Lights out

I was going to tell you this yesterday, but the power was out. From 8am until around 11pm. If you are in the habit of spending your Saturday night watching Congolese television, you probably heard that this was coming.

Kinshasa gets its power from the Inga Dam on the Congo River, located in the western province of Bas Congo and was a baby of the Mobutu regime. The dam was intended to provide power –via a 1700km electrical line- to the mines in Shaba (now Katanga Province) which had secessionist leanings. With one switch, Mobutu could literally turn the lights out on the entire province, thereby theoretically squelching any bad behaviour.

When the dam opened in 1982, it only functioned at 10% capacity. However, if the dam complex were rehabilitated to function at full power, including a new dam site, for a price tag of about $6 billion, it could provide up to 39,000MW of power — enough to supply Africa’s power needs and then some. That’s three times as much as any existing hydroelectric dam. And because the Congo River crosses the equator (twice), part of the river always has rains, maintaining a steady volume of water at the river mouth.

My –probably flawed- understanding of the current situation is that only one of the existing turbines is functioning, which means that if that one goes, we’re all in the dark for some time. Word on the street is that some smarty-pants up river -possibly at the World Bank who is investing in a bit of Inga-remodeling- decided to go ahead and shut down the dam yesterday for maintenance (a word that doesn’t usually exist in this country), leaving Kinshasa without power for a good 12+ hours.

While this certainly isn’t the first time or the last that we’ve been without power on any given day, it’d be nice to think that at some point in the future, more than 5% of Congolese will be able to complain about having their power cut in the first place.