Once again a story without pictures. But this time I have a reason. There are no pictures. My laptop has given up on me. All my photos and texts have been obliterated. There was a power cut and when the energy came back my computer told me that I don't have a hard drive anymore. Very unspectacular. But even this rather uninspiring event is a story in itself.
When Kwame Nkrumah became Ghana's first president in 1957, he was inspired by socialism and the idea of creating some kind of a Pan-African way, different from what went on in the rest of the world at the time. His new African way never quite made it and all that is left today are a number of truly massive industrial projects like the port town Tema or the Volta dam in Akosombo. Still today, the dam is just enormous. The resulting Volta Lake has been the world's biggest artificial lake for some forty years. The turbines in the Akosombo dam create most of the energy consumed in Ghana. But in the 60s, when lake was flooded, internal demand was too low. In order to make use of the excess energy, Nkrumah went for long-term contracts selling energy to a ridiculously low price to a huge aluminum smelter run by an American company. At the time the deal made sense, because it was American money that helped Ghana build the place.
Today, Ghana's economy is growing by approx. six per cent every year and energy demand has grown fast. The problem is such that during dry times the dam is producing less energy. But because the government is bound by its ancient contracts, energy has to be saved elsewhere. They call it the National Load Scheduling Programme. It means that more or less twice a week there is now power for exactly 12 hours. To mitigate the effects, they have devised a clever concept that just leaves certain areas without energy. So if there is a black out in your area, you can go two blocks down the road and find bars with cold beer or an Internet cafe.
And even when there is power the voltage in your plug might shift quite a lot. And that's what killed my hard drive, at least that is what the guy in the repair shop told me. Bad luck. But they will install a new hard drive, so I should be online soon. Plus, it is raining and the water level in the lake is rising again.
# posted by Thilo @ 6:26 PM
