A June 14, 2007, Ghana News Agency (GNA) report had some leading parliamentary members of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC) hotly disputing with some of their counterparts from the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) over the operational modalities of the newly-proposed Bui Hydroelectric Power Project.
In the main, the debate hinged on whether a new and separate managerial body, to be known as the Bui Authority, was to be set up or the new project ought to be run by the old managerial staff of the Volta River Authority, charged with running the Akosombo Dam since the mid-1960s when Ghana’s hydroelectric flagship was commissioned.
From the debate, at least reports emanating from it, the keen reader got the sense that the Kpong supplementary dam, which was foresightedly built by the Acheampong junta of the so-called National Redemption Council (later renamed Supreme Military Council), is also managed by the Volta River Authority (VRA), which was all well and good when Ghana was being dominated by the pseudo-Socialist-leaning P/NDC, with the latter’s pet abhorrence for the healthy managerial competition called for by a democratic political culture such as now prevails under the ruling New Patriotic Party.
Thus it was not surprising at all to hear such NDC parliamentary stalwarts as Mr. Edward Doe-Ajaho, the deputy minority leader and Dr. Kwame Ampofo, the NDC representative for South Dayi, in the Volta Region, railing against the NPP parliamentary majority’s proposal for the establishment of a separate Bui Dam Authority to manage the new northern-sector hydroelectric power plant upon its completion. We must, here, also note the significant fact that both Messrs. Kwame Ampofo and Doe-Ajaho are from the Volta Region, which takes its name after the Akosombo Dam Project, whose construction caused a massive displacement and resettlement of a considerable proportion of Voltaics in the Eastern and Asante Regions. And one suspects the project also created a remarkable number of jobs, both short- and long-term, for the displaced and resettled.
Actually, the Volta River, which gave the Volta Region its name was christened for an Italian engineer called Count Volta, who had had quite something significant to do with the mapping out of what would later become known as the Akosombo Dam Project during the late 19th century and early 20th century. And indeed, it was about the same latter periods that the Bui Dam Project was committed to the architectural drawing board.
To be certain, as originally conceived, the Bui Dam was earmarked to serve the domestic and future industrial needs of the erstwhile Northern Territories of the then-Gold Coast, while Akosombo catered to both the domestic and industrial development of the southern sector of the country. And here, also, must be observed the fact that the Akosombo Dam Project, as championed by then-Prime Minister Nkrumah, became more of a neocolonialist venture than one that was economically integral to the sovereignty of independent Ghana.
And while authoritative historical accounts (see David Hart and James Moxon) on the then-proposed two projects are silent with regard to their managerial bodies, it is incontrovertibly clear that the two dams were to be constructed to serve two discrete – or distinctive – regions of the country. And here, it goes without saying that energy produced by these two separate dams could be organically linked, grid-wise, that is, so as to efficiently complement one another when the occasion required such a measure, such as one plant having adequate surplus power to share with the distressed other.
Needless to say, an inescapable aspect of the chronic energy crisis facing the country is due to the perennially poor managerial capabilities and capacity of the staff of the Volta River Authority (VRA). And the commonsensical remedy points to the imperative need for the government to create a managerial competitor to ensure that the old VRA, literally, shaped up or promptly shipped out, as progressive-minded Americans are wont to say. Such competition would also be likely to bring prices down to levels of economic manageability of the hardworking ordinary Ghanaian. This would also mean the government having to consider privatizing the entire business of power production, with in-built protective measures to ensure that private Ghanaian citizens owned majority of the shares of the industry.
Besides, as can be readily verified, as well as having been amply attested by our own bleak experiences with the operation of state monopolies, as well as monopsonies, there is no better managerial culture fostered under a democratic and capitalist political climate, such as currently prevails in Ghana’s Fourth Republic, than healthy managerial competition. For without healthy competition, what we invariably end up with is abject stasis or virtual dysfunction and outright developmental regression. And this has pretty much been the overriding crux of Ghana’s problem with economic underdevelopment. Needless to say, the sort of Socialist economic culture promoted by Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) government precluded even the healthy sort of micro-capitalist competition fostered by the country’s cocoa industry which, as early as 1910, just some twenty years in the wake of Mr. Tetteh Quarshie’s introduction of the first cocoa beans into the erstwhile Gold Coast from the then-Portuguese-ruled West African Island of Fernando Po, as eloquently attested by the foresighted and phenomenal Dr. J. B. Danquah, had witnessed the then-Gold Coast take a commanding global lead in the production and marketing of the product.
Needless to say, had then-Prime Minister, and later President, Nkrumah succeeded in destroying the private entrepreneurship of Ghana’s cocoa farmer as, indeed, the proverbial African Show Boy had attempted to do with his establishment of the Cocoa Purchasing Company (CPC) boondoggle, aimed at monopolizing the local cocoa-purchasing industry, by driving out big-farmer and Danquah-leaning co-operatives, in order to massively fill the campaign coffers of the CPP (what an irony!), it is almost certain that the CPP government could not have generated the whopping magnitude of monetary and capital resources that the Party needed to embark on any of its ambitious development projects.
In essence, the problem with debating the funding modalities of the Bui Dam Project is that except for a few sterling, or astute, Members of Parliament (MPs) such as Mr. Joseph Henry Mensah, who had been in the thick of the infamously rancorous National Assembly debates on Akosombo or the Volta Hydroelectric Scheme, as it was originally called, not many of the current Parliamentarians are properly equipped, in terms of the possession of comprehensive or adequate knowledge on this subject, to be able to critically and constructively examine the question of how best to manage the Bui Dam.
I, for one, have no illusions whatsoever that NDC apparatchiks like Messrs. Ampofo and Ajaho possess even a third of Mr. J. H. Mensah’s knowledge and/or understanding of the issue, let alone be able to offer intelligent and constructive alternatives to the stance taken by our most expert and elderly statesman.
In sum, for a more constructive reading of the Bui Dam proposal to have occurred on the floor of the House, as it were, each and every participant in the debate ought to have been required to read the relevant Parliamentary Proceedings on Akosombo from the record-files. What they would have learned prior to embarking on any reading or debate on the Bui Dam, would almost definitely have sobered them to no end and, perhaps, even caused them to be immeasurably humble with their wildly divergent effusions of ideological suasion. Devoid of such critical knowledge as the preceding, the NDC-MPs, at least as reported in the media, sounded cognitively pathetic and politically amateurish (and who can blame them, seeming to be more adept at rampant parliamentary truancy and pointless boycotts than serious intellectual engagement on the House floor?)
Ultimately, I don’t think any intelligent Ghanaian staunch believer in a democratic political culture could seriously envisage these NDC parliamentary leaders attempting to actually form a viable government come January 2009.
And as to whether the $600 million Chinese loan earmarked for the construction of the Bui Dam ought not to be repaid through “the mortgaging of Ghana’s cocoa beans,” as the NDC-MPs prefer to cast matters, must be looked at in the following manner: Exactly who is going to be making use of power generated once the Bui Dam has been completed and become operational? Our Chinese creditors or we Ghanaian debtors? And just whose say-so is it to determine our means of repayment? The cocoa farmers – per a referendum – or Messrs. Ampofo and Ajaho?
My only brief and kindly advice to these parliamentary also-runs is for them to revisit the CPP-UP debates on the Volta (River) Scheme and judge for themselves just who ultimately came out the wiser, Dr. J. B. Danquah, or then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. How history has a way of unnecessarily repeating itself to both the proudly naïve and the presumptuously ignorant! It makes you wonder where we have been all these years!
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