Commentary
I must say I was terribly disappointed that the famous Bumbuna dam in the north of Sierra Leone would not be able to provide the much expected high level of electricity for a section of Sierra Leone including the capital, Freetown, at this time because the water level at the dam is as yet too low. Not enough energy to drive the turbines. I can understand that from the little physics I learnt at school.
I also know from my rudimentary biology and geography that in order to have heavy rainfall and thus water in the dam you need to preserve the surrounding vegetation, the general plant life including the trees. Even the little creatures, the insects, the rodents and up the food chain to the chattering monkeys, the baboons and the elephants. The last time I visited Bumbuna was in 1987. There were a lot of trees around the dam, then under construction but I also saw a few women looking for gold in the traditional way, digging and foraging in the streams nearby. Somebody whispered to me then that there was a lot of gold in the area, one of the reasons the project took so long to complete (some workers, it was alleged, were busy looking for gold on company time).
The people in the area, like in all of rural Sierra Leone, depend on firewood to cook their food and a lot of medium size trees were and are still being cut down. Too bad.
But the bigger trees around the dam were safe, as far as I could see. I hope they are still there. I hope the people of Bumbuna still have those huge trees and ground-splitting rains that sent us scurrying to our bus and back to Freetown, my European friends and I, in 1987. I hope that logging and gold mining in the area has been banned. If not, how else do we expect to get enough electricity from Bumbuna? I can’t for all the noodles in China imagine why government officials in Sierra Leone can even allow such a dreadful thing as logging in an already devastated country.
Anyway, a friend told me recently that we have to start to seriously consider solar energy in Sierra Leone. Sunlight is abundant out there, no matter the time of year and it’s relatively cheap. I will take a closer look at the this solar thing next week. Till then, hold tight.
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