Buba Badjie, communications officer at the National Water and Electricity Company (NAWEC), the public utility provider, has been struggling with the vandalisation of their boreholes for the past ten years.
Badjie revealed this challenge during a recent press conference at the Solar Plant in Jamburr, where serious vandalisation took place on the infrastructure by unknown individuals.
“It is only once that somebody was caught. He was taken to court and was jailed for eleven months and released,” Mr Badjie explained. “We are not the judges, we don’t make the laws, and when we catch them, we can only take them to the police. Since the last person we took to the police, we have not been able to catch anyone yet.
“But as I am speaking, the nature or way it is happening is very frequent now. It was happening to the boreholes, and now it is the solar plant. But one thing I can ascertain is that we are working very closely with the security. This morning the whole hierarchy of the security of the country was here – Chief of Defence Staff of the Army, the Security Adviser, the Inspector General of Police. As I’m talking to you, meetings are even ongoing on the issue, and that’s why the MD could not be here today for this conference.”
The national utility communications official meanwhile underscored that NAWEC is doing everything possible to curb such incidents, saying that with the collaboration of stakeholders such as the media, they could make an impact.
Sanna Touray, corporate service director at NAWEC, responded to a question by a journalist as regards the motive or rationale behind such actions.
He said: “If you look at the boreholes, it is slightly different from what happened here – cables cut and taken away. We believe that those cables cut would be sold in the black market. But in terms of what happens at the borehole sites, it is pure vandalisation. They would damage everything. You would find all the control boards broken. They would break anything that is there. Normally, they would not carry anything; they would leave everything on the floor as it is. So, that is pure vandalisation. The motive of doing that we do not know, apart from pure sabotage and destruction. This is what we can say until someone is caught and we can do further investigation around that.”
Mr Touray also said they have taken several measures to remedy the situation and would continue to do so to combat the act.
“These boreholes are in very remote and isolated locations. And you cannot even dream of putting a physical security there; it is either a CCTV camera or so, but the fact that internet coverage does not reach these places makes it difficult to get those kinds of things,” he reasons.
However he said perpetrators of these acts need to sit back and reflect over their actions. “Water is life, without water, what is going to happen?” he ponders. “So with a borehole site damaged in that manner, you are denying water to the populace.”
With the help of the security apparatus, the media and the good people of the community, Touray believes, NAWEC would be enabled to combat the menace of borehole vandalisation and solar plant theft in the country.
