Aussie tycoon takes on dam of broken dreams
Australia’s wealthiest man has revealed plans to develop the world’s most ambitious hydroelectric power project, a NZ$100 billion scheme to harness the raging power of the lower Congo River.
Andrew Forrest has reached an agreement with the Democratic Republic of Congo to complete the Grand Inga project, arguably one of Africa’s most challenging initiatives. The two sides held talks last September, when a picture surfaced on Facebook showing Forrest and his wife, Nicola, being hosted by President Felix Tshisekedi.
‘‘The capital cost of this will be many, many tens of billions of dollars, and direct and indirect employment will be in the hundreds of thousands,’’ Forrest said. No binding contract has been signed between his company, Fortescue Metals Group, and the authorities in Kinshasa.
The scale of the Grand Inga project is extraordinary – more than twice the size of the world’s largest hydroelectric station, the Three Gorges in China, and with the capacity to transform not only
the Congo region but also the entire continent. It would boost Africa’s power generation capacity by a third. Forrest’s plan also hopes to produce green hydrogen for export.
At Inga, water gathered from the Congo River’s vast catchment area, which is larger than the
Indian subcontinent, is forced through a tight gorge at a phenomenal rate, rarely dipping below 50,000 tonnes a second.
While the technical challenges are huge, they are dwarfed by the difficulties of doing business in the DRC, one of the world’s most corrupt and unstable countries.
Forrest, with a personal fortune estimated at NZ$40b, has won a reputation for ambitious development schemes.
Analysts are keen to see if he can succeed in harnessing the potential of Inga where others have come unstuck over the past 60 years, including the American
Rockefeller dynasty, the government of South Africa, and more recently developers for China’s Belt and Road initiative.
After each scheme was tabled, it was stymied by the reality of doing business in the former Belgian colony, a violent land where political patronage requires cosying up to unaccountable dictators and where contracts can be discarded on a whim, with no recourse to the law.
In the 1970s, the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko borrowed money to pay for two relatively small hydroelectric stations on a side stream of the river at the same waterfalls. Construction dragged on for years beyond the project deadline, a promised power distribution network was never built, and the affair eventually bankrupted the country. US taxpayers are still owed NZ$1b for the failed development.