Searching for Light in Ghana’s Interior
Greetings from…well actually I am not exactly sure where I am at the moment. Tonight’s guesthouse is in a small town outside of Bui National Park in the Brong-Ahafo Region of Ghana that does not appear on Google Maps. The road cluttered with free-roaming goats and chickens, and the thatched roofs give little indication that just a few kilometers up the road, Ghana’s second largest hydropower site is churning out 400MW of power right now. Few have electricity at all here, and those that do are lucky to get a few hours of consistent power a day.
The Bui Dam was funded by a sovereign loan to the Ghanaian government from the Chinese Export-Import Bank, secured by cocoa export credits. The contract for its construction was awarded (as a term of the loan) to Sinohydro, a Chinese state-owned company. Sinohydro brought in several thousand Chinese workers for the dam’s construction and, as the procurement manager, bought nearly all needed materials from the Chinese market. Where European and North American products were used, they shipped in the parts those companies produce for the Chinese market. When the hydropower station was commissioned in 2013, the Chinese packed up and left, for the most part.
Now, the Ghanaian managers of the Bui Power Authority (BPA), struggle to replace parts that can only be procured from China. Manuals, operating guidelines, and signs throughout the power station are all in Chinese. When I asked the plant’s operating director if he could speak Chinese he laughed and let out a half-hearted “ni hao.” The plant now relies on three Chinese contractors to help translate manuals and communicate with Chinese suppliers.
For all this, though, the dam is an engineering success and fully functional. Of course, it only operates for a few hours each day, well below its purported capacity. This is not the fault of its Chinese funders, Sinohydro, or the Bui Power Authority, but rather a product of decades of mismanagement and corruption in Ghana’s power sector that have created some truly terrible power purchasing deals. While hydropower is the cheapest delivered energy source, Ghana’s state-owned power distribution company — ECG — has committed to buying expensive thermal power from private IPPs before it can take hydro supply. These deals were brokered by corrupt leaders and Ghanaians suffer every day because of it. Yet, in my conversations with locals, frustratingly few know who is to blame for the astronomical cost of electricity that stifles growth and millions of livelihoods.
When I visited the resettlement communities outside Bui, the villagers I spoke with were angry. Angry that they had been forced to move, angry that they had no good land to farm anymore, and angry that promise after promise from the BPA was being broken. Of course, how could the Power Authority keep to its promises to deliver more benefits to the people the dam displaced: ECG, the state-owned firm that takes power from the dam, owes over $200 million to the BPA.
My time in Ghana has been extraordinarily educational, and at times incredibly frustrating. Everything seems to be set up for success: they have plenty of functional power infrastructure to more than cover national demand. And yet, corruption steals away the potential and, quite literally, leaves millions in the dark.
Written by Lucienne Oyer ’18, economics major, FSI Large Research Grant recipient for summer 2017.
