Residents of Tumu have been hit with water crisis for the past six months because of a GHC700.00 debt owed the Volta River Authority by the community’s Water Board.
The debt which accrued over a period of two years is making it difficult for the Board to purchase power and supply it to their consuming public.
Some residents interviewed on the issue told this portal that the development is forcing them to depend on boreholes which are sometimes far from their homes.
One resident who only gave his name as Wahab told EIB Network’s Musah Lansah that, he decided to stop paying his bills to the Water Board because they could not provide his household with water.
According to him, “we now owe the board about GHC35.00 but I won’t pay because they failed to provide us water after I paid my bill the last time which is about five months ago. My wife now fetches water from the borehole around the school which is a bit far from the house”.
Another resident, Awal, noted that the development forced his father to start a small town system himself to sell water to the residents.
He said, “We started this system a week ago and we are getting customers all the time. Daily we make about GHC200.00 from the sale of water to the people. The tap in our house is not flowing so we all come here to fetch water”.
According to Lansah, when he caught up with the manager of the water system in the area, he disclosed that the problem is multi-faceted.
The manager Bajong Hudu disclosed that, “the problem started when a private person was managing the water system. He accrued a debt of over thousand cedis and this forced the VRA to give us a prepaid meter”.
“Upon giving us the prepaid meter, they told us that until we clear our debts they won’t sell water to us. As we speak we have reduced the debt from over a thousand cedis to a little over 700 cedis”, he added.
Awal further disclosed that, illegal connections have also compounded their problems.
“Our technical people also connive with some people in town to do illegal connections so we are unable to take money from these people making it difficult for us to raise money to pay our indebtedness”.
Mr. Bajong commenting further said the board is now liaising with the Sissala Rural Bank to get a loan to settle their indebtedness to VRA so that they supply water to the residents of the area.
Meanwhile the Member of Parliament (MP) for the area, Ridwan Abass, has disclosed that, he is in talks with some Korean partners to provide another system to support the existing one. He announced this during the annual Paari Gbeili festival of the chiefs and People of the Tumu Traditional Area.
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