A repugnant stench hangs in an open space as a group of Gulu University students walk past a toilet on their main campus, grimacing with a sense of disgust. JOHN OKOT has been looking at the impact of a one month water shortage on the university.
A group of students are trying to keep up with a lecture, adjacent to the main hall at Gulu University. However, a few metres away, flies are hovering over the front porch of a toilet there, motivated by an acrid stench coming from inside.
From the level of the smell, it is a miracle that the class is still going on. Titus Semakula, a second-year Education student, agrees that the foul smell from the toilets has created an unfavorable learning environment for two weeks now. When The Observer visited on Monday, it was clear he had had it with the situation.
“We don’t have water in our toilets. This problem has even worsened with the strong bad smell from toilets that destract us from learning,” he said.
James Okello, a first-year student studying on the bachelor of Business Administration programme, says most students are seeking redress outside their campus.
“They are worried that some of them might contract urinary infections, due to the state of the toilets. It is really bad,” Okello said.
Okello and Semakula are concerned since Gulu municipality has been facing water shortage for the past one month. However, the crisis reached a critical stage last week when both valley dams (Oyitino dam 1 and 2) dried up. And one of the students, Okello, says they are in a bad space.
“Even the water that the university brings from outside is not enough to address the problem because it is taken to serve the administration block while students’ toilets are left out,” Okello complained.
This followed a statement last Thursday, by the National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC), stating that the dwindling water supply in the municipality had been affected by the prolonged dry spell.
“This severe weather has led to a drastic drop in the water level in Oyitino dam, the main source of water in the municipality. The drop in water levels renders the dam virtually dry,” the statement reads in part.
Consequently, Gulu University deputy public relations officer, Mahmud Khalid, says the institution has been spending at least Shs 1.6 million weekly to collect water from outside town using police water trucks.
“We also rely on the electric water pump outside the university which also provides little and is at times unreliable especially when power is off,” Khalid added
WATER RATIONING
With the dry spell continuing in northern Uganda, NWSC has resorted to rationing water to its clients. The NWSC regularly supplies five million litres of water daily to its 6,000 clients on the grid. However, in the last two weeks, the water supply can only generate 1.5 million litres, leaving a shortage of 3.5 million litres.
The NWSC Gulu branch manager, Stephen Gang, says the crisis is worse than what occurred last year in April, adding that even the newly dug Oyitino dam 2 meant to support Oyitino dam 1, has since dried up. He adds that Oyitino dam 2 will now have to be ‘widened and dug deeper’
“This crisis is even worse compared to the one we had last year yet we are approaching May and it is not raining. We are working on the Oyitino dam 2 to collect more water for future use,” he said.
Oyitino dam 2 was established in April last year by a team of Uganda People’s Defense Force soldiers (UPDF) who dug trenches so as to allow nearby streams flow into it in a bid to restore more source of water supply, after Oyitino dam 1 dried completely.
At the moment, Gang notes, despite the fact that they have to rely on the three newly constructed electric boreholes - in Onyang, Unyama and Mican - that will produce 600,000 litres of water daily, it is also not enough.
He furthers states that seven additional electric boreholes will also be constructed where each will take two weeks to complete: “We are looking for the right place for construction, from that we do the survey and test before we start construction,” he said
For now, Semakula and Okello can only look on helplessly as the water shortage makes their institution more uncomfortable to live in. “We hope that something can be done urgently; otherwise, we are in trouble here … people are cutting classes to avoid the smell from the toilets,” Semakula says.