By JKNewsMedia
CONCERNS OVER a planned private concession of parts of Lagos State’s public water infrastructure have prompted Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa (CAPPA), to warn that the move could weaken government responsibility for providing safe, affordable and reliable water to residents.
JKNewsMedia.com reports that the warning followed the signing of a one-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Lagos State Government (LASG), China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC), and Naston Engineering Nigeria Limited to scope and define components of a water infrastructure programme within the Lekki Concession Area.
A statement notes that the first phase of the proposed programme will involve installing a transmission pipeline beneath the Lagos Lagoon into the Lekki Concession Area (LCA), while the second phase will cover downstream distribution, including metering and last-mile connections.
It also states that the engagement is expected to produce a technical report and implementation framework to support a concession agreement between LASG and the consortium.
CAPPA said the arrangement confirmed that the MoU represented an early step towards concessioning, potentially giving private companies significant influence over water distribution, tariffs, metering and household access.
The organisation also condemned what it described as a lack of transparency surrounding the agreement, saying no publicly accessible copy of the MoU, its terms of reference or record of consultations with communities had been released.
“There is no publicly accessible record showing the project’s full scope, how the consortium was selected, what obligations the companies have assumed, or how residents have participated in its development,”
CAPPA said. “The government is already discussing tariffs and a concession while the public remains shut out.”
The NGO also maintained that while transparency was a basic democratic requirement, disclosing information would not address what it described as the inherent flaw in privatising water, which it said subordinates universal public access to commercial profitability.
It warned that low-income communities are often the first to suffer when the ability to pay becomes the organising principle of an essential public service and also questioned what it described as LASG’s inclination to transfer essential responsibilities to private actors, arguing that the state’s revenue base gives it the means and obligation to mobilise public resources, maintain infrastructure, expand production and guarantee public access to water.
CAPPA states that it rejected claims that the longstanding failures of Lagos’s water system made private involvement and control necessary, insisting that years of inadequate investment, poor maintenance, unreliable electricity and weak distribution networks should be addressed by rebuilding public capacity.
“The problem is that successive administrations have failed to fund, maintain, and expand the system at the scale Lagos requires. Allowing a public institution to deteriorate and then presenting private control as its rescue is dishonest. It is an abdication of responsibility,” said Holiness Segun-Olufemi, CAPPA’s Water Programme Officer.
He also notes that CAPPA opposed the planned expansion of prepaid water meters, saying the system automatically shuts off supply when purchased credit runs out and makes continuous access dependent on a household’s ability to pay in advance.
“For a resource essential to human life, sanitation, and public health, automated disconnections are fundamentally exclusionary and set to worsen the lives of vulnerable groups and low-income earners,” Segun-Olufemi said.
Furthermore, the organisation compared the proposed water concessions and prepaid meter rollout with Nigeria’s experience of electricity-sector privatisation and commercialisation, arguing that consumers continue to face tariff increases, prepaid meter shortages, estimated billing and persistent outages more than a decade after electricity generation and distribution were largely transferred to private operators.
“The service-based tariff has further divided consumers into bands, with Band A and Band B customers charged according to promises of at least 20 and 16 hours of daily supply respectively, even though service shortfalls remain common.
“Many households now pay rising tariffs while also spending on generators, fuel, solar systems and other alternatives.
“Meanwhile, the government continues to finance interventions, absorb sectoral debts and protect private operators from the consequences of a system that has failed to deliver reliable electricity,” CAPPA revealed.
CAPPA still warned that Lagos could reproduce what it described as the same flawed model in the water sector, where public money finances infrastructure while private companies gain control over billing and revenue, tariffs rise in the name of cost recovery, and households are required to pay upfront without a firm guarantee of supply, stressing that the consequences could be more severe because, while families may endure temporary power cuts, they cannot survive without water.
The organisation cited experiences in the Akilo and Baruwa areas of Lagos, where prepaid meters have already been introduced.
It said residents reported unexplained intermittent supply, delays in activating purchased units, restricted supply periods, low pressure and discrepancies between paid and received volumes.
Particularly, in Baruwa, households reported spending up to N60,000 monthly on water, sudden disappearance of purchased units, outages lasting weeks, dirty water when supply resumed and the absence of clear complaint mechanisms.
CAPPA stressed that water is a public good and a human right and said decisions on its production, distribution and financing must be guided by public need rather than investor returns.
It called on the LASG to halt further steps towards concessioning and suspend the expansion of prepaid metering and also demanded the full publication of the CHEC and Naston MoU and urged the government to release a publicly financed plan for rehabilitating treatment plants, pipelines, reservoirs and distribution networks.
Such a plan, CAPPA said, must guarantee a basic quantity of water to every household.
In the statement signed by Robert Egbe, its Media and Communications Officer, CAPPA also called on communities, labour unions, students, journalists, civil society organisations and residents to defend the human right to water and hold government accountable for providing basic amenities as it warned that concessions could bind Lagos for decades after the officials who negotiated them had left office.
In it concluding statement, CAPPA said Lagos urgently needed substantial investment in water infrastructure but maintained that such investment should strengthen the Lagos Water Corporation (LWC), expand public capacity and guarantee universal access rather than create another avenue for investors to profit from an essential service.
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