“Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink”
– Samuel Coleridge – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

They say that 71 percent of the earth’s surface is covered in water, Aisha doesn’t care much for this statistic. It means nothing to her. It isn’t even believable to her. If there was more water than land, then why was it that she was stumbling through the dark at 4am every morning to get to the one stream in her village to fetch water before the stream became crowded and murky? Why was it that she had to be back at that same stream at 6am to bathe herself and her younger siblings in water which was by now muddy and peppered with thousands of tadpoles swimming about their business? Water in which people were now washing clothes, scrubbing soot-covered pots, and seeking out exclusive spots in which to soak their cassavas for the next 3 days?

Aisha’s body rarely itched, but her younger sibling were always scratching their rash-covered bodies with gratifying veracity and inflicting tiny wounds on their tender bodies. She was lucky in that way. She was also lucky that her elementary-school-teacher mother religiously woke Aisha up to get to the stream very early in the morning and fetch water for their cooking and drinking. It was a pain, but she knew this was why she was the only one of her friends who had never suffered a bout of cholera.

Over 70 million Nigerians struggle to access safe water today. Even states like Lagos and Kogi which are surrounded by water do not have steady or clean water in every community, if at all. It is March 22, 2017, and it’s World Water Day (WWD). The theme for WWD this year is ‘Why waste water?’ Water is often taken for granted and not enough effort is made to conserve it when it is in steady supply through other means than the government water agency. However, as it is not oil, Nigeria is not invested enough in maximising the abundant water resources which it has, and therefore, should not join the conversation on the need to conserve water nor peddle for international funding to treat and recycle sewage water. Our water infrastructure has been neglected for decades, and so while Nigeria has water, the people do not quite have it.

This year, more than 70,000 people in Nigeria will die because of a lack of clean water and consequently, sanitation, but that is just another neglected statistic… Happy World Water Day!