WELL DONE ON KARUMA BUT …

Last month the 600 MW Karuma dam was commissioned by President Yoweri Museveni too much fanfare.

"The dam which increases the country’s installed capacity to about 2000MW, is a marvel of engineering design and should set us up as a major player in alleviating the power deficiencies in our part of the world...

But the story of the dam’s development should serve as a cautionary tale and also a lesson to prevent such disasters recurring in the future.

The dam whose construction begun in 2013 was supposed to be commissioned in 2018, so it is six years behind schedule. Such delays have real money consequences, for example, that we started repaying the loan before we had evacuated a single Megawatt, because its five year grace period had expired. The delays alone suggest that the dam’s promise of cheap power may actually be a mirage. Time will tell.

The delay had its origins in the energy ministry, which so botched up the contracting of the construction of the dam and that of Isimba, further upstream, that sympathies are in order for Uganda Electricity Generation Company Ltd (UEGCL) who have been charged with running the two installations.

Those in charge of contracting for the billion dollar project flouted procurement procedures, ignored judicial, parliamentary and cabinet oversight and it took the president to exercise some Solomonesque justice to award the contact for the building of Karuma to SinoHydro and that of Isimbe dam to CWE. If the ministry officials had had it their way the award would have gone the other way.

Out of that chaotic process have resulted in cost overruns, shoddy work and a multitude of issues that UEGCL will take years – hopefully not generations, to unfurl.

As a reminder, the people of Uganda are poor, but Uganda is not poor...

Beyond our benign climate, arable soils and bequtifuul scenary, about a decade ago an aerial survey of our mineral wealth showed that if we wer to fully exploit the minerals under our feet, we would have to move all Ugandans out of the country first. We are that rich.

The reason the people of Uganda however continue to wallow in poverty, is because of our inability to exploit this our natural endowment for our benefit.

The development of Karuma dam is a case in point.

The site’s potential of 600MW or more, has been seating there for eons unexploited. And when we decided to do something about it, public officials charged with overseeing these assets, in trust for all Ugandans, put their personal enrichment first and the people of Uganda be damned. In more serious countries these people would be strung from trees rather than awarded medals.

But the drama is not over yet.

Uganda’s peak time demand is about 800 MW, which means at the best of times 1200MW of capacity goes begging. Painfully we pay for that power whether we use it or not.

Even in Karuma and Isimbe, where we do not have onerous power purchase agreements, the creditors get paid whether you use the power or not.

"The challenge with the electricity sector, like other sectors in Uganda is that we all work in our individual silos, with no seeming regard to ecosystem around us...

One of the delays to the dam completion, apart from all the remedial work that had to be done because no sooner had the dam been built than huge fissures started showing up all over the dam, was that we had not completed the transmission lines to evacuate the power.

One would imagine that if we are to build a dam, we need to start planning simultaneously for how that power should be evacuated. One would imagine that Uganda Electricity Transmission Company Ltd (UETCL), whose job it is to evacuate the power, would be put on formal notice, with funding and timelines, beyond them reading about it in the press. It did not happen.

So UETCL only just finished the transmission lines last year, five years after the original date of commissioning of the dam.

We would be forgiven if the government was run by some bumbling fools from an earlier era. We would shake our heads, click our tongues and understand. But that is far from the truth.

In a country where less than half the households have access to the national grid, this kind of mismanagement is criminal. While it is difficult to see the cost to the people who have not had power in generations, we can see by the transformation in the lives of those who have access, to get a sense of what the rest are missing.

"The net effect is that Karuma like Kiira, is in danger of being a white elephant, too big to be swept under the carpet, but an example of how not to develop a project never the less...

The management at the energy ministry, UEGCL and UETCL are relatively new, as they all came in when the Karuma project had been set in motion, so they maybe exonerated from the mess. But as Ugandans we expect better from them and value for money for all these beautiful dams that do not generate power.