Since the mid-2000s, Rwanda and Tanzania have returned to the planning and implementing of large-scale electricity generation. For the former, this was part a statebuilding mission driving development transformation from the top after suffering genocide, civil war and state-collapse. For the latter, Kikwete’s election in 2005 marked a wider economic moment where decades of economic turmoil, structural adjustment and state withdrawal to the market, started gradually to change: the state returned to directing and constructing in the energy sector. For both countries, broader economic growth and the ending of contract management in the national Utility company, sparked plans for rapid transformation. Rwanda and Tanzania turned to a wide array of generation technologies in an effort to meet astronomic electricity-generation targets.
This paper examines the drivers and practises of these megawatt missions. In particular, it examines the imbuing of the megawatt with developmental potential along high modernist ideological lines and how this justified the scale of generation targets that deliberately rejected demand models. It also considers how the practices of implementation in both countries is the product of their wider political governance: Rwanda’s more efficient, centralised and hierarchical decision-making has produced a remarkable five-fold generation capacity increase. Tanzania’s fragmented, personalised and often corrupt central power governance created as much obscurity as progress but still achieved a doubling of capacity. This article is based on work carried out for my thesis, where over 50 interviews conducted in each country with various actors in the energy sector over 2014-2016.