Giant Congo hydroelectric project is a 'betrayal'

09:45 30 September 02, by Fred Pearce

The heart of darkness could soon be lighting up Africa. There are plans to build the world's largest hydroelectric project on the Congo river and connect it to a continent-wide electricity grid.

The scheme is the largest of a series of mega-projects for transforming the continent discussed by African leaders at the United Nations in New York last week. But environmentalists and anti-poverty campaigners say the schemes betray promises made at the World Summit in Johannesburg earlier in September.

And big projects have a habit of going sour in Africa, often getting mired in corruption. Only this month the head of a giant dam project in Lesotho was jailed for taking bribes.

Many African leaders were in New York for a special session of the UN on the New Partnership for Africa's Development. NEPAD is being described as a "Marshall Plan" for Africa. Set up late in 2001 by African leaders, it was backed by the G8 club of rich nations in June and at the World Summit, where Tony Blair called its fulfilment "my passion".

But what will it mean in practice? Last week South African President Thabo Mbeki promised that NEPAD would deliver "a practical programme that changes the lives of the masses of Africa away from despair", and that it would meet the targets set at the World Summit. But the projects discussed behind the scenes in New York look very different from those envisaged in Johannesburg.

World's biggest

The biggest, strongly backed by Mbeki, is the creation of an Africa-wide electricity grid. At its hub would be the world's largest hydroelectric scheme, at Inga Falls on the Congo.

Here the river drops 100 metres, promising huge amounts of energy for powering turbines. The $6 billion Grand Inga hydroelectric project, the brainchild of South African energy conglomerate Eskom, would generate 40,000 megawatts of electricity.

That's three times as much as any existing hydroelectric dam and more than twice that of China's controversial Three Gorges scheme. Inga could meet the current electricity demands of the entire continent, which is admittedly tiny by comparison to, say, Europe's.

Connecting it to Africa's main population centres would cost more than $10 billion. The first power lines would link it to South Africa via Angola and Namibia, a distance of 3000 kilometres. Next it could go 4000 kilometres north through the Central African Republic and Sudan to Egypt. Nigeria wants to take Inga power to West Africa. And Eskom also talks of exporting power to Europe, via Spain.

Trans-Sahara pipeline

Technical advances in high-voltage electricity transmission, along with the initiatives to end the long-running civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, have made the project possible. Construction could begin as early as 2003.

Engineers say the scheme does not require a large dam, as the river runs strongly all year round. The Grand Inga project envisages 52 separate generating units, each the size of a large conventional power station, with a combined generating capacity 10 times that of Africa's largest existing dam, Aswan in Egypt.

Meanwhile, the heads of state of Nigeria and Algeria were both also in New York to drum up finance for a second mega-project, a $6 billion trans-Sahara gas pipeline. It would transport natural gas from Nigeria's oil fields 4400 kilometres to Algeria, and from there to Europe. The gas is simply flared off at the moment.

The two schemes could gobble up large amounts of NEPAD's anticipated budget of $60 billion. And they could scarcely be further from the goal of small-scale sustainable energy projects discussed at the World Summit. There, the talk was of bringing electricity to rural people through local wind and solar power projects. Power grids, most agreed, will not reach the hundreds of millions of Africa's rural poor, whose needs NEPAD is supposed to be addressing.

But most African governments dismiss this approach. Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni wants to build a giant hydro-dam at Bujagali Falls, a popular attraction on the Nile. He says it will end the cutting of forests for firewood.