ENERGY: Growing Demands Prompt Burkina Faso to Import Electricity

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Brahima Ouedraogo

OUAGADOUGOU, Jan 3 2003 (IPS) - Growing demands for power supply have prompted Burkina Faso to import electricity from neighbouring Cote d’Ivoire.

A 225,000-high-voltage power line is being planned for 2005 to connect the city of Ferkessedougou in northern Cote d’Ivoire with Ouagadougou. The line will allow additional 90 megawatts of electricity to supply the Burkinabe capital.

Ouagadougou, whose electricity supply demand is seven percent per year, generates between 50 and 60 megawatts of electricity, hardly enough for the city’s needs.

Since 2001, Cote d’Ivoire has provided Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s economic capital, with all its electricity needs.

‘’The purpose of the new line is to guarantee a long-term supply of electricity to the city of Ouagadougou,” says Narcisse Sawadogo of the Burkinabe National Electric Company (SONABEL).

‘’The project is extremely important for Burkina Faso because for some time now in Ouagadougou, as soon as we get close to the hot season – April to June – electricity becomes one hell of a problem for our clients, for SONABEL, and for the country,” Sawadogo told IPS late December.

Burkina Faso always experiences erratic power supply during the dry season because of lack of water at the hydroelectric dams, which supply 34.64 percent of the country’s energy needs. Located in Africa’s arid region, the Sahel, Burkina Faso is subject to the vagaries of climatic unpredictability. Some of its regions receive less than 200 millimetres of rain per year.

Originally, Burkina Faso had employed diesel generators to produce electricity from thermal sources. But high production costs – attributed to fluctuating input prices on the world market – prompted the government to believe that interconnecting Burkina Faso’s grid with that of neighbouring countries like Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire made better economic sense.

The rate of electricity – measured in kilowatt per hour – in Burkina Faso remains one of the highest in the sub-region. Since 1994, it has hovered at around the 93-CFA mark. In Burkina Faso, 85 percent of the electricity produced comes from thermal sources.

One U.S. dollar is equal to 650 CFA.

SONABEL says, even with subsidy, fuel and lubricant needs account for 71 percent of production costs, or 38 CFA (about 58 U.S. cents), a kilowatt per hour.

‘’Our primary concern is to guarantee power supply to Ouagadougou because without electricity there can be no economic or social development,” says Sawadogo.

Energy imports from Cote d’Ivoire are part of a strategic plan to fight poverty. ‘’Sufficient electrical supply is an essential element of development. Burkina Faso has realised that high cost of electricity retards development,” according to Kader Cisse, the Minister of Energy, Mines and Quarries.

Cisse says connecting Ferkessedougou and Bobo-Dioulasso will benefit Burkina Faso. In the country’s eight main cities, only 50 percent of installations have electricity, and in 40 other centres, which also enjoy power service, the rate is just between 15 and 20 percent.

All the rural areas crossed by the high-voltage line – lying within a 100-kilometre radius – will be electrified, according to Burkinabe authorities.

A recent SONABEL study shows that the power lines will not ‘’cross any parks or protected forests, but may skim along the edge of some forests”. Only some 100 traditional African huts will make way for the construction of the electrical line, SONABEL confirms.

Donors, meeting in Ouagadougou recently, agreed to bankroll the 56-billion-CFA (about 86.153 million U.S. dollars) project.

However, the donors – comprising the World Bank, the West African Development Bank, the French Development Agency, and the Danish Development Agency – have urged the government to speed up the privatisation of SONABEL to improve efficiency.

‘’The institutional reform process at SONABEL is already in motion and could be completed by 2004, but the government wants to go slowly but surely, to avoid the problems other countries have encountered,” Jean Baptiste Compaore, the Minister of Finance and Budget, told IPS late December. He did not elaborate on the nature of the problems other countries have encountered.

But labour unions have opposed the privatisation of the country’s electricity, water and telephone companies, which they have described as ‘’ selling-off our national assets to the highest bidder” .