By Abdullahi M. Gulloma
Abuja
By Abdullahi M. Gulloma
Abuja
The Federal Executive Council (FEC) yesterday approved a draft National Water Resources Bill and two policies – National Water Policy and National Irrigation Policy as part of measures to enhance quality of water resources in the country.
This was disclosed by the Minister of Water Resources, Mr. Suleiman Adamu, at the end of the council meeting at the State House in Abuja.
He said: “National Water Policy seeks to provide strategies that will improve the management and delivery of water in the country in particular reference to water supply.
It is followed by the enabling law, that is National Water Resources Bill, which essentially consolidates all the existing laws, the Water Resources Act, the River Basin Development Authority Act, National Water Resources Institute Act, National Hydrological Services Act and other Acts put together to form a national law that conforms to international standard and international best practices.
“By so doing we have been able to streamline many of the overlapping laws, sometimes we have conflict in laws, like the one we have with Nigerian Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA), some laws relating to environment, mining. This bill seeks to seek out all those issues so that we have a standard national law, also so that we can set up a proper regulatory agency to regulate the water sector. With that, the door is now open for the private sector to come in a big way to invest in water supply schemes in this country.
“The irrigation and drainage policy seeks to recognise and bring in water users association and generally improve not only irrigation infrastructure but irrigation management in the country. Nigeria has the potential of 3.4 million hectares of land for irrigation and we have only about 130,000 has been developed formally and only about 70,000 is being utilised.
“So, there is a huge gap and we feel that introducing this policy will help us to work along at federal and at regional level with the states so that we will have all encompassing policy that will help our agriculture agenda for now. And also support our national irrigation policy that introduce under a roadmap that is supposed to be from this year to 2030. It won’t go well without this policy. So, is a good thing that we brought the three policies together and we believe the water resources sector is going to be entirely different ball game from now on.”
