Our engineers

The account of a worker on an engineering team describes how a well drilled for free for a village became clogged twice in less than two months, and how local day laborers abandoned the worksite by midday. The text attributes poverty to a culture of dependency, not to a lack of water.

The scene repeats itself in many villages across sub-Saharan Africa: a well drilled with outside help that stops working within a few months because nobody maintains it. A worker who spent nearly eight months on an engineering project in the region tells it in detail: his camp had water less than twelve meters deep, enough for more than forty people, and less than two kilometers away a village of about a hundred inhabitants was collecting murky water from a half-meter-deep hole. The question he asked himself then — why don't they dig a well themselves — is the same one circulating on social media today. The answer given in that testimony has nothing to do with geology.

## A free well that clogged twice in less than two months

The engineering team decided to drill a well for the village. The first obstacle was not technical: the tribal chief blocked the site and demanded ten sacks of flour, five barrels of cooking oil and two crates of soda to allow them to break ground. The team paid. Then, looking for local labor, it offered a kilo of corn flour and two bottles of soda a day — a deal that, according to the account, was enough for a family of three to eat their fill. Five people showed up, worked less than forty minutes and sat down in the shade: the sun was scorching and ancestral custom forbade working at midday. The next day three came, demanded the food in advance, dug half a meter and spent the morning chatting. On the third day, none of them showed up.

The team ended up doing the well on its own. In less than ten days it had stable water, installed a simple frame for hoisting buckets and two wooden barrels, and told the village it could draw water for free in exchange for not throwing trash in. The honeymoon lasted less than half a month: the mouth of the well turned up half-covered with branches, stones and rotting leaves. They cleaned it for free and repeated the instructions. In less than two months it clogged again. Then the chief came asking them to drill a new well, with the casualness of someone claiming a service.

## Day laborers who leave the site by mid-morning

The testimony is not limited to water. A wall of the camp was damaged and the team hired four local workers to repair it in one day. They started at eight, stopped for tea at nine, had breakfast at ten, wanted to take a nap at noon, got up at three, worked less than an hour and went home to feed the children. By the end of the day they had stacked fewer than five bricks. The next day they demanded full pay, arguing they had not been given tea or bread rolls, and the foreman fired them.

There are more cases in the account. A young man in his early twenties who sold wild fruits at the camp agreed to deliver vegetables daily in exchange for a fixed wage. He lasted three days. He reappeared a week later: with the money from those three days he had enough to rest, and when it ran out, he would come back. International aid organizations distributed free seeds and taught people how to open garden plots; half the seeds were cooked and eaten, the rest were scattered without watering or weeding. When nothing grew, they kept waiting for more aid.

## The water is twelve meters down, but the problem is not the water

The figure that circulates most in these debates — that Africa's groundwater reserves are a hundred times larger than its surface water — does not come from this testimony, but it fits what it describes: at his camp, a detector found clear, fresh water less than twelve meters down, enough to irrigate a garden daily without running out. The village well, drilled by the team, also yielded stable water. The problem was not finding it.

The account lists what was there: water under their feet, international aid, seeds, tools and wages above what could be earned idling about. What was missing was maintenance. The author of the testimony says he has seen dozens of abandoned aid-funded wells, all drilled less than two years earlier and unusable for lack of care, while people preferred to carry buckets three or four kilometers to collect dirty rainwater rather than spend half a day unclogging a wellhead.

## The laziness thesis and what it leaves out

The testimony concludes that it is not a lack of strength — dancing around a bonfire all night tires no one — nor a lack of resources, but a way of life of "depending on the sky to eat" ingrained over thousands of years. It is a thesis the account itself does not prove: it describes behaviors, not their causes. The development literature has documented for decades the effects of poorly designed aid, the absence of clear property rights over communal land and the lack of incentives to invest in a shared good. None of that appears in the text, which stops at the anecdote.

What the account does show, with specific names and figures, is a pattern: wells that clog in less than two months, laborers who stack fewer than five bricks in a day, seeds that get eaten instead of planted. These are the facts of one case. Turning them into an explanation for the poverty of an entire continent is another leap. And it is worth remembering that poorly managed development aid also has culprits among those who design it, not only among those who receive it.