The region of the Congo River basin is endowed with an extraordinary richness of natural resources. One of those natural resources is hydroelectric power potential. The Congo River flows around a basin which is several hundred meters above sea level. Near the Atlantic it falls about three hundred meters over a stretch of river only tens of kilometers in length. Here the Congo River, second only to the Amazon River in volume of flow, pours downward to the ocean. This is a hydroelectric site second to none in the world. There are two hydroelectric sites there already but a proposed dam would generate enough electricity to meet the needs of all of Africa. It is however the tradegy of the region that for all its natural resources their development falls miserably short of the potential.

When independence was in the offing for the Belgian Congo around 1960 the Belgium government held out the possibility of the building of the Inga Dam on the Congo near the city of Matadi as an inducement for the Congolese to postpone independence. The public announcements said that the Inga Dam could create an industrial complex on the Congo comparable to the Ruhr Valley in Germany. The attempted enticement did not work and the Congolese opted for immediate independence. Nevertheless in 1972 the Inga Dam was built. It provided electrical power for the mining area of Katanga (Shaba). That hydroelectric installation had a capacity of 351 megawatts (MW). Ten years later in 1982 a much larger hydroelectric installation was built with a capacity of 1424 MW. However due to mismanagement and bad economic policies on the part of the president, Sese Seko Mobutu, the two Inga Dams operated at only a small fraction of their capacities. Mobutu's policy of Zaireization resulted the replacement of the foreign technicians with domestic personel without adequate training and skills. As a consequence there were periods of time in which the hydroelectic installations were not functioning at all.

The first two hydroelectric installations on the Congo are now known as Inga I and Inga II. There is now a proposed Inga III which will have a generating capacity of 3,500 MW. This installation will cost about $5 billion and the target date for the beginning of construction is 2012. The World Bank will be a major lender for this installation.

Beyond Inga III there are proposals for a Grand Inga project that will have a generating capacity of 39,000 MW, more than twice that of the Three Gorges Dam in China. The Grand Inga project would cost something in the neighborhood of $50 billion. This is an enormous amount of money but the Grand Inga could supply electricity to much of Africa. Already with the present installations there was a project to build a power line to transmit power to Egypt. The agreement was negotiated but the project was not implemented.