Hydro-Power and the Promise of Modernity and Development in Ghana: Comparing the Akosombo and Bui Dam Projects

n 2007, as Ghanaians were suffering another electricity crisis with frequent power outages, President J. A. Kufuor celebrated in a festive mode the sod cutting for the country’s third large hydro-electric dam at Bui across the Black Volta in the Brong Ahafo Region. 1 The new 400 megawatt (MW) power project promises to guarantee Ghana’s electricity supply and to develop neglected parts of the north. The Bui Dam had been planned since the 1920s as part of the original Volta River Project: harnessing the river by producing ample electricity for processing the country’s bauxite. In the early 1960s, when President Kwame Nkrumah began to implement the Volta River Project by building the Akosombo Dam, Bui was supposed to follow as part of a grand plan for the industrialization and modernization of Ghana and Africa. Since the 1980s, periodic electricity crises due to irregular rainfall have undermined Ghana’s reliance on Akosombo. By the turn of the century, these crises had created a sense of urgency to realize the Bui project in spite of an increasing international critique of large dams. Although there is more than a forty-year gap between the