Residents of Tumu have been without water for the past six months due to a debt owed the Volta River Authority by the Water Board in that town.
The debt which accrued over a period of two years is making it difficult for the board to purchase power to enable it pump water to their customers.
According to some residents who spoke to Starr News in separate interviews, 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 Starr FM’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 35 cedis 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 told Starr News 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. On a daily basis we make about 200 cedis from the sale of water to the people. The tap in our house is not flowing so we all come here to fetch”.
When Starr News caught up with the manager of the water system in the area, he disclosed that the problem is multi-faceted.
The manager Bajong Hudu Naffah disclosed that, “the problem started when a private person was managing the water system. He accrued a debt of over a 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 power to us. As we speak we have reduced the debt from over a thousand cedis to a little over 790,000 cedis”, he added.
He disclosed that illegal connections have also compounded their problems, adding “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. Naffah told Starr News that the board is not 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 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.
