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Tuesday 22/4/2008 Page: 10
SEVEN African governments and the world's largest banks and construction firms met in London yesterday to plan the most powerful dam ever conceived - an $85 billion hydropower project on the Congo River, which, its supporters say, could double the amount of electricity available on the continent. G8 and some African governments hope the Grand Inga dam in the Democratic Republic of Congo will generate twice as much electricity as the world's current largest dam, the Three Gorges in China, and jump-start industrial development on the continent, bringing electricity to hundreds of millions of people.
But while governments and banks expect it to export electricity as far away as South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt and even to Europe and Israel, environment groups and local people warned that it could bypass the most needy and end up as Africa's most ruinous white elephant, consigning one of the poorest countries to mountainous debts. The dam is being planned to exploit one of the largest water flows on earth where the world's second-largest river drops nearly 100 metres in just 13 kilometres.
Two hydro-electric plants, known as Inga 1 and Inga 2, were constructed in the 1970s and a third is planned, but
Grand Inga would dwarf them all.
Grand Inga was proposed in the 1980s but never got beyond feasibility studies because of political turmoil in central Africa. But now it stands a chance, according to Gerald Doucet, secretary-general of the World Energy Council, which is convening the London meeting.
"It is the greatest sustainable development project, offering Africa a unique chance for interdependence and prosperity," Mr Doucet said. "It's much more feasible now than ever." Grand Inga's prospects of being completed by 2022 are said to have risen significantly in the past year as countries, banks and private companies have found they can earn high returns from the emerging global carbon offset market and UN climate change credits.
"The banks and the City of London see that Grand Inga is serious," Mr Doucet said. "The G8 countries are behind it because they can get UN clean development mechanism (CDM) credits to offset their emissions. Chinese, Brazilian and Canadian dam-building companies, as well as the World Bank, are all interested." But advocacy groups said the plans ignored local people and could leave Congo with massive debts rather than a sustainable industrial base.
The project would be a magnet for corruption in one of the world's least stable regions," said Terri Hathaway, Africa campaigner with the International Rivers, a watchdog group monitoring the project. "Its enormous budget and large contracts could devolve Inga into a corruption riddled white elephant.
"Inga will centralise a vast store of the region's electric and financial power, a development model that can foster tensions and civil wars." Ms Hathaway said the 94% of people in Congo DRC and the two-in-three Africans who have no electricity now were unlikely to benefit because the dam depends on exporting its electricity to existing centres of industry, especially in South Africa, where there have been power shortages. As it stands, the project's electricity won't reach even a fraction of the continent's 500 million people not yet connected to the grid," she said.
"Building a distribution network that would actually light up Africa would increase the project's cost exponentially. It would be very different if rural energy received the kind of commitment and attention now being lavished on Inga." Despite Congo having exported electricity for years from Inga 1 and Inga 2, access to electricity across the country is less than 6%, and in rural areas, where nearly 70% of people live, it is only 1%.
"My village is three kilometres from Inga's power lines. They built a line almost 2000 kilometres to the mines (in Katanga province) but in all of these years we have been left without electricity," said Simon Malanda, a community representative.
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