In the vivid desert setting provided by the cruel scarcity of drinking water, the announcement made two days ago by the Cameroon Water Utilities Corporation about the immediacy and availability of 25,000 cubic metres in the nation’s capital could only have been received with much relief.

Much less for the real import the new quantities will have on the ever-growing demand for water in Yaounde, but much more for its human-interest effect because for a very long time Yaoundeans had gone without water and complaints came from just about everyone: from government minister to shop owner and from diplomats to dry cleaning outfits. If city dwellers were not getting thirsty, they were getting dirty because of the absence of available water.

Demand for water in Yaounde alone is in the range of 300 000 cubic metres daily, but present-day supply is only at a staggering 150 000 cubic metres; meaning that injecting 25 000 cubic metres for now and another 50 000 cubic metres “in the next two or three months” is a mere drop in the ocean and does not really leave the city dwellers with the impression that they will soon be out of the imbroglio.

Not when new lay outs and habitation sprout up like mushrooms and hardly ever waiting for the water distribution authorities to give them the permission to settle. This means any water policy that does not take into very serious account the exponential rise in the city population and the ever-increasing demand for water, is defective and misses target.

What many people in Yaounde still find difficult to comprehend is the paradoxical situation laid bare by the presence of many streams, rivers and waterways within reach of the capital city leaving many to turn to the proverbial “water everywhere, but very little to drink” for a consolation.

Granted there exist many robust government programmes in the area of water supply, but the scarcity and the multifarious forms of threats such scarcity pose on the health and security of the population makes water supply a priority and such plans, ambitious as they may be, must be taken out of drawing boards and get “top priority” stamps because the thirst of today can become an intractable issue tomorrow.

When we were exchanging ideas over the content of this paper, a colleague who recently sojourned in Israel remarked that this desert country has a consistent water supply because it recycles up to 70 per cent of its waste water. We in Cameroon are not yet there and do not even need to consider such options because our water is handy.

Nearly all our administrative units are named after water sources as rivers, lakes or streams; meaning that our urban agglomerations are almost always within reach of a water source. In countless villages across rural Cameroon, several grassroots innovative practices are in use to make water available to ordinary villagers, leading many to acknowledge that from an exclusively water supply point of view, living standards in many villages are much higher than our so-called cities.

Our big policy-makers in Yaounde can humbly photocopy useful pages from the notes of these rural innovative minds. From many standpoints, it looks like only innovative ideas will pull the nation out of its water supply quagmire.