Uhuru must reset Kenya’s relationship with China on his maiden Beijing visit

A couple of weeks ago, Business Daily reported results of a survey of Kenyans’ attitudes towards major world powers.

Remarkably, it found that the biggest number of those polled (34 per cent) expressed admiration for China, with the US (at 33 per cent) and Japan (nine per cent) taking second and third positions. Britain was fifth in the poll conducted by Consumer Insight.

This is a significant development considering that Kenya still remains one of the African nations that is most culturally attached to the West.

China’s rise in the estimations of wananchi probably owes to the various mega projects its companies have undertaken here in recent years.

But China has benefited far more from its growing relationship with Kenya than Kenya has.

Beijing has not invested in a single massive, game-changing project in the way it has been known to do in nations where it is seeking to cultivate a deep relationship.

The Thika Highway, for example, is the one project that is most associated with China in the popular imagination.
Yet the road was constructed using funds from the African Development Bank and the Treasury. Chinese contractors simply won the tender to undertake the works.

China’s famously shrewd policy makers have used their improved relations with Kenyan officials to establish a toehold in the region and set up a base from which to penetrate places like South Sudan and the DRC.

I heartily support China’s growing presence in Africa and believe that the continent should welcome it without abandoning its traditional partners in the West (China, after all, is a master of playing major powers against each other as it did in its dance with the US and the Soviets throughout the Cold War).

But as President Kenyatta heads to Beijing tomorrow, one of the questions that should exercise his mind is why Kenya has not gotten as good a deal from the Chinese as its neighbours.
WHAT SHOULD CHANGE

Tanzania will soon have a Chinese-built $11 billion seaport. In Ethiopia, a Chinese shoemaker is establishing a light manufacturing zone that is expected to create 100,000 jobs in seven years.

In Kenya, rumour has it that the Chinese don’t have to work too hard investing in such projects because, ahem, government officials have other ways of being convinced to sign off on contracts.

This must change. It is good that the Kenyatta administration has made the construction of a standard gauge railway line from Mombasa to Malaba its top priority.

There were many letters from readers last week aghast that I had cited the number of trucks on the road as a commentary on the state of the economy.

The point was that truck shipments are an indicator of economic activity. It was not that they are a good model of cargo transportation.

The transport industry must be brought into the 21st century. And the railway and mass urban transit system Governor Evans Kidero will be lobbying for are logical investments.

Fourty-seven years ago, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere travelled to China and pulled off one of the greatest coups of his presidency.

He convinced the Chinese to build the 1,870km Tanzam Railway, a line which linked the port of Dar es Salaam with the town of Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia.

The railway proved a boon to both nations’ economies because, at the time, Zimbabwe under Ian Smith’s rule had blocked the export route for Zambian copper.

Finished two years ahead of schedule in 1975, the railway line was considered one of the greatest engineering feats of its age. Sadly, the Tanzanians allowed the rail to run into disrepair, and it is no longer the economic lifeline it should be.

Kenya, too, watched as the “iron snake” built by the British in the last century fell into disrepair. If China can help engineer a rebirth of rail transport in the country and in the process make the roads safer by eliminating the trucks, it will have gone some way to earning the affections it is currently enjoying from wananchi.

Murithi Mutiga is Special Projects Editor, Sunday Nation [email protected]