and eventually the 25,000 MW originally approved. Industrial development would advance in step, helped by a start price of $0.002 per kwh, producing 500,000 tons of aluminum with the construction of the first plant and eventually aiming for a final production goal six times that. An international syndicate named Aluminga, comprising a number of European and North American firms, was already organizing to realize this. Funding was an issue, especially once the Belgians realized that they could not accomplish such a project alone. Possible investors cited by the press included the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the European Investment Bank. In February 1959 a group of prominent American investors including David Rockefeller visited the Inga Falls, though construction was continually being pushed back from original estimates, then slated for 1961 or later. Congolese independence from Belgium did not suddenly erase the importance of Inga development. Belgian authorities were still pushing the project while negotiating independence with Congolese delegates, with Minister Raymond Scheyven proposing a joint Congolese-Belgian company that would fund an Inga dam. This was not a minor idea, but the main project in a five-year Congolese development plan he proposed. That advice was apparently not heeded, as newly elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba signed a fifty-year contract with the Wall Street-based Congo International Management Corporation to develop the Congo on 22 July 1960, with an Inga project and associated aluminum production at the top of the list. PM Lumumba later backtracked and claimed that the deal was "only an agreement in principle", but regardless he was deposed by Army Chief of Staff Mobutu Sese Seko less than two months later. Inga I and Inga II Despite the ensuing period of instability, rebellions, and UN interventions in the first half of the 1960s, it did not dampen leaders' hopes to harness the rapids of the Congo River. From the wreckage of the Belgian departure and the subsequent turmoil emerged Mobutu Sésé Seko, who seized full power for himself in November 1965 and would remain the Congo's authoritarian president until May 1997. It was during his reign that the first and so far only projects were built to generate power from the Inga Falls. Inga I was the first project brought to completion. A feasibility study was conducted by the Italian firm SICAI in 1963, which recommended the dam support domestic industrialization as opposed to export focused industry. Funded