Hydro-Power and the Promise of Modernity and Development in Ghana: Comparing the Akosombo and Bui Dam Projects

Abstract

GHANA STUDIES / Volumes 12–13 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 15 HYDRO-POWER AND THE PROMISE OF MODERNITY AND DEVELOPMENT IN GHANA Comparing the Akosombo and Bui Dam Projects STEPHAN F. MIESCHER DZODZI TSIKATA In 2007, as Ghanaians were suffering another electricity crisis with frequent power outages, President J. A. Kufuor celebrated in a festive mode the sod cutting for the country's third large hydro-electric dam at Bui across the Black Volta in the Brong Ahafo Region.1 The new 400 megawatt (MW) power project promises to guarantee Ghana's electricity supply and to develop neglected parts of the north. The Bui Dam had been planned since the 1920s as part of the original Volta River Project: harnessing the river by producing ample electricity for processing the country's bauxite. In the early 1960s, when President Kwame Nkrumah began to implement the Volta River Project by building the Akosombo Dam, Bui was supposed to follow as part of a grand plan for the industrialization and modernization of Ghana and Africa. Since the 1980s, periodic electricity crises due to irregular rainfall have undermined Ghana's reliance on Akosombo. By the turn of the century, these crises had created a sense of urgency to realize the Bui project in spite of an increasing international critique of large dams. 1. See press reporting in Daily Mail, 24 August 2007, and the Ghanaian Chronicle, 27 August 2007. The sod cutting ceremony, analogous to a grass-cutting or ribbon-­ cutting event, symbolically marks the beginning of construction for a major infrastructure project. Stephan Miescher would like to acknowledge the American Council of Learned Societies and the University of California, Santa Barbara for the support of his research. Dzodzi Tsikata acknowledges the International Development Research Centre of Canada (IDRC)'s Think Tank Initiative for the support of her research. 16 Ghana Studies • volumes 12–13 • 2011 Although there is more than a forty-year gap between the commissioning of Akosombo in 1966 and the beginning of work on the Bui Dam, the two projects have striking similarities in the discourse of modernization and development they have generated among government officials and in local communities. And yet, they could not have been built in more different times. Akosombo, constructed in the period of early independence, came to symbolize confident nationhood and the dream of industrialization, while Bui is being launched in the post-adjustment era when this dream has been in abeyance for over twenty years. Further, it is a time when the romance with large dams has been tempered by decades of global mobilization against the negative environmental impacts of dams, culminating in the World Commission of Dams. The wealth of information generated by these movements challenged the centrality of dams to industrialization and development.2 This article explores the historical linkages between the dams at Akosombo and Bui. It compares their place in Ghana's development aspirations , paying attention to the similarities and differences in context, size, and technologies; their contribution to the power situation in Ghana, and their financing and institutional arrangements. The article also examines the particularities of the modernization and development discourses of the two projects, the environmental concerns raised about them, and their provisions for the treatment of dam affected communities. Modernization The nature of modernization as it has been inflected and transformed since the era of African independence is a subject of cyclical interest in scholarship on Africa. During the 1950s and 1960s, the promises of modernity, and the route to it—modernization—belonged to the most powerful and popular discursive strategies within Africa's emerging nations. These strategies were not only evoked by nationalist politicians and academic experts, but also elaborated upon within popular culture. Modernization referred 2. World Commission on Dams 2000. For an overview of international debates around large dams, see Tsikata 2006: 388–92 and McCully 2001: xv–lxxii. Miescher and Tsikata • Hydro-Power and the Promise of Modernity 17 to the historical transformation of new nations embracing the processes of rapid industrialization and electrification. Infrastructural investments like large dams were seen as a guaranteed path to achieve such objectives...