By Adonis Byemelwa
Picture an electrician coming to your house to connect electricity and tell you to buy candles and solar lamps because the grid will collapse. Such is the outrageous reality in Misenyi, where Ruwasa officials are encouraging thirsty customers to purchase mountain-like storage tanks, which is a cynical confession that they will never have run-of-the-mill taps anyway.
Down in the green cradle of Misenyi District, where the Kagera River twists into a Lake Victoria that lies a whisper away across the horizon, geography strums a savage, dissonant tune.
For those of Bugandika, Kitobo and Bwanjai, Africa’s largest body of fresh water acts not as a giver of life but rather a mute bystander: sadly, powerless in the face of man-made devastation.
Such is the case with “economic water scarcity”, where a population is not thirsty because there are no wells, but rather because of how thoroughly their bureaucratic and technical underbelly has strangled their infrastructure.
Ruwasa promised a revolution in utility access, but as of the start of October 2023, nearly 4,500 households are still locked in systemic terminal thirst.
Even if Sh558. Despite water development at $1billion, the “last mile” of service delivery in Misenyi has proven to be a mirage, not reaching thirsty Kyaiga.
A paradox of Misenyi is a local symptom of a global malaise, matching the experience of his native Philippines that receives record-breaking annual tropical rainfall but where nearly 9 million people lack sustainable water.
It mirrors the “water mafias” of Karachi and the thirsty villages lining the Nile, where material plenty is often offset by the lethal mix of fiscal malfeasance and governance breakdowns.
Stanbic Misenyi is surrounded by the steady torrents of the Ngono and Mwisa rivers, within which isn’t entirely deniable operational heartache and squandered opportunity – as illustrated at the Kyesherero project; the area’s only mannequin.
The man who puts it in local technician Mgopa Bahati has a readily identifiable villain: a crumbling energy grid, one of many usual suspects in a country where lost (to leaks and theft) non-revenue water climbed to 42.3 per cent last year.
But the rationale of power cuts sounds hollow to a population that observes massive sod pipes automating how water from Lake Victoria would be drawn hundreds of miles away to Shinyanga’s arid mines.
This political slap has been compounded by the financial obstacles imposed by Ruwasa, which residents reported to be as high as Sh700,000 for just 178 metres of piping.
As a point of reference, this fee, which is almost three times the average monthly income for rural households, is in stark contradiction to the National New Connection Guidelines that set out prices for new connections by aiming to ensure essential water access at an affordable price (emphasis added).
Ruwasa is taking steps to advise the citizens that they should buy their own motors and storage tanks, literally privatising public service, deflecting the failure of an infrastructure onto the frayed shoulders of poor farmers.
The district’s billing system, meanwhile, has effectively collapsed as well; some customers have been left for six months without a bill, then slapped with back-dated charges for services that never came to pass.
Never mind the loss of government revenue from taxes, this will be dwarfed in impact by the loss of public trust and a “pay-to-play” mentality emerging as citizens have to have their valves opened by phone call begging.
It embodies what happens in much of Africa, which is that the politics of “who gets water” are made by relevant parties sitting cool behind glass windows and air-conditioned offices far away from the dust and heat of the village square.
The Nelson Mandela Bay crisis in South Africa showed that an advanced engineering achievement cannot save a system from the slow death of deterioration and neglect, of a lack of vision for long-term planning.
Misenyi, however, appears to favour short-term but expensive patches over permanent, more effective and gravity-fed engineering solutions that require less power by refusing the temptation of tapping perennial rivers surrounding the district.
District Commissioner Colonel Hamis Maiga has made an attempt to appeal the rising public anger, but his words often get entangled in a bureaucratic fog coming from local Ruwasa offices.
The psychological burden is heavy; mothers in Bugandika must weigh the choice of polluted surface water or the financial impact of unregulated, exploitative private water sellers.
This is the “shubiri”, the bitterness, that Ruwasa has been for Misenyi, this registration, the souring of a once-sweet ikanda: even just the promise of a modern Tanzanian prosperity and economic growth through industrialisation.
Now, the cry of intervention is directed to Water Minister Jumaa Aweso, renowned for “breaking chains” of negligence. But this time it’s a blatant test of his Kagera-ability.
The Ministry of Water has sought in excess of Sh1 trillion for the 2025/26 fiscal year, giving, among others, the residents in Misenyi no longer any fiscal excuse for their dry and dusty taps.
They want an audit of the Sh700,000 connection fees at once and an overhaul of their unreliable Kyesherero electricity system to be replaced by the hydroelectric potential awaiting them from the nearby rivers.
The sun dips below the horizon of Lake Victoria, where its golden rays shine on a surface holding the answer to prayers and streams in Misenyi, if there were political will to pipe it.
A government capable of moving water across the Rift Valley to Shinyanga must find both the mechanical and moral will to move it across the village square to its own next-door neighbours.
Minister Aweso’s appeal is not just a matter of better plumbing; more so, it represents a call for the reinstatement of the social contract between the state and its most vulnerable citizens.
Misenyi shall drown the bitterness it’s revered by the mere rivers that surround it, wash away a scarcity scandal into equitable distribution and clean governance of transparency – triumph!
In the absence of radical oversight reforms, “Kero ya Ruwasa” will haunt the regional administration for eternity, providing much-needed proof to all and sundry that in Misenyi, excuses flow more freely than water.
With freedom of information now well established across the globe, Tanzania’s record on this essential right to self-empowerment and local control will surely be scrutinised.
The world, meanwhile, scratches its head, wondering why, of all people in the world, do last-resort citizens eat two blocks down the street from their greatest natural treasure, and go thirsty. Time will tell if Tanzania is truly ready to shrug off a painful past of prioritising the centre of gravity from bitter slavery.
This failure is more than a local indictment, but an unflattering mark against institutional indifference in a world now shrunk to globalised dimensions by radical transparency. The social contract begins to fray when water, the most elemental human right, is treated as a luxury for the few miles away instead of a utility for the many inches in front.
The struggle of Misenyi epitomises a greater, pressing question: Are the national riches at last to be instrumentalised in the hands that safeguard them, or shall the “curse” of resources once more convert sufficiency into a motif of structural refusal? All eyes in the international community now turn to the shores of Lake Victoria for a sign that true fairness and equity will prevail.
