Bamako lit up by dam start

Manantali Dam is to provide power to three countries

By Joan Baxter in Bamako

The enormous Manantali dam in southwestern Mali has finally produced its very first megawatt of hydro-electricity, 13 years after it was completed.

So far, only one of the five turbines has been installed, and when that is turning, it lights up the capital, Bamako, some 300 kilometres to the east.

It is a big, big, big project. It will be a revolution electically and for telecommunications too

Mountaga Diallo, techincal director

But there is still a good way to go if long-awaited promises of serving Senegal, Mali and Mauritania are to be fulfilled.

Babacar Gueye, director of Sogem, a consortium created by the three countries that share the Senegal River, says that perhaps by the end of 2002, the dam would be providing 60% of the energy needs of urban consumers in the capitals.

Grand design

He says 52% of production would go to Mali, 15% to Mauritania and 33% to Senegal.

Mr Gueye points out that Sogem will be selling the inexpensive electricity from Manantali to utilities in the three countries, which in turn would set the prices at which they sell to consumers.

According to Mountaga Diallo, technical director of Sogem, there is a long-term plan to link Mali up to a West African grid that would permit even Togo, Benin and Ghana to receive energy from or send hydro power to Mali.

Power is intended for urban areas and not nearby

He also speaks of a proposed scheme to twin the power installations with fibre optic lines to improve telecommunications.

'It's a big, big, big project,' says Diallo. 'It will be a revolution electrically and for telecommunications too.'

Bickering

Those who manage the dam, view it as one of the most important economic developments in West Africa.

They steer away from questions about the 13-year-wait, which diplomatic sources say was caused by bickering among the three countries, that dampened the enthusiasm of international financial institutions and bilateral donors.

For that length of time, the dam and the vast lake it had created on the Bafing River, were the only things to show for an estimated half a billion dollar debt the megaproject has incurred.

And it has taken close to another half a billion dollars of financing from the World Bank and other donors to get the dam into production.

Major sacrifice

But those who feel they have paid the highest price for the dam are not those who negotiated the financing, but the local population on the Bafing River.

Bamba Dembele, school director in the village of Bamafele, is one of an estimated 20,000 people forced off ancestral lands in 1986 to make way for the lake behind the Manantali dam.

Dembele: Does not believe the promises

Mr Dembele says the inhabitants of 30 villages who were resettled downstream were allocated infertile and insufficient land to farm.

They have no health centres, and just a few kilometres from a dam that would be providing power for cities as far away as Nouakchott and Dakar, no electricty.

Unimpressed

Sogem officials say that next year a study will be done and financing will be sought to electrify the villages, and a range of donors have also promised to help displaced villagers set up irrigated rice fields along the river.

None of this impresses Mr Dembele.

He says over the years official delegations have visited them constantly, and each time the displaced people repeat the same litany of problems, shortage of land, no compensation for their losses.

'It always falls on deaf ears," he says. "We no longer believe in projects or promises."

"We know that billions were invested in that dam."

"The very first beneficiaries of the dam should have been the local people who sacrificed their fertile land, their homes, their ancestors' and sacred burial sites,' says Dembele, Instead we are the last,' he aded.

Environmental protection

The losses are not only social and cultural, they are also ecological says Allasane Diallo, of the Malian Association for the Conservation of Fauna and the Environment.

The agency struggles to protect rare species of animals and plants in two new national parks demarcated after the dam put a good part of a larger original reserve underwater.

Mr Diallo suggests that the people who really benefit from the dam are the foreign companies that built it and the new ones coming in to sell the energy it produces.

"We paid the price socially and ecologically, and we have the debt" he says.

"The foreign companies make the profits," he adds.