Africa's Biggest Battery Is Sitting in the Congo and We're All Pretending Not to Notice

Written by; Humphrey Asiimwe

I'll be honest with you, there are mornings I sit in Kampala, stare at the load shedding schedule pinned on social media and wonder what exactly we've been doing for the last thirty years. Because the solution, or at least a very large part of it, has been sitting on the Congo River this entire time, waiting for us to get our act together.

If you haven't heard of it, that's part of the problem. The site has the potential

to generate around 100,000 megawatts of electricity. Let that number breathe for a

moment. The entire installed power capacity of Africa today sits at roughly 60,000

megawatts and that's including every creaking thermal plant, every small solar

farm, every diesel generator disguised as a power station. Inga could dwarf all of

it. And yet here we are.

Uganda loses somewhere in the region of $680 million every year to power outages.

Not from lack of resources. Not from lack of engineers or entrepreneurs or people

willing to work. 

We lose it because the lights go off. Factories run diesel generators

that cost four times what grid power would. A woman running a cold storage

business in Jinja doesn't lose money because of bad management, she loses it

because UMEME couldn't guarantee eight consecutive hours of supply. This is the

reality we have normalised.

Now, I want to be fair to the complexity here. Grand Inga is not a simple project.

Inga 3 alone, the next major development phase, carries cost estimates ranging

1 | P a g efrom $14 billion to $80 billion depending on scope, phasing, and frankly which consultant you hired. 

That $66 billion spread is not a rounding error. It is a sign of how much uncertainty has plagued this project from the start. The DRC's political history hasn't helped. Neither have the revolving doors of international partners who showed up with handshakes and left with nothing signed.

But the habit of waiting, waiting for China to fund it, waiting for the World Bank,

waiting for some single saviour institution to come riding in, that habit is the real

obstacle. South Africa's Eskom signed letters of intent on Inga years ago. Letters of

intent. You cannot run a smelter on a letter of intent. You cannot refrigerate vaccines

on goodwill.

What needs to happen, and I say this as someone who has sat in enough

continental energy forums to fill a small memoir, is an African-led financing

consortium. Not a committee. Not a working group. A consortium with actual

capital commitments behind it. 

The African Development Bank, Afreximbank, and the growing pool of national institutional investors on this continent, pension funds,

sovereign wealth funds, national development banks, are collectively managing more money than most people realise.

Uganda's National Social Security Fund alone manages over 22 trillion Ugandan

shillings. Rwanda has its Agaciro Development Fund. Nigeria's Sovereign Investment Authority. Kenya's pension sector.

None of these institutions were built to fund continental megaprojects by themselves, but together, through properly structured infrastructure bonds with blended finance mechanisms and first loss guarantees from development finance institutions, you start to have something real. 

Something a commercial lender can underwrite.

Uganda's interest in this is not abstract or altruistic. We are landlocked. We share a

border with the DRC. The transmission distance from Inga to Uganda's grid is

considerably shorter than it would be for most West African nations. Every

megawatt-hour that flows from Inga into the Eastern African Power Pool directly

competes with the diesel and charcoal that currently fill the gap. 

We have 55 percent electricity access nationally. We have industrial parks that could be running three shifts instead of two if the power held.

Karuma taught us something. 

People said it was too ambitious. Too expensive. Too dependent on Chinese financing to ever truly serve Ugandan interests. Well, Karuma is generating 600 megawatts today. It wasn't elegant and it wasn't fast and there were procurement headaches I'd rather not revisit over dinner. But it works. 

The lights in the Albertine region are, quite literally, on because someone decided to

stop waiting for perfect conditions.

Inga needs that same energy, multiplied across ten or fifteen governments

simultaneously. What it requires is a structure where South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria,

Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and others all sign binding power purchase agreements before construction begins.

Not after. Not provisionally. Before. Because the commercial logic of this project only works at scale. An electricity project that serves one customer is a risk. One that serves twelve is a portfolio.

The Congo River, for context, discharges more water per second than any river in

the world outside the Amazon. It has been doing this long before any of us arrived

and will continue long after. It generates no power by itself. It simply flows,

indifferent to our summits and our strategy documents.

We have 1.4 billion people on this continent. The youngest population on Earth. The

lowest per capita electricity consumption among any major world region. You can

frame that as a crisis, or you can frame it as the largest untapped energy market

in human history. I know which framing gets investors out of bed in the morning.

The dam won't build itself. But at some point, Africa has to stop asking for permission to develop its own resources and simply start.