Damning the Zambezi

‘From being a dream, dams have become a very cynical, corrupt enterprise; a way of letting governments lay their hands on huge sums of money; a way of centralising resources; a way of snatching rivers away from the poor and giving them to the rich. And so in a sense they’ve become monuments to corruption.’
– Arundhati Roy

COME SUNSET, when our primary source of energy has dipped below the horizon, and families begin lighting candles and lamps, Africa really does become the ‘dark continent’. Overall, this land mass provides less than five per cent of global electrification, and that five per cent is dominated by only a small number of countries, including South Africa and Egypt. One-third of the world’s 1.6-billion people living without electric light are situated in Africa, instead making use of biomass, car batteries, paraffin and candles for their power needs. Using data from meteorological programmes, a satellite image of the Earth at night compiled by NASA shows the African continent ‘largely void of illuminated cities’.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) claims that less than 25 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa has access to electricity, with nearly two-thirds of the region undergoing severe energy shortages that are caused by factors such as conflict, water shortages, debt and the lack of developments in renewable energy. And this is only exacerbated by climate change. Presently, 60 per cent of Africa is reliant on hydroelectric power as the continent’s main source of energy, with countries such as Mozambique (91 per cent), the DRC (99 per cent), Uganda (78 per cent), Ghana (80 per cent), and Zambia (96 per cent) receiving electricity almost exclusively from grid-based hydroelectric power.

Huge, multibillion-dollar dams are often seen as the only solution to Africa’s critical power shortage. But are they really the optimum solution, and do they have the best interests of the regions’ inhabitants at heart, given the environmental damage caused by dams,