Dozens of residents of the Sudanese capital Khartoum have taken to the streets this week protesting severe shortages of drinking water and claiming they did not have water in their houses.
The police dispersed the crowds using tear gas as water administration officials vowed to find a solution to the crisis.
“There’s a shortage of water and the water is also very muddy,” Sampath Kumar, the United Nations children’s fund Chief of Water and Sanitation in Khartoum, told The Media Line. “The problem is that they’re doing some rehabilitation in many parts of the city… they’re cleaning or putting down new pipelines.”
Kumar stressed that the children’s fund was not involved in water management projects in the urban parts of the city.
“Most parts of the town are having problems,” he said. “I’m living in the center of the city and in my house, for the past two days, I’ve been getting very muddy water which you can hardly use at all.”
Kumar said this was the first time in five years that he had encountered this problem and that his general impression was that the water supply in Khartoum was mostly good.
Residents say they are encountering huge difficulties accessing water, and say taps have been dry for days, the London-based A-Sharq Al-Awsat reported.
In areas where the water shortage has hit, people are buying the precious commodity from street vendors who carry mobile water tanks on donkeys.
Water prices have shot up three fold, with a barrel of water is being sold for the equivalent of $60, A-Sharq Al-Awsat reported.
Kumar said buying from vendors was a common occurrence in the outskirts of the city, where the pipelines have not been extended.
The water administration in Khartoum, a state body, said the water shortage over the past two days occurred in two neighborhoods and was the result of damage to a well being repaired.
The authority said there was a higher-than-normal build-up of sediment in water coming from the Nile and that it should be back to normal in two days.
The lack of sufficient water resources to support the populations dependent on the Nile has been a source of growing tension recently.
Ministers from 10 African countries located around the Nile River postponed the drafting of a new water-sharing agreement on Tuesday for six months. Sudan and Egypt rejected the pact as they refused to reduce their quotas.
A 1929 agreement between Egypt and Great Britain gave Cairo veto power over upstream projects in the Nile. Another agreement 30 years later between Egypt and Sudan gave Egypt 55.5 billion cubic meters of water each year (70 percent of the Nile’s flow) and Sudan 18.5 billion cubic meters.
Other Nile Basin countries resent these pacts and claim they are unfair.
According to the World Bank, the Middle East and North Africa is the world’s driest region, with water availability at around 1,200 cubic meters per person per year, compared with the average of about 7,000 worldwide. Half the region’s residents already live under conditions of water stress and water availability per capita is expected to halve by 2050.