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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Tue Jun 15 2010 - 17:28:36 EDT
Ethiopia aims to turn itself into a regional energy giant
The Gibe 3 dam on the Omo river will be Africa's largest, providing power to
a nation with one of the world's lowest per capita levels of access to
electricity. NGOs warn of environmental disaster
* Christophe Châtelot
* Guardian Weekly <http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/> , Tuesday 15 June
2010 14.00 BST
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ethiopia> Ethiopia's government has set
itself an ambitious target: in just a few years it aims to take an
undeveloped country, with one of the world's lowest levels of per capita
access to electricity, and turn it into a regional powerhouse, exporting
energy to its neighbours.
To achieve this the prime minister, Meles Zenawi, is advocating a spending
spree to develop Ethiopia. Various foreign non-governmental organisations
have questioned the reliability of official impact studies, but with a de
facto one-party state, controlled by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary
Democratic Front, there is little risk of serious opposition.
Ethiopia is pinning its hopes on the Gibe 3 dam in the Omo valley, 350km
south of Addis Ababa. Predictably this is also the focus of the NGOs's
concern. Work started in 2006 and by 2012 there should be a dam 240 metres
high, the largest in Africa. It will feed a 1,800 MW hydroelectric power
station producing twice as much electricity as Ethiopia used in 2009.
In January a coalition of NGOs, including International Rivers and Survival
International, started a petition calling for work to be stopped.
"The dam, if not stopped, will cause food insecurity, chronic hunger, poor
health, food aid dependence, conflicts among the local communities for the
control of the already scarce natural resources and a general unravelling of
the economy and social safety net throughout the region," the petitioners
say. They say that Gibe 3 and its 150km reservoir will lower the level in
Lake Turkana by about 10 metres. The lake, which straddles the border with
Kenya, draws four-fifths of its water from the Omo river. The changes would
threaten several hundred thousand people in both countries, say the NGOs.
Over the past few years not a month has gone by without the opening of a new
road, university, school or health centre. In the past two years alone three
dams have come into service. "Most of these schemes are funded by
international loans or aid, but Ethiopia is one of the few African countries
where work is completed and corruption does not swallow all the money," a
western diplomat said.
Both the World Bank and the African Development Bank expressed initial
doubts about the Gibe 3 scheme, so the government turned to the Chinese. On
19 May the CEO of the Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation, Mihret Debebe,
and the president of the Dongfang Electric Corporation, Luo Zhigang, signed
an agreement worth $459m for Gibe 3. The total cost of the dam is estimated
to be $1.8bn (compared with $25bn gross domestic product in 2009). According
to Debebe, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China has committed itself
to cover 85% of total outlay. The design office at Sinohydro is already
working on plans for Gibe 4, also on the Omo.
"Ethiopia has enormous hydro-electric potential," says Debay Tadesse, a
researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in the capital. The
government aims to achieve a ninefold increase in capacity in just a few
years, rocketing from 1,000 to 9,000 MW.
Just 2% of Ethiopia's rural population (80% of its 80 million inhabitants)
have access to electricity. "It is inconceivable to develop the country
without electrical energy. How else can we power the schools, hospitals,
businesses and irrigation systems?" Tadesse asks.
Over and above the problem of connecting homes in Ethiopia to the power grid
- which raises the question of a transmission and distribution network - the
prime objective is to export energy and earn foreign currency. This should
soon be the case thanks to the dam on Lake Tana - at the source of the Blue
Nile - built by an Italian firm, Salini, and officially opened last month. A
contract to export electricity to Sudan is slated to bring in $150,000 a
day. Other contracts have been signed with Kenya and Djibouti.
omo-river-ethiopiaA Karo warrior overlooks the Omo River. Photograph: Remi
Benali/Corbis
