White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Electricity Is the Gift That Can Keep on Giving in Africa

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Photo: South Africa – August 24, 2014: African woman with child collecting water from the river on the road leading to local Game Reserve.

He is generic Africa Man. You can see him everywhere, walking barefoot across the Savannah and desert landscapes. He is on a mission that gets harder as time goes on.

His mission is to find enough wood — a few dry sticks here, some roots there — to make a fire for a hot meal and to bathe. He walks and walks, adding a stick and a piece of scrub wood to the bundle carried, in the traditional way, on his head.

Generic Africa Woman is busy, too. Her mission is to draw water. She carries a container on her head, filled with water from a distant well, to make dinner — a meal of maize (corn) porridge with maybe a stew of some meat or even caterpillar — and to bathe.

African life is picturesque, but it is not pretty. Hardship is in daily attendance in much of Africa, blighted from deforestation and polluted water.

Yet Western aid has not been easily delivered. Much of it has been stolen, some of it has been misapplied and some of it has led to aid dependency.

So, as an old Africa hand (I was born in what is now Zimbabwe, and left when I was 20 years old), I was elated to learn of a new and critical partnership just announced between the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) and the U.S. Department of State’s Power Africa initiative. Electricity anywhere is the gift that gives and gives, but especially when it begins to transform lives of hard struggle to ones that are less so.

When I was a boy, the opening of a power station or the building of a power line were events that brought forth celebration. Electricity signaled a better tomorrow.

When a village — whether it is in Bolivia, India or Uganda — is electrified, good things flow. A simple hotplate replaces days of firewood collection and those who can read can do so after the sun sets: hygiene improves, education is facilitated and expectations soar.

When the shantytowns that surround Johannesburg, South Africa, were electrified, the productivity of workers who flood into the city every day went up. Simply, they were saved from the drudgery of collecting animal droppings, wood scraps and other combustible stuff to burn.

The colonizers of Africa realized the need for electricity. Hence, in my part of the continent, two great dams were built on the Zambezi River: the Kariba, between Zimbabwe and Zambia, and the Cahora Bassa in Mozambique.

As a very young reporter, I covered the construction of the Kariba Dam, and its near destruction by unusually heavy flooding, in 1957. It has been the backbone of electricity supply for Zimbabwe and Zambia for more than 50 years.

But in recent years the dam, holding back the world’s largest, man-made impoundment of water, has begun to show deterioration in the concave wall, but especially behind the wall. The outflow has been eroding the plunge pool and threatening the wall. Hundreds of millions of dollars have had to be raised internationally for remediation, which is yet to begin in earnest. If the dam should fail, about 4 million people would die downstream.

The dam also has been producing much less electricity than it had been previously due to multi-year drought in the region. Copper production in Zambia, a vital industry, has had to be curtailed because of severe electric shortages. Blackouts are routine throughout the region.

Electricity is also a problem in South Africa, the industrial and commercial giant of Africa. Delay in ordering new generation, political interference in the decision processes and other problems, stemming from the end of apartheid, have damaged the system. Blackouts are affecting South Africa’s competitive posture.

Now the government is being romanced by Russia, hoping to sell it a new nuclear plant on favorable terms. It would join the two-unit, 1,860-MW Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, which has been operating since 1984. Unfortunately emerging countries have a fascination with big, showy projects, like the national airlines and steel mills that have cost them so dearly in their post-colonial phase.

EEI and the State Department need to guide the countries of Africa to today’s energy solutions, not yesterday’s. Africa needs to turn to its most abundant resource: sunshine. In North Africa, Morocco is building the world’s largest solar installation. Way to go.

A Tale of Two Dams: Catastrophe in the Making

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This is a tale of two hydroelectric dams. Two dams far from each other, but either of which could produce the next great humanitarian crisis.

The first is the Mosul Dam, which stretches across the Tigris River in a valley north of Mosul, Iraq. As dams go, this one is a civil engineering horror. It has been captured by the Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Should the two-mile-wide dam fail, which is likely, Mosul will be wiped out and the damage will extend to Baghdad. Loss of life could reach 500,000, and millions could be deprived of water and power. An immense catastrophe piled on the daily pain of Iraq.
The second dam, far away in Southern Africa on the Zambezi River, is the Kariba. This 55-year-old dam, by some measures, is the world’s second-largest. It was a civil engineering masterpiece and has held up well, given the spotty maintenance by its owners — Zambia, on the north bank and Zimbabwe, on the south bank.

If the Kariba Dam fails, as it is predicted to do in three years without repairs, surging water would rip a vast trench down the length of the Zambezi River on its route to the Indian Ocean. The wall of water would take out another giant dam, Cahora Bassa, in Mozambique. Loss of life could reach 3.5 million, with untold damage to wildlife. Central Southern Africa would lose 40 percent of its electric supply.

While the Mosul and Kariba dams are linked in their potential lethality, they are very different structures.

The Mosul Dam was a rush job, ordered by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s without regard to the engineering realities on the site. It is anchored in gypsum, which dissolves in water. So leaks in the foundation have to be plugged daily with “grout,” a mixture of cement and sand. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the Mosul Dam is fundamentally the wrong structure for the location, and called it the “most dangerous dam in the world.”

Even with careful tending, the Mosul Dam is in danger. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, many of the workers who have kept the dam going fled when the Islamic State arrived, and only one dedicated manager is known to have remained.

The United States spent $33 million trying to stabilize the Mosul Dam, but the money, according to an inspector general’s report, was largely wasted. Now the United States cannot bomb near the dam for fear of destabilizing it further.

Apart from general-maintenance issues, the Kariba Dam issues are a little simpler. When the dam was built between 1955 and 1959, it was planned that the river flow would be controlled though six sluice gates set in the wall. These empty into a plunge pool before the water flows downstream.

The trouble is that the plunge pool has grown from an indentation in the riverbed to a vast crater 285-feet-deep. There it swirls around with great force and is eroding the basalt rock on which the dam is anchored. The dam is eating itself alive. All the sluice gates dare not be opened at once, and have not been since 1966.

The fix is a mixture of blasting the plunge pool, so the water goes downstream without creating a whirlpool, and injecting grout — in the form of underwater concrete — to shore up the foundation.

A consortium of the World Bank, the European Union and the African Development Bank this month agreed to provide $250 million to save Kariba. Engineers say the work must be done in the next three years or it will be too late.

If Zimbabwe and Zambia can agree on the contracts and let them in time, work should begin next year. But in that part of the world, the only thing that moves fast is the Zambezi River. The future of Mosul Dam is anyone’s guess. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Other Noah: The Man Who Saved 6,000 Wild Animals

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Rupert Fothergill and friend                                     Source: Internet

In the Bible, it was Noah who stuffed the animals into the ark, two by two. Now there is Russell Crowe, whose movie “Noah” went on general release this weekend, and whose animals are almost the backstory compared to Noah's family disputes.

But from 1958-64, on the Zambezi River and in the Zambezi valley between Zimbabwe and Zambia, there was another Noah: a game warden for the colonial government in Southern Rhodesia, who was the nearest thing to the biblical Noah. He led a small band of ingenious men, who between them saved about 6,000 creatures, great and small, from a watery grave.

The man who mounted probably the greatest animal rescue since the captain of the vessel in Genesis was Rupert Fothergill. This quiet “man of the bush” was in his forties when he undertook the rescue of every kind of living creature trapped by rising waters from the giant Kariba hydroelectric dam project, which flooded the Zambezi valley downstream from Victoria Falls.

At the time, the waters behind the dam created the largest man-made lake in the world. Because the governments of the British colony of Southern Rhodesia and and the British Protectorate of Northern Rhodesia were primarily concerned with relocating about 57,000 Tonga people from the flood plain, little attention was paid to the density of game that would be drowned.

Enter Fothergill, who orchestrated “Operation Noah.” With few resources, and often no idea how to do it, Fothergill and team went to work, learning as they went along.

As Tim Abbott, an American conservationist, told me, “How do you tranquilize a black rhino?” Well on YouTube, you can watch some amazing footage of the enormous, beautiful beast being secured, fighting back and finally being tied to a giant stretcher that was dragged onto a raft made of oil drums for the journey to her new life on high ground.

As the waters of Lake Kariba rose, islands formed in the flood plain, trapping everything. There is a searing image, recorded in a blog by Abbott, of a giant bull elephant, found by Fothergill's team when it was near death, having swum for five hours, its trunk changing color from the exertion.

Some big game was more or less ridden to safety through the rising water. Small creatures were carried in loving arms onto small boats and taken to safety. There are photographs and there is 16mm film of the rescues, even of Fothergill pampering an antelope calf.

Peter Jones, now 77 and living in Durban, South Africa, was on Fothergill's team. He told me by phone that gradually and with very few resources, they leaned how to save everything from poisonous snakes to the big game — buffaloes, elephants and rhinos; the big antelopes, eland, kudu, sable and wildebeest; cheetahs, leopards and lions; and hyenas.

Fothergill and his men (about seven white Rhodesians and 50 Africans, Jones recalls) had a small flotilla of dinghies with Evinrude outboard motors. There were six or seven of these, but later a larger boat (Jones thinks it was 30- or 35-feet-long and fitted with a diesel engine) was procured and used to tow the other boats with men sitting in them, holding animals in bags and nets and sometimes just in their hands. The boat's name was “The Tuna,” and it had come overland from South Africa — boats were in very short supply in that part of Southern Africa, a largely arid area.

I missed “Operation Noah” by a year. When I was a young reporter (17 years old), I was sent to the Kariba dam site to cover floods that threatened to wash the whole project away. It was just a year before the great animal rescue began but my boss, Eric Robins, a man from whom I learned my trade, was aware of the coming wildlife tragedy. Later, he wrote a book about it called “Animal Dunkirk: The story of Lake Kariba and 'Operation Noah,' greatest animal rescue since the Ark.” It was. It was.

Sadly, “Operation Noah” got lost in the turbulent history of Africa that was to follow and particularly the civil war in Rhodesia, which brought an end to the colonial era and tended to inter its good deeds with the race issues that dominated the politics.


Happily more and more images of “Operation Noah” are being digitized, largely by Fothergill's family, and are making their way onto the Internet. Watch Crowe, marvel at Fothergill.  —  For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate