By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
Water is life, they say. So the debate about its safety is very important. In Sierra Leone, the discussion about water has mostly been about access and less about safety. The reason for this is logical, there will be no debate about safety if there is no access.
But whether there is a shortage of water or not, today almost everyone is a consumer of sachet water, especially in urban areas like Freetown.
This massive consumption rate has been driven by the visibly portable and descent branding of sachet water which has since ended the days of knotted plastic waters in public spaces.
The sachet water industry is offering a key assurance as part of their unique selling proposition- safety. This assurance is supposed to be in the form of thorough filtration system and careful handling.
But the rise in consumption has seen so many of these businesses spring up to the extent that regulation has been a nightmare for the water industry.
In the process standards have been eroded and there is no telling how bad the situation is.
Micheal Kargbo, the Head of Water at the Electricity and Water Regulations Commission (EWRC) says they have up to 120 registered water companies across the city, but that even this number is not reliable.
“But these numbers keep changing. Some of them just pop up and shut down, whiles some of them hide and do business. Others duplicate names. It is so sporadic, so it is difficult to track them,” Kargbo said.
Head of Product Certification at the Sierra Leone Standards Bureau, Tamba Kamanda also had similar concerns about how big and uncontrollable the industry has become.
“The market is so vast and so dynamic that you need a very meticulous monitoring system in place for you to actually keep track of all of them,” he told Politico.
Both the EWRC and the SLSB are key stakeholders in the water regulation circle. EWRC is directly responsible for regulation whiles the Standards Bureau are responsible for quality assurance.
According to both bodies, companies register whiles going through almost four key stages.
Kargbo explained to Politico the process of registration.
“The current criteria we use is that you should be a registered business, you should have gone through Standards Bureau for quality test so they can give you a certificate, then get a certificate of fitness from the ministry of Health. After all of these, you would come to the regulator to register.”
On the face of it, this should be thorough enough, but it is not. Most of the problem has not been about the registration process of sachet water businesses. It has been about how they operate afterwards. Because whiles they try to tick all these safety boxes during the start, they don’t continue doing so.
The Ministry of Water Resources is already in the spotlight for failing to deal with perennial water shortages, safety as well is a concern they have failed on. This is so especially with the water sachet industry.
Logistical nightmare
All things been equal, Standards Bureau say they are supposed to conduct unannounced checks at these business locations, but their challenge as an institution is stopping them from either doing their job or not doing it effectively.
“Ideally, we are supposed to conduct these tests twice a year, even that is not adequate. But even the twice a year has not been effective because of logistics constraints. As I speak to you we have only one operational vehicle to go and collect these samples and inspect these facilities,” Kamanda told Politico during a tour of their facility.
Standards Bureau assessment of the safety of consuming water sachet is worrying. When asked about how dangerous the situation is, Kamanda summed it up by saying “It’s quite dangerous. We can’t quantify it.”
The Bureau says the last time they attempted to collect samples was in January, 2019.
The Bureau’s assessment is based on science. For a start they should be physically checking to monitor the quality out there, but their lack of capacity is preventing them from doing do so. And unlike other bodies in the water regulation chain, they do their work analytically, using science to determine safety.
According to the Technical Manager of the Food and Microbiology lab at the Bureau, Mohamed Fofanah, they have a very rigorous system of testing before certifying water as safe for consumption. This is so because most of the bacteria that affect water can’t be seen with the naked eye.
Fofanah said the process includes sampling, inoculation, incubation, analysis and interpretation. But these steps also go in line with four parameters.
“We have four test that we use as the parameters to determine a pure water: Aerobic plate count, Polliforms, E.coli and Salmonella tests. We do all these tests simultaneously. If the water doesn’t comply with all four of these tests then it is contaminated,” he said.
The bar to certify water purity is high but getting the companies to willingly come for periodic test has been a challenge. But EWRC say this might change soon.
Strengthening regulations
There are so many players in ensuring water safety but there have been talks about the lack of coordination and clear responsibilities, which water producers have used in the past to their advantage.
“Monitoring is fragmented. It is not very coordinated, so much so that the client is confused,” Kamanda said.
But Kargbo said this is not the case: “There is perfect coordination, we have developed this regulation with everyone involved.”
The regulation Kargbo is referring to is a special regulation that has been drawn just to tackle the problems and increase quality. But it is still a work in progress.
“Currently we are focusing on regulation. We have developed special regulation for water sachet,” he said.
He explained some of the key steps in the regulation and what it aims to achieve.
“In this new regulation, we have frequent water inspections, how to handle and packet water and even rules about how to mark them.”
According to Kargbo, the regulation is now at the law officers department and it might take at least two months from then to its been passed as a law in parliament.
But until then, Standards Bureau says the most common cause of water contamination is its handling, and this situation could get worse by the rainy season.
“The common problem is the contamination of water because of poor handling of water. The water must be pure, your tank must be clean. Most environments are really not clean. The workers are supposed to be wearing gloves and PPE,” Kamanda said.
Sanitation is still a major problem that Freetown is yet to address. Ironically, the situation’s primary cause is the acute shortage of water in the city, but the situation only gets worse during the rains instead of getting better.
The way forward
For people to consume safe water, the responsibility rests with these agencies and the line ministries, no matter how ill-equipped they are. Kamanda says recent meetings in the development of the regulations have clearly helped the whole monitoring regime to clearly understand their roles.
This is a start.
Investing in the capacity of these bodies is crucial. Kamanda summed up their challenge in these words.
“The major constraint here is that: one, we don’t have the manpower on our side to cover every inch of the ground. Two, we only have one vehicle to collect the samples. Thirdly, even the testing of the samples, reagents are very expensive and we buy reagents. We need money to sustain the lab.”
Now that the special regulation on governing the sachet water industry is in the pipeline, it must stiffen the conditions of entry in to the market. People who can’t afford to run the business on a full scale with all the required machines, must not be registered to operate.
There is no halfway with water safety, sachet water is either safe to drink or it is not.
But it is in everyone’s interest to deal with it.
© 2019 Politico Online
