The Story of Rural Electrification
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2 June 2019 Chapter Six: Waiting for Light: The Story of Rural Electrification “The abundant supply of electrical power will bring light to thousands of homes in the countryside where darkness now prevails.” Kwame Nkrumah 1 “Who believes that the electrical companies have no archives, no records of consumption, no charts of the enlargement of their networks? The truth is that historians until now have simply neglected to question these documents.” Marc Bloch2 In 1967, Queenmother Anomesi of Golokwati wrote “on behalf of the women’s folk” a letter of appreciation to General Joseph Ankrah, chairman of the National Liberation Council. The NLC was the military regime that had ousted President Nkrumah and his government the previous year. At Golokwati, the people were celebrating, since their village had been selected as a site for a diesel generating plant, which was to supply electricity to the towns of Kpandu, Hohoe, and Jasikan in the Volta Region. Ghana had an abundance of idle diesel generators since the completion of the hydroelectric Akosombo Dam in 1965. Akosombo fed the new power grid that connected the southern population centers and mining areas. The queenmother seeking to flatter referred to the NLC chairman as a “good father” who had the ability to achieve progress. The people of Golokwati were not only convinced to enter “the dawn of a brighter era” but also confident that they would soon have “completely recovered from the slough of 1 Kwame Nkrumah, “Volta River Project: To the National Assembly, 25 March 1963,” in in Selected Speeches by Kwame Nkrumah, vol. 5, ed. S. Obeng (Accra: Afram Publications, 1997), 22. 2 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It, translated by Peter Putnam (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1953), 66-67. 2 depression” left by Nkrumah. The queenmother assured Ankrah that the elders of Golokwati had reserved a large field, “free of charge and free from all litigation,” for the installation of the generating plant. Queenmother Anomesi expressed the hope that the NLC would launch development programs in the Volta Region, which had been neglected by the “contemptible fortune hunters” of the “old regime.”3 This letter stands for many petitions addressed to the government in the 1960s, as it conveys a desire for electricity, while placating the big men of Ghana’s revolving civil and military regimes. In another 1967 petition, Nana Awua III, the Benkumhene of Begoro, an mountainous town in the Eastern Region, wrote on behalf of his people to the Electricity Department and asked for an extension of the transmission lines from the nearby substation at Tafo. Explaining his request, Nana Awua noted that Begoro was the “old Capital” of the Benkum division of Akim Abuakwa “with a very large population.” Begoro had several educational institutions including a training college, a women’s vocational school, and four middle schools, two of which were boarding schools. The Salvation Army operated a clinic at Begoro. “All these establishments and the people,” Nana Akwua added, “need[ed] electricity.” The “lack of electricity,” he deplored, was a “great handicap” for the town’s development.4 This petition, unlike the previous ones, did not ask for a diesel generator but for a connection to the country’s new grid powered by Akosombo. Electricity generated by local diesel plants was a more costly and prone to breakdowns. Access to the grid, though dependent on a higher investment, was in the 3 Archive of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG-A) Box 47, 565/vol. 9, no. 132, G. A. Anomesi II, Queenmother-Golokwati to NLC Chairman, 21 June 1967. 4 ECG-A Box 47, 565/vol. 9, no. 74, Nana Antwi Awua III, Benkumhene Akim Abuakwa, Begoro, to Chief Electrical Engineer (CEE), 7 Jan. 1967. Begoro had about 5,000 inhabitants. A subsequent report established that approximately 1,202 consumers would benefit from a connection to the grid, see ECG-A, Box 47, 565/vol. 9, no 144, Electricity Division, Koforidua to MD, 19 Sept. 1967. Akim Abuakwa, like other precolonial Akan kingdoms, was organized into divisions; the chief of Begoro, as the Benkumhene, was the “left wing” leader of the kingdom’s military. 3 long run cheaper, more reliable, and more desirable. Availability of electricity, provided by Ghana’s most modern infrastructure, became a key marker of full citizenship. Ghana experienced an electricity fever, when Nkrumah inaugurated the Akosombo Dam in January 1966, one month prior to the coup. After witnessing the construction of this enormous dam, the country was ready for cheap power that would mitigate the economic crisis left by Nkrumah. Initially, Akosombo’s hydroelectric plant had an installed capacity of 528 megawatts that fueled the smelter of the Volta Aluminum Company (VALCO) and powered a 500 mile grid of 161 kilovolts lines with seventeen transmission substations (Fig. 6.1). Although there were no immediate plans to provide electricity to rural areas beyond the grid, official statements and press reporting had created expectations that the whole country would benefit from the wonders of Akosombo. Nkrumah’s metaphor of turning darkness into light, quoted in the epigraph, had become a powerful vision that rallied support for the project. Exhibits touring the country, poems celebrating Akosombo, and press reporting contained references of how electricity would overcome darkness. Ghanaians expected that the state would provide them with electricity. Thanks to Akosombo, Ghana became one of the few sub-Saharan countries with a large hydroelectric plant and a power grid. Although VALCO was to consume over 50 percent of the electricity generated at Akosombo, Ghana had a large electricity surplus until it began exporting to neighboring countries in 1972.5 This chapter traces the popular 5 For a brief overview of the history of electrification in Africa, see Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Electricity Networks in Africa: A Comparative Study, or How to Write Social History from Economic Sources,” in Sources and Methods in African History, ed. T. Falola and C. Jennings, (Rochester: University of Rochester Press 2003), 346-60. For East Africa, addressing the politics of infrastructure and electricity, see Christopher D. Gore, Electricity in Africa: The Politics of Transformation in Uganda (Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey, 2017), 31-63. For a compelling study of how the arrival of electricity changed a rural community in Zanzibar, see Tanja Winther, The Impact of Electricity: Development, Desires, and 4 expectations and technopolitics around electricity in Ghana until the early 1980s. Drawing on the underused archive of the Electricity Corporation, it examines petitions and government initiatives for rural electrification. The discussion explores how rural Ghanaians struggled to gain access to electricity as a claim of citizenship, and how they challenged changing governments, civil and military, to deliver on their promises.6 The availability of electricity became a yard stick of how ordinary Ghanaians measured their inclusion into the promise of modernity and modernization.7 Ghana experienced three civilian governments with different constitutions (three republics) and five successful coups and military regimes from 1960 to the early 1980s.8 These various governments relied on the technologies of electricity generation, transmission, and distribution to pursue their political goals. Such technopolitics, as Gabrielle Hecht has argued, were closely linked to nation building and shaping of a national identity.9 Multiple state agencies took part in the articulation and deployment of Dilemmas (New York: Berghahn, 2008). For current debates on the politics of electrification, see David A. McDonald, ed., Electric Capitalism: Recolonising Africa on the Power Grid (London: Earthscan, 2009). 6 For a similar argument about the state providing electricity as a right to democratic citizenship, see Lauren M. MacLean, Christopher Gore, Jennifer N. Brass, and Elizabeth Baldwin, “Expectations of Power: The Politics of State-Building and Access to Electricity Politics in Ghana and Uganda,” Journal of African Political Economy and Development 1 (2016): 103-34. While Mac Lauren et al. rightfully situate the origin of this expectation with Nkrumah’s nation building, they ignore how the connection between citizenship and electricity evolved from 1966 to the early 1980s. For a brief overview of rural electrification efforts in the late 1960s and 1970s, see also Naaborle Sackeyfio, Energy Politics and Rural Development in Sub- Saharan Africa: The Case of Ghana (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 100-1. 7 For the expectations of and disillusionment with modernity, see James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths, Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) and J. Ferguson, Global Shadow: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), especially chap. 7. For a discussion about the aspirations associated with modernization, see Peter Bloom, Stephan F. Miescher, and Takyiwaa Manuh (eds.), Modernization as Spectacle in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 8 The First Republic with Nkrumah as president (1960-66), the military-police National Liberation Council (1966-69), the Second Republic with A. K. Busia as prime minister (1969-72), the military National Redemption Council (1972-75) replaced by the Supreme Military Council (1975-78) under Colonel (later General) I. K. Acheampong, the Military Supreme Council II under General F. W. K. Akuffo, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council under Flight Lieutenant J. J. Rawling (1979), the Third Republic with Hilla Limann as president (1979-81), and the Provisional National Defense Council under Rawlings (1981-93). 9 See her study on the nuclear industry in France, Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power 5 the technopolitics of electricity, among them the Volta River Authority that generated power at Akosombo and operated the main transmission lines, the Electricity Department and later the Electricity Corporation in charge of distribution to domestic and commercial consumers, and other government offices.