Pwani — President Samia Suluhu Hassan on Saturday officially switched on the Julius Nyerere Hydropower Project (JNHPP), a 2,115-megawatt plant on the Rufiji River that has already become the backbone of Tanzania’s national electricity grid and a centrepiece of the country’s industrialisation drive.
Speaking at the site in Rufiji District, Pwani Region, before an audience that included Egypt’s Prime Minister, Dr Mustafa Kamal Madbouly, and former African Development Bank president Dr Akinwumi Adesina, President Hassan declared:
“I am pleased to announce that the Julius Nyerere power generation station has been officially commissioned today, the twenty-second of August, 2026,” formally opening the plant.
The ceremony closes a chapter that began with an idea Julius Kambarage Nyerere held in the 1970s and that successive governments carried forward for four decades before construction finally started.
Funding model
The project was financed entirely through domestic government resources, at a total cost of roughly Sh7.452 trillion, equivalent to about US$2.9 billion — with no foreign loan underpinning the build.
TANESCO’s director-general, Lazaro Twange, confirmed more than Sh7.11 trillion had already been paid to the contractor, funded from the national budget rather than external borrowing.
The engineering, procurement and construction contract, signed in December 2018, was carried out by an Egyptian consortium of Arab Contractors and Elsewedy Electric, which built the main dam, four auxiliary dams, the powerhouse, water tunnels, spillways, bridges, access roads and the grid-connection infrastructure.
Chinese firms supplied the machinery: PowerChina and Dongfang Electric Corporation supplied and installed all nine turbine-generator units and associated electromechanical equipment.
Minister of Energy Deogratius Ndejembi, addressing the gathering, thanked the president for prioritising the project’s completion.
“I thank you personally, Mr President, for setting aside time in your schedule to launch this project,” Mr Ndejembi said. “This is a major strategic undertaking that the government resolved to implement in order to bring economic development to its people.”
Grid transformation
Construction ran from June 2019 to March 2025, and the plant began feeding power into the grid in February 2024, with its share of national output climbing steadily since.
By May 31, 2026, JNHPP was supplying about 44.9 per cent of all electricity fed into the national grid over the preceding year — effectively half the country’s power passing through nine turbines, each rated at 235MW.
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The addition lifted Tanzania’s total installed generation capacity to 4,646MW against a peak national demand of 2,271MW, leaving a surplus of 2,375MW that the government now hopes to export.
President Samia noted that a newly energised 400kV Chalinze–Dodoma transmission line had already shown how quickly latent demand can surface once supply is available.
“As soon as that line was switched on, we saw demand at peak hours become very high,” the Head of State said, describing how the surge forced engineers to bring a fifth turbine online at the dam itself.
Political weight
For President Samia, the moment carried personal and political significance.
She recalled that when her government inherited the project, it stood only 33 per cent complete, and that she had presided in December 2022 over the closure of the diversion channel that let the Rufiji River begin filling the reservoir — a process expected to take three years but completed in eighteen months.
She used the occasion to rebut long-standing scepticism about the project’s usefulness in the absence of adequate transmission lines.
“There were people who said it had been completed but was a white elephant lying idle and useless, because there were no major transmission lines to carry the electricity,” she told the crowd directly. “This project is of great benefit to the nation, and it is not a white elephant.”
She also credited the project’s Tanzanian workforce, noting that nearly all the engineers now running the plant are local: “All the experts operating this project are Tanzanians. So, Tanzanians, this is your project.”
TANSECO has said more than 95 per cent of the roughly 12,000-strong construction workforce was Tanzanian, gaining skills the utility says will make them competitive in domestic and international labour markets.
Egypt’s role
Cairo used the ceremony to frame the dam as evidence of its own development credentials elsewhere on the continent, at a moment of friction with Ethiopia over the Nile.
Prime Minister Madbouly, representing President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, praised the consortium’s work, saying the project’s completion within 42 months, at a cost of about US$2.9 billion and with a 2,115MW capacity, showcased Egyptian firms’ ability to deliver major projects internationally, and thanked Arab Contractors and Elsewedy Electric for “this historic achievement of building one of the largest dams in Africa.”
Egypt’s government said around 1,700 Egyptian engineers and technicians worked on the site alongside the wider Tanzanian workforce, and has cast the plant as a flagship example of Egyptian–African cooperation.
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Dr Adesina, who oversaw African Development Bank engagement with Tanzania during his decade-long presidency, told the audience the project’s real value lay not in the megawatts themselves but in what they unlock.
“The true importance of this project is not simply the 2,115 MW of electricity that it will generate,” he said. “It is what that electricity makes possible… Every megawatt must become an opportunity. That is how infrastructure becomes development. That is how power becomes prosperity.”
Beyond electricity, officials point to wider benefits. The reservoir can store about 33 billion cubic metres of water — nearly ten times the capacity of the Mtera Dam – and is expected to support flood control, irrigation, fisheries and tourism along the Rufiji basin.
Electricity supply in Pwani region alone rose from 118MW in 2022 to 356MW by July 2026, helping draw more than 1,600 industrial facilities to the region.
The government has tied the project explicitly to its longer-term targets, with the energy ministry linking JNHPP to Tanzania’s National Development Vision 2050 and a goal of reaching 8,000MW of installed capacity by 2030 through a mix of hydro, solar and gas sources, alongside plans to expand transmission infrastructure and electricity exports to neighbours including Zambia and Kenya.
Criticism answered
President Samia acknowledged the project had faced years of doubt, including questions about environmental impact and financial risk, but insisted the country’s decision to persevere had been vindicated.
“When we make decisions that are in the national interest, we should not give up simply because the path to achieving them is difficult,” she said.
She closed by insisting the achievement belonged to citizens rather than to any single leader, telling the crowd the commemorative honours handed out during the ceremony to five former presidents, including the late Julius Nyerere and John Magufuli, would be housed in the national museum.
“These gifts are not mine; they belong to all Tanzanians,” President Samia told the crowd. “They will go and sit in the national museum, not in Samia’s museum.”
