Africa-Press – Cape verde. The PAICV in São Vicente today reported that the council refuses to connect the Faculty of Education and Sports (FAED), of the University of Cape Verde, to the sewage network and imposed a fine of one thousand contos on the institution.
The complaint was made today by the municipal elected official of the African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde (PAICV), Nilton Medina Silva, after a visit to FAED, at the University of Cape Verde (Uni-CV).
According to the elected official, this situation of “lack of public health” has harmed more than 600 people, including students, teachers and staff, and puts the very structure of the building at risk, because the basement, which is located beneath the library, is flooded with sewage water.
Furthermore, he added, it affects residences close to the institution and the Bishopric of Mindelo itself, where Bishop Dom Ildo Fortes lives, next door to FAED.
“We became aware of the situation regarding the lack of connection of this institution to the sewage network, because since its inauguration there has been no connection to the sewage network. And the situation has become increasingly worse, given the increase in the student population. At this moment we practically have an open sewer,” he began.
For Nilton Medina Silva, this problem occurs because the city hall does not authorize the institution to connect to the public sewage network, which, in his view, will make it difficult to start the next school year, given the “unhealthy situation”.
The municipal elected official stated that despite successive contacts from the FAED management and the warning from the São Vicente Health Department to resolve the situation, the mayor of São Vicente, Augusto Neves, has remained silent.
“Soon, with the rains and the heat increasing more and more each day, there will be another environment conducive to the proliferation of mosquitoes. We appeal to the city government to resolve this problem because we find it strange that after so much insistence the city government has not responded, FAED decides to continue with the work and the city government fines it one million cruzeiros without any institutional contact,” he criticized.
According to the head of FAED, Albertino Martins, for several months they have been dealing with the problem of water accumulating in the basement of the old Cortiço building.
This is because, he explained, since the inauguration of the new building, the university has never had authorization to connect to the public sewage network, so they had to channel waste water to a septic tank that no longer meets demand.
“We had about two meters of water accumulated in a basement that is quite large and this is a cause for concern for us. The Health Department warned us about resolving the problem. We are trying to talk to the city government because it is a problem that is beyond our control,” he explained.
Albertino Martins said that they proposed that the city hall do the work of connecting to the sewage network at the university’s expense and never received a response.
But, given “the silence of the city hall”, they hired a construction company and began the works “out of desperation and aware that they were carrying out an intervention without municipal authorization”, and were fined.
“We cut the sidewalk, made all the pipe connections and when we got to the asphalt stage where we would reach the sewer that would allow us to make the connection, the city council fined us one million escudos to be paid in 30 days”, explained the same source.
The official reported that the city hall’s sanitation team is fully aware of the situation because it has already sent the sanitation truck to carry out the suction of sewage water, which is now being carried out by a private company at a cost that has already reached 100 contos.
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