From article:
In August 2011, the 10 million residents of Kinshasa worked and slept in a thick haze of diesel fumes pumped from thousands of generators running around the clock. The pollution, though, wasn’t the main worry for most in the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was what the fumes reflected: the lack of power. During that August, the two hydroelectric dams on the Congo River that served as the country’s major source of electricity were stymied by a combination of broken equipment and unusually low water levels.
But even when the dams — Inga I and Inga II — were producing electricity, it was only a fraction of what the country needed. Two-thirds of enterprises in Congo rely on their own generators. While the data is unreliable, it’s estimated that less than one-third of people in Congo’s urban areas have access to electricity, and that figure plunges to single digits in rural parts of the country. Businesses rank electricity as the major constraint to their growth, coming well ahead of issues like access to finance, taxes, and even corruption and instability — no small thing given that Congo is regularly ranked by Transparency International, in its annual Corruption Perceptions Index, as one of the world’s most corrupt countries and that the country suffered one of the most deadly conflicts of the twenty-first century. Congo is near the bottom of the rankings on almost every indicator of development: more than four-fifths of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day, according to the latest survey data. Nearly one in 10 children born dies before his or her first birthday. And the link between energy poverty and poor health is compelling: When the dams’ water pumps lack power, homes have to use polluting fuels instead of electricity for light, and when vaccines cannot be properly refrigerated, they fail to work properly.
It didn’t have to be this way. For nearly a century, humans have made plans to harness the power of the nearly 3,000-mile-long Congo River, which originates in the highlands of the East African Rift and flows west into the Atlantic, where its plume can be detected 500 miles from shore. Moving 10 million gallons a second, the volume of water in the river is enormous; its flow is second only to that of the Amazon. In less than 20 miles near Matadi, in Bas-Congo province, the river drops 300 feet, creating what’s known as the Inga Falls. Here, the river rages downward at speeds that top 30 miles per hour, in a channel as much as 750 feet deep — more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty.
As large as the promise of the Inga Falls is the failure to deliver on it.