Nawuni is a small community located in the Kumbungu District of the Northern Region and a 45-minute drive from the regional capital Tamale.
The White volta, one of the longest rivers in Ghana passes through this community whose inhabitants are largely Ewes with pockets of Dagombas. The main economic activities in this community is fishing and vegetable farming.
The water serves as a huge source of livelihood for the people in the community and a home to treatment plants of the Ghana Water Company Limited which currently supplies three million gallons of water every day to five districts including the Sagnarigu Municipality and the Tamale Metropolis.
Despite its strategic location and importance to the people of the Northern Region, the community is fraught with a lot of challenges.
Beyond the perennial floods, lies an enormous sanitation challenge that appears overlooked but continues to pose unimaginable threats to the people. With some 84 households and nearly three thousand people, the community has no single public or household toilet facility and no proper means of disposing liquid or solid waste.
As a result, residents have resorted to desecrating the very body that holds the means to their livelihood as they openly defecate and throw rubbish indiscriminately into the White Volta River. Stand on the bank of the mighty Volta and scenes that greet you will be the sight of sacks of rèfuse, plastic bottles and human excreta wrapped in plastic bags. Very often, men are seen defecating into the river from their boats.
It is unsurprising that as per statistics available at the Dalun Health Center, a nearby community where the residents go to seek treatment, cholera has become the most prevalent condition in Nawuni.
Fishing which is also a source of livelihood is also under threat as the constant pollution of the river has diminished its fishing stock. Mohammed Habib is a fisherman. He knows the river like the back of his palm as he fished in it with his father since the age of five but as his dad becomes old and too frail to take the boat, Habib, for half a decade now, has been paddling the boat and casting the nets to provide for a family of six including himself, his wife whom he took not too long ago, his father and two younger siblings. I met him at the river bank with a heap of worms gathered before him that he cuts into pieces to fix into hooks in preparation for an expedition.
He said to me that a good catch could fetch him 200 Cedis in a day but the problem is they have been experiencing dwindling fortunes in recent years. He pointed to an empty space further upstream and said women usually come all the way from Tamale to wait for them there and to buy their fresh fish but the table has turned as the unfavourable fortunes means the women don’t come anymore and they now have to go wherever the traders are to sell to them, a situation that has also turned pricing out of their favour. Asked whether the low catch could be
attributed to the incessant pollution of the White Volta, Habib replies in the affirmative. He said like humans, fish cannot thrive in the dirt.
“Fish and people are the same. They don’t like dirty things but every day we come and throw rubbish in this water, we do toilet in it and they eat them and may die even before we catch them,” Habib noted.
Peter Agbavor known popularly as Soldier, apart from fishing also operates an engine boat that ferries people across to communities beyond the river. He confirms to me all that has been said by Habib. He said before they virtually were casting their nets behind their homes but for the constant pollution which has diminished the fish stock, they now are forced to travel farther in their boats to fish and this sometimes means passing the night in the Volta. Soldier, also lamented the disposal of rubbish in the river is not only detrimental to aquatic life but to themselves as sometimes their nets are destroyed when instead of trapping fish, they trap sacks of rèfuse, bags of faecal matter and Others. He appealed that authorities build for them household latrines and place rèfuse containers at vantage points to enable the proper disposal of solid waste.
Assembly Member for Nawuni Electoral Area, Hon. Alhassan Yussif, said the poor sanitation situation remains a bigger challenge and something he does not sleep over. He disclosed that relentlessly he has pursued the Kumbungu District Assembly to intervene and to help his people overcome the sanitation challenge but has always been met with one excuse or another.
For the pollution of the White Volta, he revealed that engineers of the Ghana Water Company have complained severally to him to tell his electorates to stop disposing waste into the river as the cost for treating and distribution of raw water has more than tripled. He tells me that he and his people have no option than to defecate and throw waste into the river as they have no other ways to rid their community of filth.
The Assembly Member concludes our interview by appealing to benevolent individuals, groups and NGOs to come to the rescue of his people.
Report by Iddrisu Zakaria | SOA Ghana Fellow
