After listening to the intervention of the President of the Republic, Gustavo Petro, in the city of Santa Marta, the water solution seems to be further away than it seems.
And, during his speech at the Polideportivo Sur coliseum, Petro ’embolated’ the specific solution for water and spoke of a kind of total solution for water problems in the different regions of the country.
According to the president, the solution for the different regions costs around 100 billion pesos, and he stated that this total solution would be cheaper than the investments that have been made in 4G roads in previous Governments, which exceed 130 billion pesos. .
“Do you know what the national budget is per year in the Ministry of Housing and Drinking Water in the Duque Government? 300 billion pesos. That is to say, not even with an entire Government, with that type of budget, could the problem be solved. drinking water problem in a region of Colombia. Then it occurred to me to ask: why do we prioritize 5 billion for a 4g road and not 5 billion for water in various regions? Why is cement more important than water? Petro asked himself.
Based on this premise, the president proposed that the definitive solution will be with future validity, modifying the budget for the next three decades and allocating the resources, not to the creation of new roads, but to the water solution.
“I asked the Minister (of Housing): how much does the water solution cost throughout the country, because the problem is everywhere, even in Bogotá? and she told me: 100 billion pesos. Billions! How much did it cost? all 4G, I asked Mintransporte? 126 billion pesos, then we have a mental problem in our Colombian oligarchy. Why in the years that have passed, in the last governments, did they choose to spend 120 billion on large highways and not on the highways? water solution?” the president continued to ask himself.
“Even tripling the water budget in Santa Marta, solving the water problem in Colombia would take us a century (…) That is why we got into a problem, which is to change the matrix of future validity in the next 30 years, which Everything is dedicated to 4G highways and we want in those 30 years to have the 100 billion pesos that the solution for drinking water and environmental sanitation for all of Colombia costs before the road, the water,” said the president.
Outside of this reflection, the president, in a very ambiguous way, President Petro said that, in the case of Santa Marta, the solution could be a mixture of several things, and he mentioned desalination plants, he talked about bringing water from the Magdalena River and the Sierra Nevada, but he was only clear in saying that the solution could be a mixture of all of them, without being forceful in a grounded solution as such.
