African governments should finance Grand Inga project

By Olley Maruma

Harare. — It is one of the biggest ironies for Africa's development that its God-given natural resources often bring it more misery and penury than advancement and prosperity because they are coveted by richer and more industrialised nations.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Inga Dam Hydroelectric Project, touted for a long time as a water source with the hydroelectric potential to "light up the whole of Africa", is slowly becoming a curse rather than a boon to the country. Indeed the lucrative project is now the cause of a new great Scramble for Africa, hence its new name: the Grand Inga Project.

The Inga project has been discussed at various fora for more than three decades now. The first studies were done in the 1960s but due to political instability in the country, instigated by the assassination of Patrice Lumumba just after independence in 1961, they came to nothing. Numerous meetings and events were held to focus on the project but no major breakthroughs were ever made because African governments and foreign investors were reluctant to take the risks involved.

The studies recommended the construction of four hydroelectric power stations in two phases. The first phase concerned the construction of three power stations in the Nkokolo Valley, namely Inga. The first phase of the project was eventually commissioned in 1972, providing 351 megawatts of power. The second phase was commissioned in 1982, providing 1424MW of electricity. The third phase, which is currently in its project designer stage, will transmit generated power to Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa and the Congo Brazzaville. This phase is a joint venture project of the national power corporations of the DRC, Angola, Namibia, Botswana and South Africa.

Apart from the two existing sites currently under development, the total potential of the Grand Inga Project is about 44 000MW, enough power to provide sufficient electricity to the whole African continent and to export through interconnectivity links to Southern Europe. In total, the DRC has a hydroelectric potential of over 100 000MW. The price per kilowatt hour (kWh) generated at Inga and transmitted to the Italian border would be lower than the market price in Italy.

Feasibility studies for the project have identified three major African interconnection projects: a) the Northern Highway, between Inga and Egypt; b) the Southern Highway, between Inga and South Africa; and c) the Western Highway, between Inga and Nigeria.

Now that there is no doubt that the Inga Project is a potentially lucrative venture, the scramble for the Inga Dam has begun. At the head of the scramble is the World Energy Council (WEC), prodded by the governments of the G8 countries and their major industries and banks. The plans for the project include a 205-metre-high dam, a 15-kilometre-long reservoir and a power plant with a capacity to produce 320 terawatt hours of electricity annually.

In April 2008, the WEC organised a conference in London at which financiers and African politicians met to discuss plans of how to finance the US$80 billion cost of the Grand Inga Project. The plant, the project organisers said, would generate twice as much energy as China's Three Gorges Dam. Gerald Doucet, the secretary general of the WEC, told the media that the project would bring electricity to an estimated 500 million Africans among whom two in every three currently have no access to it.

Nearly a hundred officials and interests from big business gathered at the conference to discuss how to profit from one of the DRC's natural resources. Interestingly, Congolese officials reportedly disappeared shortly after the conference commenced with no explanation to the organisers. The government officials were apparently not happy that the organisers had refused to invite Congolese civil society and area communities living around the dam, leaving no voice to

defend the country's interests.

The council also refused to invite Africans monitoring the Inga Project, subjecting them, unlike any other participants, to government authorisation. Although at least 8 000 villagers or more face the possibility of displacement for the project, one official of the council stated that the Grand Inga required no resettlement!

The question is: if the Grand Inga is meant to light up the whole of Africa, why are Africans being kept in the dark over the project's financing and planning? The answer becomes evident when one takes a careful look at the potential client base of the project. First of all, the price tag for the project that has been quoted so far covers only the cost of the hydropower plant and the long distance transmission lines to Africa's mining and industrialised heartlands and urban centres in Egypt, South Africa, Nigeria and other distant countries. There is no provision in the budgeted costs for distribution lines to local communities, meaning that the project's energy will not reach even a small fraction of the continent's 900 million people. The reason is that actually building a distribution network that would light up the whole of Africa would require a much higher cost.

Under the planned grid system, for Africans to access the electricity generated at Inga, they would have to buy it from one of the centralised distribution stations in a trickle down model of economics and distribution favoured by the Western corporations funding the project. By design, with its three interconnection points, the project will centralise a vast store of the region's electricity and financial power in the hands of foreigners who could be forced by circumstances into fuelling regional tensions and civil wars. So even in the hour of its deliverance from darkness, Africa will still be back to square one.

Why has this come to be? Despite their rich mineral resources, African countries have not created their own financial institutions to provide them with easy credit for their own infrastructural development. Even the African Development Bank, which is going to invest in the Inga project, is controlled by the West nations who own a majority shareholding in the bank. The idea that money is simply a form of exchange reflecting the cost of actual goods and services does not seem to have yet permeated deep into the African mind. We still worship the currencies of other continents, of Europe and America instead of making our own convertible currencies that are a viable form of exchange between our own nations. Do we really have to borrow American dollars to develop our own natural resources so that we benefit from them instead of foreign investors and their governments?

The ideal solution for the Inga Dam would have been for African governments to pool their resources together as they have done for phase three and invested in their own resources. They should have crafted or should still do so, regional policies that encourage a decentralisation system of energy distribution, especially from the Inga, that would spread wealth and electricity more evenly within the Congo, the region and the continent. Outside investors should be encouraged to participate as partners who want to make a return on their investment and to increase power supplies for their own countries' consumers, shareholders and investors. The construction of huge development projects of this complexity and size requires inclusive planning from and consultations with all stakeholders' right from the beginning, and not when their voices are raised in protest or dissent.

Today thousands of villagers living near the Inga rapids are anxiously waiting for information about the Grand Inga's potential and how it will impact on their lives. Sixty million Congolese and almost a billion other Africans are wondering how long it will take for their communities to be electrified by the dam that they have been told over and over again has the capacity to "light up the whole continent." In addition, all these people are wondering who will profit from the US$80 billion investment it will take to get it off the ground and if it will be at their expense or their benefit. They have seen too often: Mozambique exports electricity to South Africa and Zimbabwe, while the majority of its people still live in darkness. Lesotho exports copious quantities of water to South Africa, while its people live under constant drought conditions. How long will rural Africans be prepared to accept this flagrant marginalisation? After all they are the vast majority on the continent.

With a landmass covering some 30 million square miles, the African continent is a land of giants – the second largest continent in the world. Africa's powerful rivers form a landscape with impressive valleys and waterways that could be the green basins of phenomenal economic development.

Sadly, we still have leaders who, as former Botswana president Festus Mogae, told the world: "The leaders of the West still treat us like their subjects." The question from my generation Mr. Mogae is: "Why do you allow them to do so, when you are a lot richer than they are? When have you ever seen a rich man kowtowing to a poor one? When will Africa get rid of its inferiority complex?"

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