Ethiopia: Do-gooders keeping Africa the dark continent

In a country where 70 per cent of the 80 million-strong population still can't switch a light on in their homes, and where those lucky enough to have access to electricity suffer regular power cuts, the dam project is potentially life-changing.

Ethiopia's big and bold development project flies in the face of the West's Live Aid-ification of Africa, where charities, pop stars and politicians have cemented an image of the continent as a place populated by helpless, fly-ridden, emaciated peoples desperate for Western pity and cheesy pop songs. Yet some environmentalists are apparently deeply disturbed by the prospect of industrialisation in Africa, and would rather it remains, quite literally, a "dark continent".

A coalition of campaign groups, including the California-based International Rivers and the London-based Survival International, has renewed its efforts to halt the construction of the Gilgel Gibe III dam on the Omo River in southern Ethiopia.

This is the third stage in Ethiopia's five-part dam project; once completed, Gibe III will be Africa's second-largest hydro-electric dam. After running an online petition to pressure foreign investors into pulling funding for Gibe III, the coalition of non-government organisations called for protests outside Ethiopian embassies across Europe, to coincide with World Water Day on Tuesday.

The anti-dam campaigners say Gibe III will ruin the local ecosystem, lead to displacement and disrupt the traditional lifestyles and food security of the "indigenous peoples" living along the Omo River. They say Gibe III will end the Omo River's "natural flood cycle, on which the downstream communities have depended for growing food, fishing and grazing animals for thousands of years".

It is true that people living along the Omo River depend on so-called flood-retreat cultivation, planting riverbank plots as the silt-laden floodwaters recede. Yet the fact that they also live in abject poverty and suffer from chronic hunger should tell us something about the precariousness of this primitive farming method.

That this unreliable practice is the most reliable source of sustenance in the region is an outrage: to campaign to sustain this situation, and to say it provides "food security", is inhumane and mad.

International Rivers says the Omo's "nourishing floods" sustain locals' "most reliable sources of food". Yet the floods also regularly inundate crops, displace people and leave killer diseases such as malaria and acute watery diarrhoea in their wake. In 2006, a particularly devastating flood washed away 400 people and thousands of livestock in the Omo delta. According to the UN World Food Program, floods have displaced more than 20,000 people in the region. The river itself will only keep ruining lives unless human beings tame it, for instance through dam construction.

Yet from the vantage point of International Rivers' air-conditioned offices in sunny California, Omo communities' "traditional lifestyles", close to nature and free from modern amenities, apparently look rather quaint.

"The rise and fall of the Omo waters", the NGO wistfully observes, "is the heartbeat of the Lower Omo Valley." It refers to the Omo River as a "lifeline" for Ethiopians. In truth, by campaigning to sustain Ethiopians' dependency on perilous natural forces NGOs risk condemning Ethiopians to living at nature's mercy, to a life of river-enslavement.

Of course dams are not the answer to all of the problems caused by underdevelopment, and no doubt Gibe III's investors are driven by profit rather than charity. Yet the idea that halting the dam project is some kind of humanitarian act is misguided.

Although the Stop Gibe III campaigners claim to be speaking up on behalf of disempowered peoples (they say locals have not been adequately consulted about the dam), their main objective is to preserve biodiversity.

In so far as they care about "indigenous peoples", it is only because they regard them as part of the natural kingdom rather than human society. They view them as integral to the local ecosystem, which they want to keep untouched by modernity's apparently corrupting forces.

The NGOs campaigning against the dam apparently think Africans can't cope with modernity. In a letter to the African Development Bank, they warned that the dam project will disrupt community systems and increase the likelihood of "regional destabilisation and resource conflict".

This use of the spectre of tribal warfare to deter investors from supporting development projects that can help lift millions out of poverty starkly reveals the neo-colonial, paternalistic outlook of some western NGOs.

Many visitors to Ethiopia seem similarly charmed by the idea of preserving Africans in a state of noble savagery. That is why one of the most popular tourist attractions in Ethiopia is a jeep tour of the Omo River communities. The tours are like human safaris. Visitors drive from village to village on dirt roads, taking snaps of curious dark tribes - such as the Surma, whose women walk around topless and wear clay lip plates.

If NGOs are truly concerned about the welfare of Africans, why aren't they focusing on supporting Ethiopians in their ambitions to develop and modernise? Why aren't they campaigning for the benefits of the dam project to be fairly distributed?

After all, although Gibe III is an ambitious step forward, it is only expected to realise double the amount of electricity presently generated in Ethiopia, adding 1800 megawatts to its current 790MW. But, according to some estimates, Ethiopia has the potential to generate 30,000MW of electricity.

In short, the anti-dam campaigners want Africans to remain "untouched by modernity", and this desire is not compatible with ambitions to lift people out of poverty. As Survival International puts it, "progress can kill".

Unsurprisingly, many Ethiopians feel there is more to life than mere survival and thankfully they are resisting the Western greens who apparently don't give a dam about development. They deserve all the support they can get.

Nathalie Rothschild is a correspondent for spiked and a freelance journalist.