Page 130 - Afrika Must Unite

TOWARDS ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE
Nevertheless, I put it up to the colonial administration, who
could see no prospect of raising the capital. It was obvious that
the project would have to wait for independence and that I
would have to take upon myself the task of enlisting financial
help from overseas. W ith independence, we would be in a
position to give government guarantees to outside investors. As
soon as we became free, I started pushing the project, but quickly
came up against a blank wall - the leading manufacturers of
aluminium. They were organized into a consortium controlling
the bulk of the world’s output, and were not interested in a new
competitor, still less in a new source of cheap aluminium. They
expressed polite interest; one even sent a study mission to make
an on-the-spot investigation and then turned the project down.
In the middle of 1958, I accepted an official invitation from
President Eisenhower to visit the United States. During the talk
I had with him I told him of the Volta River scheme. This led to a
meeting with members of the Henry J. Kaiser Company, one of
the large independent aluminium producers. They promised to
send a team of experts to reassess engineering aspects of the
original scheme. The team made their investigations and were
favourably impressed. Their reassessment report recommended
the construction of the dam at a different point from that
originally proposed, and the extension of the scheme by the
provision of two other hydro-electrical stations which would
supply the more northerly part of the country with much-needed
water and power.
The original Volta River project was designed to channel the
bulk of the electricity produced by the dam to an aluminium
smelter, and a comparatively small proportion only would have
been made available for domestic consumption. The reassess­
ment report recommended the installation of a national
electricity grid covering the major part of Southern Ghana, from
the harbour and industrial town of Tem a, through Accra,
Takoradi, Tarkwa, Dunkwa, Kumasi, Koforidua and back to
the dam site at Akosombo. By the addition of the two smaller
stations at Bui and Kpong, at higher points on the Volta, the
national grid will extend into the territory on the other side of the
river. At selected points on the grid there will be outlets from
which electricity will be distributed for domestic and industrial