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The federal government has concluded plans to enforce the mandatory water test policy for drilling boreholes and other water projects across the country.
According to NAN, this was made known on Sunday, October 2, 2022, by the minister of water resources, Malam Suleiman Adamu, during an interview in Abuja.
Adamu said this policy is part of the federal government’s efforts to strengthen its National Reference Laboratories to solve the problems of water quality, standards, and monitoring in Nigeria.
What the minister of water resources is saying
Adamu said, “We are going to come up with a policy in all our water projects that when you drill boreholes, part of the condition is you must do water tests.’’
He said periodic water tests and quality water surveillance were being carried out in adherence to the Nigerian Standard for Drinking Water Quality.
The minister noted, “For our own projects, the water quality test should be conducted within our laboratories.
“In that way we keep them busy, but we also use the laboratories for surveillance because we are also in charge of water quality surveillance.
“So, periodically, we go out, we test not only existing water supply schemes, but also the rivers with the source of the raw water,” he said.
FG to complete National Reference Laboratories
Adamu reiterated the ministry’s commitment to the completion of the National Reference Laboratories, which is a priority.
He added, “We give priority to the completion of the laboratories. They are among the projects that we prioritise for completion, and we are working very hard to complete them.
“One of the things we are looking at is completion; we’ll take a few that can be run directly by the government.
“We may also align some of them with universities or maybe some arrangement for others to run them.’’
The minister said this was because there were certain tests or certain situations where one needed to authenticate some of the water quality tests.
Adamu explained that sometimes when there was an outbreak of infections, relevant tests were conducted to authenticate some of the hypotheses around the causes of the infections.
What you should know
Recall that in a related development, the federal government earlier in July insisted that it would go ahead with its proposed Water Resources Bill despite backlash and opposition from some stakeholders over some controversial aspects of the bill, adding that the reforms in the water resources sector are to reposition it to where it is supposed to be.
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