Why recall this episode today? Fleetingly, last summer, Africa was
big news, when it became the central topic at a meeting in Scotland of
the leaders of the G8 group of top industrialized nations, chaired by
British prime minister Tony Blair. Yet the real action is being taken
by a donor nation that isn’t even a member of the G8: China.
The G8 nations — correctly, if belatedly — are considering how
best to invest in Africa, so that the previous misappropriation and
mismanagement can be avoided. China seems to have no such
qualms. Across the continent, from Zimbabwe to Sudan, China
is winning friends by lending money to Africa’s most unsavoury
regimes without asking awkward questions.

Scientists and
engineers are sometimes complicit with this process. Sudan’s
Merowe dam on the Nile could be set to repeat the mistakes that
have characterized previous large-scale hydropower projects in poor
countries. Studies of how to resettle 50,000 people whose land will
be flooded, and assessments of the project’s environmental impact,
were finished late in the day, and undertaken with insufficient
rigour. They would have stopped the project going ahead if the
World Bank, for example, was funding it.

Lahmeyer International, the German company that is coordinating
the project, is disarmingly open about why this is so. It says
that funders such as the World Bank make things too complicated.
Thorough environmental and social impact assessments take years;
Sudan wants power now. China is willing to invest, in part to cement
closer ties with an important oil producer. And the Sudanese government
lacks the political infrastructure – and probably the political
will – to enforce proper safeguards. So, once again, thousands of
poor people look set to suffer so that a big dam project can go ahead.

The project’s backers have sought to portray Merowe as a necessary
trade-off between the competing needs of development and the
rights of local people. But there is no reason why both needs can’t be
met. Hydropower certainly has a role to play in Africa’s development.
Most of the continent’s available hydropower resources are
untapped and could, if properly harnessed, provide a valuable and
renewable source of energy. But that doesn’t mean that large dams
need to be built. Successful projects in Asia and South America have
shown that small hydropower projects can supply a few thousand
local people without the need for big resettlement projects. Smaller
projects can be run with more input from local people and are easier
to combine with other renewable sources, such as solar power.
Unless the lessons of the past are thoroughly learned, large dam
projects will sink over time in a morass of corruption, haphazard displacement
of local people, lack of political accountability, and failure
to plan properly for maintenance.

South Africa has, to its credit, tried to incorporate some of these
lessons into a hydropower and water-supply project in Lesotho. The
project is imperfect, but at least
its administrators have sought
to consult with local people and
to run independent assessments
of its environmental impact. But
South Africa, with its wealth
and its relatively sophisticated political system, is an exception.

In many other African nations, there is little chance of proper safeguards
being implemented. Chinese firms and government agencies
will operate with few checks or balances.

The same goes for the
European companies involved in Merowe and elsewhere. They
know that rigorous political consultation and environmental assessment
are needed if big dam projects are to succeed. Yet they have
been happy to engage in such projects in the absence of any such
safeguards. The staff and shareholders of these firms are part of
another scramble for Africa, in which local peoples’ rights and needs
are once again being sidelined in the stampede for wealth.

(Source: Nature.com – March 23, 2006)