FIRST WORD
terms of infrastructure the country is well planned and already has all that it needs to create the foundation of a fast developing country .
Add to this an impressive road network that spans the whole country including a proposed impressive expressway that is being constructed to decongest the city center and you begin to have a very good feel of a country planned by professionals .
You almost miss an interesting piece of news that the East African Community is poised to admit DRC as a member and suddenly the whole regional market looks very attractive and in terms of the basic economic indicators very encouraging .
When you eventually land in Kenya to do the final investment recce you will find as the Kenyans say that ‘ things on the ground are quite different ’. All the indicators are correct but they mask an insidious problem called corruption that ruins the best of plans .
You will discover that although Kenya has highly skilled and industrious workforce the manufacturing sector is a shell of its former self because the international manufacturing companies fled Kenya in droves mainly due to high production costs .
One culprit in the high cost of production is the cost of electricity . You then find out that Kenya has a ridiculously high cost of electricity compared to similar countries in Africa and this does not seem to make sense given the stated objective to be the manufacturing hub of the region .
If you dig deeper you will find that Kenya has one of the strangest power supply arrangements you will find anywhere in the world . Kenya Power , the distributor , mainly gets power from KenGen the producer but also from independent power producers .
Kenya managed to get into amazing power purchase agreements with these independent power producers during one draught period that are tantamount to theft . The agreements that apparently are irrevocable have
Kenya Power paying for electricity even when not needed .
This would not be so bad if the price paid was not so ridiculously high as to not make any sense . This huge burden is passed on to the consumers and is what contributes to the astronomical prices that Kenyans pay for electricity .
Then you discover that Kenya has well-developed geothermal electricity production supplemented by wind generators and of course the huge potential of solar power production and you begin to comprehend the impunity of the theft that all Kenyans have to pay for .
You are then told that some of the dams paid for don ’ t actually exist but money in the billions of Kenya shillings has been paid out . Since this is disconcerting you decide to do a more careful due diligence , only to uncover some white elephants .
The most interesting one you discover is the standard gauge rail which somehow managed to cost four times per kilometer more than equivalent projects in the neighboring countries . The galling fact is that the neighboring projects are electric while the Kenyan one is diesel powered .
More worrisome is the fact that the Kenyan project is not actually commercially viable to the extent the Chinese funders refused to lend more money until Kenya could demonstrate the economic viability of the line . To be commercially viable it needs to reach the border .
But the real problem is that funds were stolen and if the project was run transparently we would have had two lines running from the coast to the border plus connecting lines to all the major towns in Kenya for the price paid for the incomplete line .
Another white elephant is the new port which is currently not connected by tarmacked road or rail to any other town in Kenya . The proposed rail link and pipeline to Uganda is a pipe dream . Why would a person consign goods to a port with no forwarding capabilities ?
Two of the international airports at Isiolo and Eldoret are prime grazing ground for goats as they need all the other mega projects to be complete for them to be viable . This is not going to happen anytime soon so the two airports will remain pink elephants .
The dual carriageway from the coast looks more like a diversionary illusion since there are more urgent dual carriageways needed elsewhere . The much-touted expressway may actually compound Nairobi ’ s traffic problems and they are many .
All what these mega projects have managed to achieve is to laden Kenya with excruciating debt burden which is alarming given that since most of the funds are actually stolen Kenyans get no benefit but the full responsibility of the debt .
Added to this pathetic situation is the fact that the other parameters that help make a country an attractive investment location like ease of entry , favorable tax incentives and one stop centers for information are totally compromised in the Kenyan setting .
The rent seeking culture is so pervasive in Kenya that institutions don ’ t work anymore and those peddling influence are the ones running the show . Deal making and not meritocracy is what defines the current Kenyan reality .
The reality that Kenya hits the economic reset button every five years is testimony to the fact that it is actually politics that runs Kenya and as long as that is the truth then vested short-term interests determine how the national cake is divided and who the thieves are .
The political promises of all the development that the politicians will implement are promises of all the avenues they have thought about siphoning money out of the public coffers to private ones . Kenya will not progress until Kenyans stop stealing from Kenyans - that ’ s the bitter truth ! ■
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