W. Giod’s view
Last month, China approved the mammoth A $140 billion hydropower project To build a dam on the Yarlung Zangpo River in Tibet, which will generate three times as much energy as the Three Gorges Dam – currently the largest hydroelectric power station in the world.
The scale of environmental and diplomatic ambition Challenges However, both are amazing, but somewhat unsurprising. The Chinese have historically avoided confusing their current circumstances with their goals. They have never resorted to outsourcing to achieve their ambitions, even when they rely on external actors for capital and expertise.
If there is one big thing that we Africans can learn from our Chinese cousins, it is that we must wrest our ambitions for the expected future from external “partners” – be they multilateral institutions, Europeans, Americans, or Chinese.
I recently visited the city of Chongqing in southwest China, and took the high-speed train from there to Yichang in Hubei Province to see the Three Gorges Dam. The train passes through endless tunnels as it travels between mountains soaring over deep canyons and valleys. It occurred to me that these are exactly the kinds of projects that the World Bank and its sister organizations would immediately reject as unworkable if any ordinary African country even dared to imagine them.
A few years after the Liberian civil war ended in 2003—when I was an aide to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf—the Liberian government had two projects it sought funding. The first was the link between Monrovia Airport and the city itself. The goal was to build a four-lane highway. It was clear, even then, that the city’s only way to grow was this way. But the project was rejected by a multilateral bank on the grounds that “there is no traffic to justify it.” Within a few years, traffic overwhelmed the two-lane highway that was eventually built.
In the early days after the war, the government also sought to build HFO (heavy fuel oil) plants, rather than more expensive diesel fuel, to provide electricity immediately. Some partners, whose names I will not mention, closed this project because they saw an opportunity to build a “fully renewable” energy base. After about eight years, the World Bank ended Financing a heavy fuel oil plant. Many of the major infrastructure projects financed by China across the developing world were first offered to either multilateral development banks or Western partners, who rejected them outright or slowed them to death. Even after I later became Minister of Works, I saw up close the same restrictions on our vision during negotiations.
The size of an individual’s economy today is not a definitive statement of its potential. Here lies the great danger of outsourcing one’s ambition to others. For example, when the massive Grand Inga Dam project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is discussed – by development finance institutions and experts – it is about supplying “Africa” with electricity. But actually, like this mail X points out that even if the DRC achieved Egypt’s per capita electricity production rate alone, Grand Inga would not meet domestic requirements. That is, unless you assume, as the author writes, that Africa suffers from “permanent poverty.”
External actors have no incentive, inclination, or obligation to imagine an expanded future for you. The first proposal to dam the Three Gorges was made between 1914 and 1919, when China was poor. 100 years later, its ambition is now three times that, which is no surprise.
There is no future for an Africa that chooses to outsource its ambitions.
