Water demand is increasing three times as fast as the world’s population growth rate, and poverty is the single most important factor related to meeting that demand, said officials at the 3rd World Water Forum. Some 1.2 billion people lack safe water supply and 2.4 billion live without secure sanitation, according to Water Forum official figures. At least five million people die yearly from water related diseases, including 2.2 million children under the age of five. An estimated one half of people in developing countries are suffering from diseases caused either directly by infection through the consumption of contaminated water or food, or indirectly by disease carrying organisms, such as mosquitoes, that breed in water -- Environment News Service. Tinu Ayanniyi takes a look at water crisis as it affects Nigerians.

Patrick, six year-old son of the editor of a national newspaper in the country, Dapo and Omolara Johnson went to visit some family friends with his parents in one of the high brow areas of Ibadan city.

When the visitation ended, Patrick was nowhere to be found. A search party combed the big compound and Patrick was eventually found standing in front of a running tap, staring intently at it.

Everybody wondered at his action but all he was able to say was “daddy see. Water.” His embarrassed father got the message. His son had never seen a running tap in his six years on earth.

For Abiola, Taiye and Idowu, siblings, and children of Mr and Mrs Ola Babatunde who live in the urban centre of Ibadan, Oluyole Estate, one of the supposed high class area of the city but they have a problem.

The problem is safe drinking water. Abiola and her younger ones, whether on holidays or not, spend up to a quarter of their working hours looking for water where they live. When the family can afford it, they buy the water to drink from a woman down their street who invested in a borehole that commercially serves the area. It is cheaper anyway than buying “satchet” water or bottled water. For the water they’ll need for household chores they rely on finding and hauling from houses that have wells beacuse the well in their house has dried up.

To get to school early, they are up by 5am. To make matters worse, the water they spend so much time and energy to find is rarely safe for drinking.

The Babatunde’s experience is a typical example of what most average family experiences in most urban centres of the country, not to talk of the rural communities.

As far back as 2000, the United Nations had been warning of future crisis world over. While the developed nations are finding solution to the water crisis, the developing nations appears to be folding their arms not knowing what to do. The implications is more deaths, more suffering fo the people.

In Nigeria, more than half the population has no access to clean water, and many women and children walk for hours a day to fetch it and the country is one of the world water flashpoints.

The water sector budgetary allocation by the Federal Government bet.ween 1999 and 2007 is over N357.86 billion to provide safe drinking water, yet there appears to be no solution in sight.

The billions appears to have dried up in the pipes instead of water flowing there. The over 120 million people have been left to continue drinking water containing all sorts of bacteria, germs capable of causing diseases. State governments have spent millions purchasing treatment chemicals for water that is not available.

The effect of the water crisis is not just waste of time and energy for all that are affected, diseases that are otherwise preventable are now common place among the people especially from among the midlle class downwards since many diseases hop a ride on food and water to enter the body right through the mouth.

There are now indiscriminate sinking of boreholes without proper geophysical survey. Some of which are close to septic tanks, unlined pit latrine and waste dump sites.

From Shonga in Kwara State to Onipe in Oyo State, Ogbia in Bayelsa and Yankari in Bauchi, Kaura in Jigawa there is continued prevalence of poor quality water in the country. The masses continue to fetch water from questionable sources such as rivers, ponds, burst pipes and wells. How can this be in a land that has fresh water in abundance by way of rivers all over?

Water more valuable than diamonds, says study A study by University of Arkansas economists shows a strong relationship between economic freedom and access to water. David Gay and Charles Britton, economics professors in the Sam M. Walton College of Business, and Richard Ford, a professor of economics at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, compared data from two important international indices and found that greater economic freedom leads to economic development, which in turn decreases the amount of poverty associated with a nation’s lack of access to water.

“When humans are free to improve their economic conditions, one of the conditions they choose to improve is their access to water,” Gay said. “So, based on our findings, we conclude that one means of improving humanity’s conditions with respect to access to water is to promote economic freedom on a global basis.”

Gay, Britton and Ford have collaborated on several research projects on water poverty, water resources and the environment, and the economies of arid lands. When the United Kingdom’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology released the Water Poverty Index, a new interdisciplinary tool for measuring the world’s water-scarcity problem, the Arkansas researchers wanted to examine the relationship between water and economic freedom, especially since those who developed the index acknowledged the connection between water use and economic development. The researchers’ work was also motivated in part by the efforts of former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and rock star Bono, who toured sub-Saharan Africa together and agreed on the critical importance of clean water to people in that region.

In determining whether a country is water poor, the Water Poverty Index considers five components: resources, access, capacity, use and environment. The researchers limited their analysis to the area of access, which focused on the percent of population with access to clean water, sanitation and irrigation.

“These areas are really about the ‘affordability’ of water, which is related to economic development in general,” Britton said. To compare water poverty to economic freedom, Gay and his colleagues used the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, which defines economic freedom as “the absence of government coercion or constraint on the production, distribution, or consumption of goods and services beyond the extent necessary for citizens to protect and maintain liberty itself.” Stated differently, it is an economic system in which people are free to actively participate — to work, produce, consume and invest in ways they think are most productive.

The index considers 10 factors — trade policy, fiscal burden of government, government intervention in the economy, monetary policy, capital flows and foreign investment, banking and finance, wages and prices, property rights, regulation, and black market. These factors were used to determine the absolute level of economic freedom of 161 countries and to compare those countries to one another.

The researchers looked at gross domestic income per capita as a measurement of economic development and found a “statistically discernable” relationship between the variables of economic freedom and development. Their results demonstrated that as a country’s economic freedom increased, there was a corresponding increase in gross domestic income per capita. Furthermore, as gross domestic income per capita increased, there was greater income per person in that country. Finally, the researchers found that as income levels increased within a country, there was more access to water and less water poverty in general.

“We believe that markets, supported but not encumbered by excessive government activity, lead to better conditions for human population,” Gay said. “As people are freer from their government, their income increases, and as economic conditions improve, poverty associated with lack of access to water decreases.”

The researchers discussed their findings within the context of an economics puzzle known as the “paradox of values.” Formulated by Adam Smith, the founding father of economics, in his influential book

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