“In the abundance of water the fool is thirsty!”

The SPPF government has been saying that the economic situation in the country is improving. This is not, however, supported by the reality of the situation that the ordinary citizens are facing daily. Take for example the water situation in the Seychelles.

With the recent rains, water restrictions have been lifted. The question is for how long. In a country with abundant rainfall why should we have water restrictions at all?

It was President James Michel, then Minister of Finance, who made the decision to invest in the construction of desalination plants with money raised from international banks. His decision went against all available logical advice. The main reason being that transforming sea water to fresh water is a costly exercise. Most of the modern interest in desalination is focused on developing cost-effective ways of providing fresh water for human use in regions where the availability of water is limited. But Seychelles has an abundance of rainfall.

Here in Seychelles, experts believe, dams or reservoirs to trap rain water would have made more sense than costly desalination plants. Although the government has recently been constructing small reservoirs and holding tanks to supply those parts of the island which do not have adequate streams of water, no new major construction has been undertaken since the La Gogue dam came on stream in 1974. Plans drawn up by British consultant engineers for a second dam at Grand Anse were shelved, because the one-party state had a different economic agenda.

The situation has been further aggravated by the decline in the standard of the principal water mains on Mahe which was installed in the middle seventies. According to the latest statistics issued by the National Statistics Bureau, in 2006 of the 11,519,000 Klitres of water treated on Mahe, only 5,766,000 Klitres actually reached consumers. This means that 50% of the water collected and treated is lost into the ground on Mahe.

Large-scale desalination typically requires large amounts of energy as well as specialized, expensive infrastructure, making it very costly compared to the use of fresh water from rivers or groundwater. The large energy reserves of many Middle Eastern countries, along with their relative water scarcity, have led to extensive construction of desalination in this region but Seychelles is struggling to find foreign exchange to pay for its fuel. The cost of importing and installing the desalination plants in Seychelles would have provided all the funds needing to import and replace all the out of date and broken water mains on Mahe, and reduce the fuel consumption to produce electricity. The direct result would have been to double the amount of water available to consumers rather than paying back a foreign currency debt but with no water to drink, shower or flush our toilets as soon as the rain stops.

This simple explanation shows the flawed decision-making process of the Government of Seychelles under the SPPF. Our country is not in the arid region of the Middle East, our country does not have the energy reserves for operating desalination plants, our country does not have the expensive specialised infrastructure for desalination plants and now we have desalination plants that do not work. This does not point to an improving economic situation in the country. From all the above we can look to Bob Marley for a reason for making such bad decisions –

“In the abundance of water the fool is thirsty

Rat Race, Rat Race”