Honours Hall is one of the seven female halls of residence in Akoka Campus of the University of Lagos. The hostel – located on the outskirt of the main school area in DLI – is said to be forgotten by the school management. One of the many reasons for this claim is the water issue in the hostel.
Water is an essential part of our existence but the hostel water has proven to be unhealthy for use. The girls complain that they manage to use the water to bath, wash their clothes and ensure they do these with the use of a disinfectant – which is rather expensive – but they can not use the water for cooking, which is an essential domestic activity for survival. “We go to man-o-war to fetch cooking water”, a student lamented. This means that, the residents of the hostel have to go out of the hostel all the way to fetch water for cooking or they will be taking an unhealthy risk of using the hostel’s water to cook.
It was recently brought to notice that the school management is aware of this situation and in fact, some students mentioned that something was done about this water issue last year. Further more, they said that the water is even better this year because as at last year, the water was really in a bad unusable state but the management came to the rescue.
The major complaint of the occupants now is that, the water is still not good enough. One of the complaints laid by the resident of the hall was, “one can’t keep the water down for future use as the state of water becomes worse; you’ll begin to see oily substances in the water”. As we all know, one of the characteristics of good water is colourlessness but the water is not colourless, it is usually light brown in colour.
Also students complain of body rashes, skin reactions, typhoid and so on from the use of this water.
With all of these, there is an outcry for help. The students plead to the school management to do something about this situation and permanently.
