Residents of Gosa Kpanyi Kpanyi community in Kuje area council recently decried the lack of electricity and water supply in the community which, according to them, has crippled development in the area.
Gosa Kpanyi Kpanyi is a community situated on airport road with streetlights just at the entrance of the community, but inside there is electricity supply.
Some of them who spoke with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) said the government had abandoned the community without electricity for over 40 years.
Mr Tanko Joshua said there were no social amenities in the community right from when he was born.
“I was born here and I grew up in this place, I have never seen light in this place for over 40 years now. There is a central place that we do charge our phones, lamps and we will have to pay N50 to charge. As you can see, there are electricity poles here, but there are no wires let alone power supply.
“There is no single school in this community, our children have to cross to the other community (Gosa seriki) to go to school,” he said.
Also Bako Haruna, a Senior Secondary School student, regretted that politicians would always come to the community for campaigns and promise better days for the residents but never fulfilled their promises.
“When election is approaching, politicians will be visiting and making promises to the community to provide the people with infrastructure. The councilors come here to do campaign and they will promise to bring power supply and other social amenities for us, but once we have voted them and elections over, they forget us.”
Haruna called on the FCT authorities to provide basic amenities in the community which would have been about development.
A female resident, who claimed anonymity, said it’s her 20th year in the community and she has never seen electricity in the community.
“No hospitals, no school, no potable water, no light too. All my children were born in the opposite community; the pregnant women have to go to either Lugbe or other places to give birth. This is the only community along airport road that don’t have any amenities, other communities have all this things. The government is fencing the community, there is street light in front of the community but we live in total darkness.”
Mr Danjuma Musa said: “I was born in this community and now I have two children here still no light. In January, last year, AEDC brought this electricity poles you are seeing and since then we haven’t seen them. It’s more than a year now, they brought it to deceive us during the election.
“No presence of government infrastructure here. No electricity, no water, no school, no health structure. They are fencing all the communities along airport road just to present visitors a good sight. The river at the entrance of the community is our main source of water supply.”
Mrs Endurance Ephraim said she has been in the community for over 20 years without potable water.
“No water in this community for twenty years that I have been here. When I came here, I met people who also shared the same experience. The Wupa water is dangerous and full of harmful objects, there are sharp stones. Yet, we can’t stop the children from entering it because there is heat and they need water to cool their body temperature.
“Before we drink the water because we don’t have water in the community but when we discovered that our children started peeing blood, we stop drinking the water but we use it for every other thing. We use the water to do domestic chores, we wash our clothes in this river and also bath and the cattle too come here, our children come to swim here and if the water enters their system, they will pee blood,” she said.
Another resident, Mrs Tina Gaius, complained about the stress she goes through to get clean water for use.
She said the only clean water in the community was a stream which might be a broken water pipe and can’t serve the entire community.
“To get water, we sometimes go to water vendors to get water to drink, other times we go to the community across to fetch water.”
Mrs Augusta Tanko said she does not fetch from Wupa River, rather she gets water from a small stream that flowed in trickles within the community.
“Today I got to the stream by 9 a.m., it is past 1p.m. already and I’ve fetched just one bucket, I’m trying to fetch the second bucket now.
“With these two buckets, my family will bath and I will cook from it. Tomorrow, I will come and fetch again.”
She, however, called on government to come to their aid because they have being neglected for so long.
