Stupidty of Ghana's "Bui Dam" project continues [Volta VTR.TO]
26 AUGUST 2010 - Bespoke
The ill-starred Chinese Bui Dam project is attempting to build a superfluous dam upstream from the the famous Akosombo Dam on the Volta River, northwest of Ghana's Lake Volta. It is essentially a Chinese-funded diplomatic ploy. Aside from 1. the Bui Dam will screw up already-paltry water flow into the existing, shrinking Lake Volta, 2. it will kill and wipe out hundreds of Ghana's hippopotamuses, about half of Ghana's population (bringing Ghana's "hippo tourism" to an end) 3. it serves as a covert instrument of Chinese influence and control over Ghana's government, 4. its promised economic benefits for Ghana are mostly fictional, 5. "dash" (Ghanaian corruption, bribery, not all Chinese), now there is something further:
The Bui Dam project is being used as an excuse to block ALL gold prospecting and development activity in the large "Bui Concession" held by Canadian miner Volta Resources. This rich gold area has numerous promising gold deposits that had been developed at great effort and expense with government encouragement for over a decade, by Volta Resources and its predecessor, the highly respected Birim Gold Corp. The gold concessions are miles and miles from the Bui dam site and the area to be flooded by it, and they will be unaffected by the dam in the unfortunate event that the dam ever actually gets built by the Chinese. Nobody can explain why the dam project has any relevance to distant gold properties like the Brohani Hills that are so many miles away and hundreds of feet higher than any area to be flooded or affected by the Bui Dam. Possibly the ancient Ghanaian tradition of dash (bribery) is the real reason for the massive hold-up; are palms waiting to be greased? Certainly there is no scientific or other rational reason to stop all work in Volta's Bui Concession because of this dam.
Luckily for Volta Resources, it has several other hot properties in Ghana and Burkina to fall back on, and the Bui Dam fiasco just amounts to an ongoing nuisance to the company; it's an ongoing embarassment to the government of Ghana. There's something here to annoy the ecological Left (mercilessly killing the hippos) and the capitalist Right (screwing the Volta shareholders), as well as locals who would like the related jobs, or who expect rationality in their government.
