A fitting name for the new railway line is Fait Accompli

The passenger train station in Miritini, Mombasa, on May 2017. PHOTO | JEFF ANGOTE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • This ambitious project is Kenya’s middle finger to the World Bank and other naysayers who wanted the country to remain in the dark era of backward metre gauge railways.
  • Misers and penny-pinchers at the World Bank who wanted Kenya to spend a measly Sh7.5 billion upgrading the old railway are suffering from diarrheic anxiety after China Exim Bank agreed to lend Kenya a total of $3.3 billion dollars to build a spanking new railway line from Mombasa to Malaba.

Fait Accompli is the name that should rightfully adorn the trains running on the standard gauge railway between Mombasa and Nairobi, not that Madaraka Express nonsense.

This ambitious project is Kenya’s middle finger to the World Bank and other naysayers who wanted the country to remain in the dark era of backward metre gauge railways, with diesel engines and wooden wagons.

Misers and penny-pinchers at the World Bank who wanted Kenya to spend a measly Sh7.5 billion upgrading the old railway are suffering from diarrheic anxiety after China Exim Bank agreed to lend Kenya a total of $3.3 billion dollars to build a spanking new railway line from Mombasa to Malaba on the border with Uganda.

Nobody can develop on savings. Borrowing is a must, but not when your lender also wants to police your morality police, priest and conscience as the World Bank is wont to do.

The $1.633 billion (Sh164 billion) commercial loan from the China Exim Bank will be paid over 10 years, starting May 2019 after the five-year grace period expires. The other concessional loan of $1.6 billion (Sh164 billion) will be paid at 2 per cent interest rate over 13 years, starting May 2021 when the seven-year grace period ends. In between, there will be no stupid conversations on conditionalities about governance and human rights.

DOLLAR RATE

Kenya borrowed from the Chinese when the dollar rate was Sh87 in 2014 and has barely gone up Sh17 in four years. Once exports start leaving the hinterland for the international market, the interest rates on the principal sum will dissolve in the strong shilling. After all, Kenya and the region is teeming with minerals such as rare earth, titanium, coal and diamonds as well as oil that needs to leave in tonnes in order to create wealth.

The World Bank is full of lectures about value for money but they are not putting in a single dollar into Kenya’s development priorities. For all their long lectures, the World Bank people have not contributed a single shilling to fund the Sh327 first phase of the standard gauge railway between Mombasa and Nairobi. Their local lackeys and lords of poverty who wanted to keep Kenyans in penury will likely be focused on trying to separate the Chinese cement from the sand and aggregate on the 98 bridges, 77 overpasses across the highway and the 969 culverts in an effort to send it back to Beijing.

OVERNIGHT MILLIONAIRES

When the government began to manufacture overnight millionaires by buying barren land from citizens in Mombasa, Kilifi, Kwale, Taita Taveta, Makueni, Kajiado, Machakos and Nairobi counties, the merchants of poverty were clearly panicked. The new battle front for the standard gauge railway is to oppose its electrification, an honest afterthought, at a cost of Sh40 billion by insisting that lighting inside the coaches be provided by candle.

With the project entering the second phase to link Nairobi to Naivasha for Sh155 billion, bewildered competitors accustomed to the backwardness of the old colonial railway and its painful history of racial segregation have been stricken with political constipation. When the railway advances westward towards Kisumu and onto Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan at just over Sh1 trillion, its critics will long have become its loudest defenders.

FIRST PHASE

The 30,000 youth employed as masons, carpenters, mechanical and electrical technicians and the 400 engineers and technicians who have built the first phase of the railway are only a foretaste of the millions of employment opportunities building the remainder of the railway will begin. Energy wasted on opposing the railway is better deployed to memorising and reciting Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference”.