenting after the President’s State of the Nation Address about the water situation all over the country. Taps are not flowing all over the country.

Rivers are polluted. Wells are running dry; the water from the taps is not the best for drinking. There seems to be a war of some sort against our rivers by illegal miners popularly called ‘Galamsey’. They mine gold and diamonds in the rivers indiscriminately.

They divert river channels. They fell trees in their way near the river banks. They wash the gold with heavy metals such as mercury and cyanide and allow them to enter the rivers. Illegal logging along the river banks follows closely.  

Some fishermen have also decided to do their river fishing with dynamite and this contributes to the intoxication of river bodies.

So I ask again, what is happening? It is time to rise up and take a stance. This has assumed a national dimension and we need to bring every Ghanaian on board to deal with this menace.

We need to get the educational campaigns underway in the rural areas. We need to teach people sustainable small-scale mining methods.

We need to plainly educate and give people hope in the rural areas. Above all, we need a conscious and an intentional national agenda to moralise our society on true values. But are all these measures enough?

We do have a capable security apparatus to confront these challenges. But why have we looked on for some few miscreants in our society, be they local or foreign, to negatively impact on our entire economy? Keeping law and order isn’t that hard, is it?

Foreigners shouldn’t be infiltrating our borders at will while we send peacekeepers to other places, should they? It appears we can help care for other countries’ business but cannot manage our own borders and internal security.

The Pra River, Going, Going…

It is high time we sat down and considered our ways or started building that aqueduct to Nigeria. Take the Pra River for example. She seems to be beset by every woe a river could suffer in Ghana.

The Pra River is the largest of the three major rivers that drain the area south of the Volta divide which separates the Volta River basin from the rest of the country.  

The mighty Pra River rises in the Kwahu Plateau  near Mpraeso and flows south at 240km through rich farmland and valuable forests in the Southern lowlands, and then she enters the Gulf of Guinea east of Takoradi. 

The Pra has many cataracts, notably the Bosomase Rapids at Anyinabrim, and for most of its length is not navigable even by canoe. The main tributaries are the Offin, Anum and Birim rivers. The Birim valley is a major source of diamonds.

The Pra Basin is located between Latitudes 50 N and 70 30’ N, and Longitudes 20 30’ W, and 00 30’ W, in south central Ghana.

The area drained by the Pra network is about 22,106 km2, with average elevation of 300m and generally below 600m above sea level. It features Lake Bosomtwe, a natural lake that stands out as a prominent protected area.

The entire Pra Basin covers 41 administrative districts .The Offin sub-basin is the main source of water supply to Kumasi and its environs, through two reservoirs, namely Barekese and Owabi dams.

The Birim sub-basin is located predominantly in the Eastern Region and has attractive historic places and nine forest reserves. 

Rapid depletion of forest cover for mining, farming, and settlement development is a challenge. Forest cover outside the reserve area is negligible and is estimated at less than two per cent of the basin.

These forests are heavily logged often with very wide open canopies. A high concentration of mining activities in the upper reaches of the basin has brought about the situation which means the source of the river is in danger of drying up . Large-scale and small-scale mining (medium-scale mining?) with disruptive impact on surface cover including soils occur around Obuasi and Konongo.

Moderate to severe sheet and gully erosion poses a threat for flooding within the basin. The extensive forest clearance for mining, settlement, and infrastructural development causes considerable loss of soil minerals and subsequent high sediment transport in the Pra and its tributaries.

Encroachment of wetlands and buffer zones by private developers and by agriculture is occurring as urban areas develop and land and food are needed.

The Water Resources Commission claims to have control over the river basin and has appointed a Pra Basin Board to implement Integrated Water Resources Management. The reality tells us something different.

Just five years ago, crossing the Pra at the Beposo Bridge was a tourist attraction. Children would be swimming in the clear water, and fishermen in dugout canoes will be casting their nets to catch fish.

The fish were plentiful and the children learnt a few acrobatic diving skills. Fast forward to today and the picture is like that of the clay pond of my secondary school’s art studio. 

No child and certainly no canoe would venture out there. Upstream our ‘Galamsey’ friends, both local and international, are having a field day.

Loggers have destroyed the forests that protect the river. Right from its headwaters, it is assaulted in diverse ways. The burgeoning towns along the river and its tributaries have found a way to dump their raw sewage into the rivers by using roadside storm drains as sewers. Household and industrial garbage is launched into the river with the claim that the river will carry it away. But where is it to carry it to?

The Daboase treatment plant on the Pra is failing. This serves the Sekondi-Takoradi metropolis and should have been capable of delivering all the water needs of that city.

However, the ‘Galamsey’ activities upriver are causing massive siltation of the dam and the plant cannot cope. The Ghana Water Company has dredged it once already but the question is, how much can they spend doing that?

The ‘Galamseyers’ are also busy doing alluvial mining with their dredge boats in the Birim, a tributary of the Pra, in the Eastern Region. This has fouled the water. We seem to be clueless as to how to stop the menace of illegal small-scale (medium-scale) mining in the Eastern,

Western and Ashanti Regions, which is slowly condemning the Pra to the history books.

 Recently, it was reported in the Daily Graphic in a story published on the GhanaNewsMedia website (www.ghananewsmedia.com, Friday,  November 1, 2013) that the Daboase plant had been taken by armed illegal miners to the point that water had to be rationed in the Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolis since the water reaching it from the river was too small.

The illegal miners were working directly near the intake point of the treatment plant. The picture you see above is the situation as seen by the reporter.

The widespread use of mercury in illegal mining has led to a situation where mercury poisoning is highly likely if you use the river for domestic purposes.

This can lead to miscarriages, stillbirths, deformities, nausea, dizziness, kidney failure, neurological disorders, hypertension and need I say death. Arsenic and other heavy metals are also used to extract the gold too. How callous can these wealth seekers be?

It is no wonder that fishing in the river is down. People are afraid to drink from the river let alone fish from it. And heavy metal pollution is so bad that if the water is used to irrigate crops, they either die or absorb them and pass it on to consumers.

This also has consequences for sea fishing as the Guinea current carries the heavy metal pollution along our coast and sea fish near our coast swallow them.

In fact, satellite photos via Google Earth© clearly show the pollution-laden mud of the Pra River moving as far as Elmina and maybe even Biriwa in the Central Region. Besides, the sea fish which used to breed in the Shama lagoon are either extinct or polluted. And the ones which survive enter the sea with their pollution.

There is hope

Let us note that there is light at the end of this long convoluted tunnel. The Pra can be revived but at a huge cost.

This will mean a lot of resources not just to clean up the river basin but how to develop alternative sources of income for those who have attacked its sustainability out of want.

The Pra at one time was tagged by the late Prof. Kwesi Andam, former Vice-Chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) as a potential growth pole for the development of a new national capital. Let us strive to redeem it at all cost. The experience gained will help us deal with the other river basins under threat.

The Birim can be saved. The Densu can be protected and even the polluted Odaw River in Accra can become a water resource again.

All this will come at a cost. It takes planning and effort and determination but it can be done. We can stop illegal mining, we can get our people to value sustainability and we certainly can develop our nation’s water resources too as a key national resource to rather be an exporter of water and not an importer.

The writer is an Engineer

A version of this article appears in print on pages 48 and 49 of the Daily Graphic (March 17, 2014).