So, you know, it’s all fun and games for me to lament the lack of power and water, but in a city of over half a million people, losing power can quickly become a serious disaster.

For me, it’s not such a big deal: I’ve got financial flexibility, I’m mobile, I speak English, I work for a good organization, et cetera. But for the actual Central African full time residents, this kind of situation is far more dire — and in ways that may not fully be grasped.

First off, without power, the city has trouble running the water pumps that feed the city. Without water pumps, sanitation of any kind becomes an issue very quickly. In a city of over 500,000, residents will start taking water wherever it is that they can get it. Ditches, polluted streams, drainage canals, the river, et cetera. This, without a doubt, means the beginnings of epidemics such as cholera.

Bangui — at night. With generators doing most of the work . . . (turn off the sound):

Also, without power the city has trouble running its hospitals. Gas, needed for generators, isn’t exactly cheap: it costs $600 a day to run a typical business sized generator here. That’s in a place where the government’s budget is around $30,000,000/yr (that’s thirty million). Without any hospital care to treat the disease and illness that inevitably arises from a lack of water comes large scale epidemics.

Now imagine that there isn’t power throughout the city and the only way to get power is to buy gasoline to power your generator. What do you think happens to the price of gas? Since the only way to have power or move anything here requires the use gasoline, the price of everything will skyrocket: food, water, medicine, beer. Everything.

With epidemics and inflation comes almost certain political upheaval, especially because the issues with power have long been known to be entirely preventable: the gov’t has been offered help to deal with this issue (as I’ve been told), and has chosen not to take it for various reasons – disorganization and pride being the likely culprits.

That said, now the gov’t is willing to accept the help that it should have taken at least a year ago when it was offered. The current rumor is that the power won’t be regular for at least six months — which, knowing CAR, probably means much longer than that. And what do I mean by “regular”? Well, regular is having reliable, continuous power in most of the city for longer than 3 to 6 hour spells every 48 hours.

Some might say, well, at least you have some power. That’s true, but this isn’t about being grateful that something works in a poor country. This is about a poorly managed situation leading to an even poorer result that was entirely avoidable. And the “entirely avoidable” part must be emphasized.

This, of course, is a worst case scenario being played out on paper. We’ll see what really happens. For now, like I said earlier, they say the power will be on/off for the next six months . . . I’m only here for two.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Red Hot CAR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.