Non-revenue water, water that is treated and pumped but never billed because it never reaches a paying customer, is one of the most persistent problems in urban water utilities worldwide. The World Bank has documented it extensively as a leading cause of utility financial failure in developing countries. When a utility loses a large portion of its output to leakages, illegal connections, and unbilled consumption, it cannot generate the revenue needed to maintain its own infrastructure. The cycle is difficult to break.
Nigeria's urban pipe networks, in many cities, were laid in the mid-twentieth century. They were not designed for the populations they now nominally serve, and decades of deferred maintenance have left many of them corroded, brittle, and prone to frequent bursts. When a pipe bursts, water is lost. When those losses are not recorded or accounted for, the utility absorbs the cost silently. When that cost is large enough, it exceeds what the utility can collect in revenue, and maintenance budgets are the first thing cut.
The result is a feedback loop: aging pipes cause leakage, leakage reduces revenue, reduced revenue prevents pipe repair, unrepaired pipes leak more. Breaking out of it requires coordinated investment, not just in new pipes, but in metering, monitoring, and the organisational capacity to act on what those systems reveal.
In Ogun State, as in many parts of Nigeria, those preconditions are only beginning to come together. Transitioning from flat-rate billing to metered consumption is a necessary first step, it makes losses visible. But visibility alone does not fix a pipe. The harder work is building utilities with the financial footing and technical capacity to respond to what the meters show.
