GHANA: DUBILA STILL DRINKS “ANYTHING” TO SURVIVE

DUBILA STILL DRINKS “ANYTHING” TO SURVIVE

Edward Adeti’s Report, Ghana.

Residents of Dubila dig deep into the earth for elusive brown water

Two years after the Daily Dispatch brought to the fore the acute shortage of drinkable water at Dubila, a remote rural village inside Bolgatanga, there has been a level of change but some parts of the area still drink “anything” to survive.

A whole community had been thirsty years before and after Independence until this paper by its publication on Tuesday June 30, 2009, got involved. Consequently, one borehole popped up in three of the six zones that constitute the village which hitherto had been looking up to erratic rainfall, passing rivers and a lonely dam in its centre for water to meet domestic and commercial purposes.

Whilst the three zones, namely Dubila-Nayirekura ( or Dubila Central), Dubila-Kolibolgo and Dubila-Ayessikabisi, now form endless queues behind a few boreholes they can call their own, the rest still travel several kilometres back and forth on foot, and are too tired to do anything else except to sleep when they finally return in tired bodies.

School-going children in Dubila-Nayirepaala, Dubila-Yakene and Dubila-Anayelebisi (the areas without boreholes) are the worst-disturbed as they sometimes are forced to forgo their sleep for a pre-dawn journey for water amid fears into the unknown. By the time they are returning after sunrise, wet and waddling under heavy containers, the first two lessons are long over at school. There is not a single school in the community. Basic school children walk daily beyond the perimeters of the village to attend school. 

Animals and humans compete over a receding dam

As the prevailing climate change continues to hold back sufficient rainfall and the rivers with the central dam at Dubila recede and surrender their water to global warming, the women and children of the area join dry-throated cattle in an endless contest for the scarce little water. Every family has a steel container with which they dig deep into the wet sand of the riverbed for water whenever the two rivers, Ayaboka (at Dubila-Nayire) and Ayomii (at Dubila-Yakene), go dry. In time of complete dryness, the inhabitants travel out of the community to the neighbouring Bongo Beo and Dachio. 

In an exclusive interview with the Daily Dispatch, Mr. Wisdom Awisika Atuah, an opinion leader in the area and founder of the Wine-Panga Cultural Foundation ( a talent-hunting community-based organisation), said the water-deprived population had continued to suffer the scourge of such water-borne diseases as river blindness, bilharzias and cholera among others.

Mrs. Avoorima Azanlebisa, a farmer and peasant trader at Dubila-Nayire, lamented the adverse effects of water scarcity on domestic and commercial activities in the village. “A number of our children had ever set forth at dawn in search of water and never returned. We’ve have lost some children, and some have been maimed, due to water-borne diseases. And there are many who, out of pressure to satisfy the scarcity, have given up their commercial farming activities for some other businesses because there is not constant water supply for an all-year-round farming. 

"Some children have also dropped out of school after the indispensable and endless search for water has rendered them perpetual latecomers, absentees and poor-performing students. There is no school here. The schools they attend are miles away from this community and there is no light under which they can study or do their home work when they come back from school. No affordable access to electronic information and education for our children, yet they must compete with their contemporaries in the towns and cities in everything including external examinations like the BECE and job interviews,” she said.

Another resident, Mrs. Victoria Apoore who is into local shea-butter processing at Dubila-Yakene, used the interview opportunity to appeal for vehicle-friendly roads, a basic school, a clinic and electricity.

Transportation pressure is unbearable particularly on market days in Bolgatanga. Market women and men are torn in-between queuing for water and enduring the marathon to Bongo-Beo and Dachio to catch any available means of transport to the Bolgatanga market with their crops, animals, locally woven baskets and smocks. How they will return home at sunset hangs on a stroke of luck.

The only school structure in the area, which is yet to function probably under the name “Dubila Primary School”, has got only three classrooms. Since twenty electric poles were offloaded in the area in the year 2000 to connect the community to the national grid, it was only six months ago that about ten of the poles were planted upright. Residents are worried because the erection of the ten poles has been the only development so far since the resurrection of the project in January, this year.