Hydropower

It was another early start and a rush hour flit to the airport as we have meetings in Songea in southern Tanzania for the next few days. Meetings I’m excited about as the Mozambican colleagues are with us and my role is all about trying to promote such ‘transboundary exchanges’.

The flight path to Songea went directly over the newly filled lake in the middle of the Selous ecosystem wilderness. This has been planned with the damming the of Rufiji River for the controversial Julius Nyerere Hydropower Project. Whilst it attracted a lot of attention to create a large lake in the middle of the country’s biggest wildlife conservation area, the development has been completed with success if power reliability in Dar es Salaam is anything to go by. It’s not a good look for European nations (such as Germany, who threatened to withhold aid) to deny countries like Tanzania the freedom to develop economically. And my view is that this wilderness is so vast, uninhabited and uniform for tens of thousands of square kilometres that any negative impacts can be mitigated fairly well.