A journey 48 years back saw a sustainable solution to Nigeria’s future problems with groundwater availability, which history records as a missed opportunity but even now there might still be a limited window to plan and execute a coordinated reboot that rids real estate of a complete fixation on drilling boreholes to get their supply. While the hope for a quick mind shift stays strong, one of the country’s past presidents has posed a question coinciding with the 2025 World Water Day which the global decision-making body the United Nations (UN), is championing as a force for good.

Every year on 22 March, the 193 member states of the organisation attempt to bring focus on a key issue pointing to any of the 17 strategic UN sustainable development goals that have been listed. It is on that note that Nigeria’s 5^th and 12^th president, who is a traditional chief, Olusegun Obasanjo comes in wondering how long until Nigeria’s growing population exhausts 155.8 billion cubic kilometres per year worth of groundwater.

By the middle of the century, it is estimated that Nigeria would have grown immensely in terms of its economy if the appropriate choices were made, but also, by then, this West African nation would have reached 400 million people.

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Getting to 2050, there will be pressure to provide safe, clean water to households while not forgetting that agricultural services – to produce crops and livestock – will also need a boost which all the more inspires the appetite to drill more bore holes as Nigerians generally rely on their initiative to achieve water supply, although it is turning out that this cannot go on.

In Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, an estimated 607,580 people live there and President Obasanjo, an indigene is one of them. At his residence, he worried openly to a delegation of Ogun-Oshun River Basin Development Authority (OORBDA) staff who visited him at the same moment the United Nations was marking the 2025 World Water Day, which had a theme focusing on glacier preservation in the heat of global warming.

The basin authority team that visited Chief Obasanjo was led by their Managing Director, Adedeji Ashiru. Listening to the 88-year-old host, they learned the impulsive act of drilling boreholes around every corner turned in Abeokuta naturally ought not to have been as work had gone into taking care of such dysfunction as far back as the late seventies.

Revisiting a particular memory of his Military Head of State leadership precisely in 1977, Obasanjo via a statement his Special Assistant on Media, Kehinde Akinyemi released on his behalf, said: I realised that strategic water management must be part of our food sufficiency drives, and food security and we created 11 River Basin including the Lake Chad, but it has appeared that those earlier efforts have lacked follow-up for a long time because it isn’t Abeokuta alone in the southwest of Nigeria that has the situation where borehole drilling is the common thing within the market that can afford the price tag.

To get water, northern Nigeria where infrequent rain and climate change affect everyone, finds itself drilling more holes but there is now the fear of emptying the entire groundwater, earlier than what would have occurred under a normal circumstance.

Back to Abeokuta, President Olusegun Obasanjo recalls another distant memory although one that is very much still clear, which was when Oyan Dam was built to supply water for Abeokuta and Lagos, but it has been neglected and ignored just like the turbine for the power supply.

The water supply is not there for Abeokuta, and we have rather continued to dig holes everywhere causing the water level to go down and down. That will have repercussions in the future, how long we shall have it I don’t know, but the geologist can do their job and tell us how fast [those] repercussions will come.

The 1983-built Oyan Dam, located near Abeokuta in Ogun State, Nigeria, was constructed primarily for water supply, irrigation, and hydroelectric power generation.

Built on the Oyan River, a tributary of the Ogun River, the dam’s reservoir is meant to serve as a significant water source for Lagos and Abeokuta, ensuring access to potable water for millions of people.

Before the former president’s press statement, Managing Director Adedeji Ashiru had remarked that towards driving irrigation farming, the incumbent administration of President Bola Tinubu had made a budgetary allocation of ₦45 billion for the agency, in addition to flagging off the construction of six adjoining dams to take the pressure off Oyan, but only time tells if all these are sufficient for the long-run.

Ayodele Johnson

Ayodelé is a Lagos-based journalist and the Content and Editorial Coordinator at Meiza. All around the megacity, I am steering diverse lifestyle magazine audiences with ingenious hacks and insights that spur fast, informed decisions in their busy lives.