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DR Congo

Water all over DRC, yet no drinking water for people

KINSHASA, Mar 27, 2007 (Xinhua via COMTEX) --C "Each day we walk for long distances in search of drinking water in the river situated at the bottom of Mount Amba valley," said a housewife Florence Dimbu who lives in Mount Ngafula area in northwestern Kinshasa, complaining of having to go to draw water in the river as if she was living in the village.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DCR), a country endowed with the gigantic Congo River which is one of the world's biggest rivers thanks to its flow, and irrigated by a multitude of rivers and countless lakes, the inhabitants are short of drinking water.

In the capital of Kinshasa and its surrounding areas like Masina, Kimbanseke, Bumbu, Makala, Ngaba and Mount Ngafula, drinking water is a rare commodity and even a luxury.

Antoine Moma, a civil servant who lives in N'djili area is complaining of the fact that the water supply company Regideso currently does not have a supply plan and stock of drinking water for Masina and other areas situated close to N'djili International Airport.

"It's as if the company does not consider us as human beings. For several years, we have written to the management requesting them to supply us with drinking water. But there has been only promises and nothing has been done as yet," he told Xinhua.

"Regideso itself is facing serious problems related to infrastructures and maintenance of its production equipments," one of the company officials said.

Obsolete and ineffective infrastructures and lack of electricity contribute to the water crisis in Kinshasa. The same phenomenon is observed in the country's interior. "Only about 20, 000 homes are connected to the water supply system in the eastern South-Kivu province," Regideso's commercial director Mudumbi Mweze said.

However, "several rivers and water streams cover this province. Lake Kivu and Lake Tanganyika are also an integral part of its hydrographic network," a geographer Cyprien Birhingingwa said. But due to lack of efficient infrastructures, this water cannot reach the consumers.

There is no lack of water as such: "River Congo, in the center of Africa, is the largest hydroelectricity reserve in the world. The country's water streams, rivers and lakes feed it with regular flows of 75,000 cubic meters per second, making it the world's second biggest river after Danube," Birhingingwa added.

Lake Kivu extends over an area of 2, 650 square meters, while Lake Tanganyika, the world's seventh and Africa's second largest lake extends over an area of 32, 900 square meters.

The province and the country is overflowing with thousands of drinking water sources with high flows, but "only 45 percent of DRC's 57 million people had access to drinking water in 2002," according to a July-August 2003 report published by a Washington- based research body known as Population and Community. These figures have not been improved as a result of the war.