Chakwera tours Area 18
Malawi Congress Party (MCP) president Lazarus Chakwera says residents of Lilongwe’s Area 18, who were supplied piped water contaminated with sewage three weeks ago, need a psychologist to talk to them over the issue.
During a tour of the affected households in Area 18A yesterday, Chakwera, who is also leader of Opposition in Parliament, said he believes the talk by a psychologist could be part of a holistic approach to resolving the water contamination problem and the impact it has had on the residents.
He said: “Some of these problems do not only affect our physical beings, but also our psychological being; hence, the need to engage a psychologist to talk to these people. Some of us have knowledge of such psychologists so we may consider doing something about it privately.”
On why he has taken long to visit the affected households, Chakwera said he did not want to be seen to be working to expose government’s delayed response to the issue.
One of the representatives of the residents in the matter, Leonard Phiri, said that although 90 percent of the people who were taken ill due to contaminations have been treated there are others who are still having problems such as diarrhoea.
He said most of the people in the area are no longer drinking or cooking using the tap water because their trust is gone after the trauma they were subjected to.
According to Chakwera, the Area 18 contamination, which Lilongwe Water Board (LWB) attributed to a sippage from a burst sewer line, could be a tip of an iceberg on the magnitude of the problem in the cities of Malawi as most of the installations were built about 50 years ago.
Nation Publications Limited (NPL) newspapers—The Nation, Weekend Nation and Nation on Sunday—last week published a series of investigative reports that exposed how deep-rooted the problem of faecal matter was getting into city residents’ food and water.
The Area 18 residents have since given the service providers an ultimatum to compensate them over the contamination or risk legal action. n
