Abstract
This essay looks at why water supply, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) stay chronically underfunded in Nigeria, and why sanitation gets even less than water. It starts from a structural asymmetry: water can be metered, priced and disconnected, so it gives utilities and politicians leverage. Sanitation cannot be withheld from one household without putting its neighbours at risk, so it has no such leverage. Using national survey data (WASH NORM 2019, 2021), WHO surveillance, government statements, peer-reviewed studies of Lagos water infrastructure and investigative journalism, the essay traces the burden that underinvestment shifts onto households, reviews the three standard funding routes (public budgets, private capital, development finance) and argues for a mixed model: a subsidised lifeline volume paid for by tiered tariffs, delivered through ring-fenced, accountable utilities, and planned together with electricity supply. The case of the Turkey–Northern Cyprus pipeline shows how capital-intensive water security is when a place has no raw water of its own.
Keywords: WASH; sanitation; water tariffs; lifeline pricing; non-revenue water; Lagos; Nigeria; cholera; political economy
1. Introduction
You can disconnect a household's water. You cannot disconnect its sanitation without threatening everyone's health. That one asymmetry explains a great deal about why one service is chronically underfunded and the other is neglected outright. Water can be metered, billed, priced and switched off, which gives it political, commercial and moral leverage. Sanitation offers none of that. It cannot be sold back by the litre, it is not photogenic, and it promises investors no quick return.
The argument was prompted by a public post by Dr Joe Abah, OON, Visiting Fellow at the Government Outcomes Lab, University of Oxford. He argued that water infrastructure suffers from underinvestment and corruption, that sanitation is in even worse shape, and that its costs are consistently underestimated [1]. The national data support him. When the Federal Government declared a state of emergency in the WASH sector in November 2018, access to piped water had fallen from 32% in 1990 to 7% in 2015, access to improved sanitation had fallen from 38% to 29%, and 46% of rural water schemes were not working [2]. About 60 million Nigerians lacked basic drinking water [3]. The 2019 WASH NORM survey found that 56% of the population (112 million people) lacked decent toilets and 23% (46 million) practised open defecation [4][5]. Public spending on WASH fell from 0.70% of GDP in 1990 to about 0.27% in 2015, well below the West African average [2].
The essay asks three questions: (i) who carries the cost when public WASH systems fail; (ii) why none of the usual funding routes has closed the gap; and (iii) what a workable pricing and institutional model looks like.
2. Methodology
Design. This is a qualitative policy analysis built on document review and secondary quantitative data, supported by a reflexive account of the author's training and fieldwork conversations. It is an argued essay, not an empirical study, and it produces no new primary data.
Sources and selection. Evidence was gathered in four tiers, in order of weight:
- Official and multilateral data: WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) [6]; the Federal Ministry of Water Resources / NBS / UNICEF WASH NORM surveys, 2019 and 2021 [4][7]; WHO epidemiological releases [8][9]; NCDC situation reports [10]; the Nigerian State House [2]; the World Bank [3].
- Peer-reviewed and institutional research: studies of Lagos waterworks performance and distribution losses [11][12]; WaterAid / Development Initiatives financing analysis [13].
- Investigative journalism: reporting on Lagos water budgets, prices and household coping strategies [14][15][16][17], used for recent figures that official data do not yet cover.
- Comparative case: the Turkey–Northern Cyprus water pipeline [18][19][20], chosen as an extreme case of the capital cost of water security.
Search strategy. Targeted searches of WHO, UNICEF, World Bank, NBS and NCDC repositories, Google Scholar, and Nigerian national newspapers (BusinessDay, The Guardian, Punch), for 2015–2026. Where sources disagreed, the official or peer-reviewed figure was used and the difference noted.
Verification. Every quantitative claim is tied to a numbered source. Figures in the original draft that could not be traced to a primary source were revised or removed (see Author's note on revisions).
Positionality. The author trained in Water Resources Management and Agrometeorology at the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB). First-person passages (sections 3 and 7) are reflexive context, not evidence.
Limitations. Nigerian WASH data are patchy, and different surveys use different definitions (JMP "basic" vs WASH NORM "improved"). Lagos budget figures come from journalistic investigations, not audited accounts. Vendor prices are illustrative and change with inflation. The essay does not model tariff levels quantitatively.
3. From consultant dreams to policy realities
Before moving into design and technology, the author wanted to be a water policy consultant: someone who asks the right questions and argues, patiently, for water policy that is fair and sustainable. Good water policy is invisible. When clean water runs from a tap, an engineer, a utility and a policymaker upstream did their jobs, and nobody will ever know their names. That invisibility is fatal to political priority.
In 2009, a FUNAAB class debate asked a deceptively simple question: should water be free? The afternoon settled nothing, because the question sits on top of harder ones about rights, markets, corruption, engineering timelines and accountability.
4. The household as utility: who carries the cost
In much of Nigeria, the public tap is mostly for show. Even at full operating capacity, the Lagos Water Corporation says it can serve only about 35% of households in a state of more than 20 million people [14][15]. Its installed capacity is still under 210 million gallons per day, against demand projected at 540 MGD in 2010 and much higher since; the 2010–2020 Water Supply Masterplan target of 745 MGD was never met [15]. Studies of the state's waterworks find utilisation rates often below 40% of design capacity [11]. An earlier study estimated that 60–83% of production was lost to vandalism, illegal connections and ageing pipes, and that about 64% of residents relied on groundwater [12].
What fills the gap is private self-supply. Households drill boreholes and buy tanks, pumps and treatment kits. Those who cannot drill buy from vendors: residents of Lekki reported paying ₦300 for 25 litres and spending ₦6,000–7,000 a week on water [16]. Those who can afford neither use wells of uncertain safety [17]. In effect, every household has become its own water utility, buying, storing, pumping and treating at a scale and cost no working system would ask of individuals. The poorest pay the highest price per litre.
The burden is also unequal between men and women. Globally, women are mainly responsible for collecting water in two out of three households without water on the premises [6], and the World Bank links water collection in Nigeria to lower school attendance and a higher risk of gender-based violence [3].
5. Disease: when inconvenience becomes mortality
Cholera is a current emergency in Nigeria. In September 2026 the WHO reported that 47 countries notified 451,499 cases and 7,870 deaths in 2025, the highest annual death toll reported since 1999. Seven countries, including Nigeria, accounted for about 90% of reported cases and deaths [8][21]. The WHO's emergencies chief said the concentration "shows where targeted investments in safe water, sanitation and hygiene could have the greatest impact" [8]. Cholera spreads through water and food contaminated with faeces, and access to safe WASH is essential to preventing it [9].
Nigeria has also been fighting diphtheria since 2022: by December 2023 there were 13,387 confirmed cases and 598 deaths, mostly among under-vaccinated children [10][22]. Diphtheria is mainly a vaccine-preventable disease, not a waterborne one. It is mentioned here as a parallel sign of weak public-health infrastructure, not as a direct result of WASH failure.
6. Scaling clean water is capital-intensive: the Northern Cyprus case
Supplying one household is a solvable engineering problem. Supplying a megacity is a different kind of problem. Northern Cyprus shows how extreme the cost can be. Cyprus is one of the most water-stressed places on Earth, and more than 60 aquifers there have falling water tables [18][20]. Its answer was an 80-kilometre pipeline suspended up to 280 metres under the Mediterranean, carrying water from the Alaköprü Dam in Mersin, Turkey. It was completed in 2015 and is described as the only long-distance undersea water pipeline in the world. It cost about TL 1.6 billion (roughly US$480–550 million at the time) [18][19][20]. The lesson is not that pipelines beat treatment plants. It is that when a place has no raw water of its own, securing any becomes enormously expensive. Water is heavy, cannot be compressed, and is among the most capital-intensive things a society can move or treat. That capital intensity sits behind every argument about who should pay.
7. Should water be free? A mixed model
The answer, stated plainly: no, water should not be entirely free for everyone, but access to a basic, life-sustaining amount should never depend on ability to pay. The UN recognises water and sanitation as human rights, and WaterAid argues that Nigeria's national action plan must be judged on equity [13].
On a train from Abeokuta to Lagos, the author debated this with Dr Ruth of the University of Ibadan, who had just returned from Uganda. They arrived at a lifeline tariff: a subsidised volume enough for drinking, cooking and hygiene, paid for by higher tiered tariffs on high-volume and commercial users, so the system can recover its costs. Free at the point of survival, priced above it.
The reasoning is both moral and practical. Fully free water pushes costs onto public budgets that have been shrinking [2], which leads to deferred maintenance and failed schemes (46% rural non-functionality). Pure market pricing excludes the people who already pay the most per litre. Tiered pricing gets past this false choice. Survey evidence that many Lagos residents believe water "should be free, and behave as such" [12] shows why any tariff reform needs public trust in the utility first.
8. Who pays? Three funding routes and why each has fallen short
8.1 Public budgets. Water infrastructure takes years to build and decades to mature, far longer than electoral terms. WaterAid estimates that Nigeria needs a ten-fold increase in public WASH funding, and that even allocated funds are poorly absorbed [13].
8.2 Private capital. Build times of three to five years and long payback periods put off investors. Private money flows readily into profitable slices (sachet and bottled water, premium boreholes) but not into the shared network. Lagos's 2025–26 public–private partnership, which drew 23 bids across four lots [14], is a live test of whether concession design can change this. Civil-society groups oppose it [23].
8.3 Development finance and governance. Multilateral lenders have funded Lagos water since at least 2005 [24]. Yet an investigation reported more than ₦66.9 billion spent on Lagos water over roughly six years while residents still depend on wells, boreholes and sachets [17]. Other reports cite ₦16 billion allocated to the corporation in 2019–2023 alone [16]. In 2025 the Lagos State House of Assembly promised to investigate stalled projects, including the ₦4 billion Otta-Ikosi waterworks awarded in 2007 [23]. The money moved; the water did not. Funding is necessary but far from sufficient when the systems around it leak, both money and water.
9. Water, power and sanitation fail together
Sanitation needs water, and water systems need electricity to pump, treat and distribute. Studies of Lagos waterworks point to unstable power as a main cause of under-capacity [11], and the state spent ₦3 billion on an independent power plant for waterworks plus about ₦180 million a month on fuel [23]. Households that "bought their way out" with a borehole are back at the well when the grid fails. These are not separate failures but one interlocking system that fails as a whole.
10. Policy recommendations
- Independent, ring-fenced utilities. Give them a mandate for cost recovery, publish performance data, and ring-fence revenue so it cannot be redirected [13].
- Lifeline tariffs. Guarantee a survival volume to every household, cross-subsidised by higher-volume and commercial tiers.
- Cut non-revenue water first. Lagos loses a large share of what it treats [12]; the cheapest new water is water you stop losing.
- Fund sanitation directly. Treat it as public-health infrastructure with its own budget line, not an add-on to water, in line with the WHO's cholera guidance [8][9].
- Plan water, power and sanitation together, including dedicated or renewable power for waterworks [11].
- Improve data and auditing. Publish audited WASH spending and make WASH NORM a regular annual exercise [7][13].
11. Conclusion
The crisis is not mainly technical. The engineering has existed for a century. What is missing is a funding logic built for assets that outlast election cycles, and the political will to treat water as the essential economic good beneath public health, education, dignity and economic life, not as a favour handed out by powerful men. It starts with the question the 2009 class never resolved, and a willingness to answer it.
Author's note on revisions
Compared with the earlier draft: (a) the pipeline cost was corrected from "$450 million" to TL 1.6 billion (about US$480–550 million) [19][20]; (b) "only one in ten Nigerians has basic WASH" and "rural open defecation near 29%" were replaced with WASH NORM and State House figures, since 29% is the national improved sanitation rate for 2015 [2]; (c) "0–48% waterworks capacity" and "80% self-supply" were replaced with peer-reviewed and utility figures [11][12][14]; (d) "non-revenue water near 40%" was replaced with the published 60–83% loss estimate [12]; (e) diphtheria is now framed as vaccine-preventable.
References
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