Africa-Press – Angola. The problem of water scarcity that has been occurring for several years in the municipality of Soyo, province of Zaire, will be resolved, in the near future, with the execution of the project to build a station for capturing and distributing the product.
The deputy municipal administrator of Soyo for Technical Services, Adelino Kai, informed that the local authorities had already received guarantees from the Ministry of Energy and Water, for the execution of the project.
Speaking during the visit of the governor of Zaire, Adriano Mendes de Carvalho, the deputy municipal administrator of Soyo for Technical Services, Adelino Kai, acknowledged that the future station will solve the problem of distributing drinking water to the municipal headquarters, provided that it has capacity exceeding 20 thousand cubic meters of water daily.
In his opinion, the system should not only be designed for housing areas, but also for companies and other projects that are being implemented in the region, such as Kwanda, to support the oil industry, the Oil Refinery and the Combined Cycle. of electricity production.
Adelino Kai informed that at the level of communes and villages, the water supply is being done through artesian wells, built with funds from the Program to Combat Poverty. “We started in the village of Tombe, commune headquarters. We also rehabilitated the water hole in the village of Mponzo, commune of Quêlo, we are going to rehabilitate another well in the Pângala neighborhood, commune of Pedra de Feitiço”, he said, adding that the Municipal Administration plans to implement mini systems for capturing water from rivers.
The deputy municipal administrator explained that the current water treatment plant, existing since 2000, was designed at a time when the municipality had a population of less than 40,000 inhabitants. Today, the region has over 300 thousand inhabitants, and the current capacity (850 cubic meters) does not benefit even ten percent of the population. In order to minimize the situation, the Municipal Administration carried out a work to restore 85 of the 280 existing fountains in Soyo. This project is at a standstill, because most of the sites where they are installed do not have connections, that is, the ducts were damaged.
According to Adelino Kai, at Soyo level, only the Kinganga Mavakala urbanization, located more than 15 kilometers from the city center, benefits from 100% potable water, as its distribution network is still in good technical conditions.
Lack of payments
Residents of the municipality appealed to the Government to urgently resolve the issue of water scarcity, at a time when the head of the Department of the Commercial and Marketing Agency of the Public Company of Water and Sanitation of Zaire, Ribeiro Pascoal Sebastião, recognized the deficit, as the treatment plant, built on the Vuembanga river, currently works with only one of the two installed pumps.
This situation, he explained, reduced production capacity from 300 to 215 cubic meters of water per hour and the reservoir capacity is 2,000 cubic meters.
Ribeiro Sebastião stressed that around 1,500 customers are registered with household connections, a figure he considers to reflect the sector’s inability to guarantee access to drinking water for the population of Soyo, estimated at more than 500,000 inhabitants.
He regretted the fact that around 30% of the 1,500 customers in the database do not regularly pay for their water consumption, a fact that has been reflected in very derisory figures in terms of revenue collection.
“The debt of these customers is estimated at between 1.5 and two million kwanzas, per month”, he revealed, to explain that Soyo’s drinking water distribution network was initially designed to operate, on a large scale, through fountains, that is, it did not provide for household connections.
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