African Entrepreneurship Records 2

Chapter 1080 National Canal Plan
Yarsd: "There are many problems in my country's water conservancy construction, especially the unreasonable planning of some projects in the early stage, which has caused some ecological and environmental disasters, resulting in economic losses. For example, the Ankarena Reservoir burst in 1876 caused hundreds of casualties and destroyed some farmland and villages."

The Ankarena Dam collapse was obviously not as minor as Yarsd described. The actual casualties were as high as thousands, but the casualties of black workers were not counted in the statistics in East Africa.

The Ancarena Reservoir is a large reservoir planned in the early days of East Africa. It is technically feasible. The main problem was that during construction, floods occurred due to miscalculation of weather conditions. At that time, the Ancarena Reservoir had not yet been completed and the workers' station was too close to the river beach, which resulted in subsequent problems.

This tragedy occurred due to many reasons, such as the fact that East Africa's early understanding of domestic hydrology was obviously not as perfect as it is now, and the technology was relatively backward, and the professional team was not adequately trained.

According to the usual practice of the East African government, such a large-scale water conservancy construction project obviously requires a large number of black laborers, so many black laborers died in this disaster. For this sacrifice, the East African government would not even shed a drop of crocodile tears, but would instead intensify it.

Yarsde continued, "But overall, our country's water conservancy construction has brought huge benefits to the country. Some minor problems are not worth mentioning in the face of huge economic and social benefits. Therefore, in the next ten years, our country should pursue higher goals, further improve the level of national water conservancy facilities, improve national transportation accessibility, and better serve the construction of our country's industry, agriculture, and urban areas."

"One is to further transform and upgrade the existing national water conservancy facilities to solve a series of problems caused by insufficient knowledge and technical deficiencies in the past."

"The second is to further develop my country's inland water transport network. In addition to developing a number of new canals, we also need to upgrade the existing canals. With my country's economic development in the past, the population, urban and industrial scale have greatly increased, which also means that the volume of logistics has greatly increased. The originally designed navigable canals are no longer able to meet the current needs of my country's industrial and urban development, so some canals need to be deepened and widened on the original basis."

"Based on the East African Canal, we have accumulated rich experience, and on this basis, we have developed a more scientific and macro-national water transport network, covering most of the country's water systems and lake systems, and realizing the connection of inland water transport across the country."

“The third is to dredge and regulate the country’s major rivers, protect the ecology of our rivers and reshape the adverse impacts on the environment.”

There is no doubt that any of these three proposals of the Ministry of Water Resources will require huge human, material and financial support. Of course, if they can be completed, the benefits to East Africa will be obvious.

If the key to achieving the above proposal is black laborers, East Africa's idea of ​​eliminating black laborers has not changed from the beginning to the end, and there is still a lot of room for development in terms of the number and age of these black laborers.

Seven million people are needed to complete the plan of the East African Water Resources Department. Once these three points are completed, it is estimated that all the black people in East Africa will be basically exhausted.

The first is to upgrade and renovate the original national water conservancy facilities. The construction of water conservancy facilities in East Africa has accumulated many problems, mainly in the early planning and construction. Technology, personnel, and domestic industrial capacity have caused the East African government to compromise a lot, so it is not easy to accomplish this alone.

The second point is that the canal plan in East Africa is the most exaggerated. According to Yarsde, the East African government is no longer satisfied with the current national water transportation system.

As we all know, East Africa's talent in water transportation is far inferior to that of Europe, the Far East Empire and the Americas, the world's major economies. Although East Africa has been working hard for more than half a century, the gap with these countries or regions is still quite significant.

Therefore, the East African government hopes to form a usable and effective canal system across East Africa through massive manpower transformation, so as to further reduce the logistics costs in East Africa and establish logistics advantages for the competition between East Africa and other major economies.

In this regard, East Africa is no worse than other countries in terms of railways and roads, but water transportation has always been the biggest regret of East Africa. Yarsde said: "In the past few decades, through long-term demonstration and investigation, our Ministry of Water Resources and other departments have gained an in-depth understanding of the national water system, climate, topography, topography, etc., and in the long-term water conservancy construction work, we have accumulated rich experience and lessons, coupled with the training of domestic professional talents. On this basis, our Ministry of Water Resources and the Ministry of Transport have formulated a draft plan for the development of the national canal system."

“That is, across the country, by building 48 large canals with an estimated total length of 2,730 kilometers, the national water transport system will be upgraded.”

"Once this plan is realized, our inland water transportation will achieve a qualitative leap. Although the national water transportation conditions cannot reach the level of the Far East Empire and Europe, they will exceed those of the United States. The cost of our inland water transportation will be greatly reduced, and it will further supplement an important link in national transportation."

The characteristics of Europe, the United States and the Far Eastern Empire are that they have large areas of plains and crisscrossing rivers, thus forming a developed inland water transport network. Moreover, these countries and regions have iconic rivers to represent their own water transport. Europe has the Rhine and Danube, the United States has the Mississippi River, and the most representative of the Far Eastern Empire is the Yangtze River.

In contrast, although East Africa has world-class rivers such as the Congo River, the Nile River, the Zambezi River, and the Orange River, their shipping value is limited by the terrain. The only way to break this limitation is through artificial transformation.

The canal project in East Africa is obviously crazy. Based on the experience of the East African Canal, at least three million workers would have to be sacrificed to complete the national canal project in a short period of time.

The Grand Canal in East Africa is more than 1,000 kilometers long and took about thirteen years to build. The construction length of the national canal plan is almost 2.5 times that of the Grand Canal in East Africa, almost equivalent to the Grand Canal of the Sui Dynasty in the Far East Empire.

The Grand Canal of the Sui Dynasty was more than 2,700 kilometers long and took six years to complete with millions of laborers and a casualty rate of at least two million.

From this perspective, East Africa's construction of the Grand Canal is not as good as that of the Sui Dynasty. After all, East Africa paid almost the same price in lives, and with technology and tools far superior to those of the Sui Dynasty, it only built half of the project, and it took twice as long as the Grand Canal of the Sui Dynasty.

This is actually easy to understand. Even though East Africa had far more technology and tools than the Sui Dynasty when building the Grand East African Canal, this advantage was not obvious, and it ultimately relied on a large amount of manpower to complete.

Although East Africa was already able to produce tractors, cars and other modern engineering construction tools at that time, the output was pitifully small and none of them were invested in the construction of the canal.

It can be said that the East African Canal was completed step by step under the suppression of East Africa by black laborers using hoes, shovels and other tools.

Moreover, the conditions for building a canal in East Africa at that time were not as good as those in the Sui Dynasty. The Grand Canal of East Africa mainly connected the Zambezi River and Congo River systems, and these two areas were not fully developed at the time, which was especially true along the Grand Canal of East Africa.

The area through which the Grand Canal of the Sui Dynasty passed was basically the core economic area of ​​the Sui Dynasty at that time, and most of it was located in plain areas. This saved construction costs and risks to a certain extent.

In contrast, many of the projects in the East African Canal, especially those in the Congo River Basin, have to pass through dense primeval jungles, or increase the difficulty of construction in order to bypass unfavorable terrain such as valleys and gullies.

(End of this chapter)