The standard gauge railway fight is a very African story: Here’s why

As many a good African would say, Kenya’s Sh327 billion (or whatever shilling) standard gauge railway, has become the standard gauge railway.

Critics allege corrupt networks are “eating something big” on the project and want it suspended. Supporters say saboteurs – and political enemies of the Jubilee Government – are out to derail the project either because they bid and lost, or they just want to rain on President Uhuru Kenyatta’s party.

Uhuru himself has come out to emphatically say the railway is too important an economic project for Kenya and East Africa, and will go on.

One needs to step back a little here.

The kerfuffle over the railway is not just Kenyan. It is African. All over Africa there are these fights over the cost of new pipelines, dams, airports, highways, even presidential palaces. In Uganda, the country fought itself to exhaustion over a dam for nearly 20 years.

AFRICA'S BUILDLING!

So, if there is one good thing about this is that Africa is finally building stuff. In fact lots of stuff. The infrastructure food fight in Africa tells us that waste and corruption remain a big problem on the continent, yes, but to eat from a project, first there has to be a project. To sabotage a tender, first there has to be a tender.

From there on, I am afraid the news is bad. Parts of Africa are in an infrastructure boom because of either newfound resources like oil, or real economic growth.

But most of the building is because we lost a lot of time. Past governments were either incompetent, corrupt or both, or African nations were laid down by conflict that made development hard to do.

Tanzania has been talking, planning, and doing somersaults over the expansion of Dar es Salaam port for years.

It has made little progress. Kenya fidgeted a little at Mombasa and opened a new berth last year, but its port development is decades behind. The railway in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, everywhere else mostly went to rot.

For the last 20 years, I have read about the Inga Dam in the Democratic Republic of Congo. How it could easily be the world’s largest. How it has the potential to supply three-quarters of Africa, and parts of western Europe with electricity for generations.

There have been pictures drawn, architectural mock-ups scattered about. The only thing that has not happened all these years is that no one has a laid brick to build the Inga. Now the Inga Dam project has become so big, it is the cause of a simmering conflict between the world’s economic powers!

In many parts of Africa new roads were not built (or rebels blew up existing ones), corrupt officials sold off road reserves that were turned into expansive residential areas, making the task of building the roads for new reformist governments a nightmare. Airport lands have been encroached upon.

Markets and churches have been established along disused railways, and the railway metal has been a major source of raw material for all those window frames you see in mushrooming housing estates.

MASSIVE PROJECTS

If roads had been built in small bits every year, if kilometres of railway lines had been added on regularly, if ports had expanded gradually with, and if airport extensions had kept up with rising passenger traffic, most of the mega projects we see in Africa wouldn’t be there.

If we had worked consistently, and spent small monies, we would only have had to contend with local small-time “eaters” because the amounts involved would be small beer.

So there is a part of the controversy over the Kenya standard gauge railway that is about the country’s political history. It is happening because in years gone by, some people slept on the job.

Because nothing was done for years, the scale of the required new build grew very large. And the money needed to erect these infrastructure projects became massive.

The money needed to do a railway becomes so much; a government has to look to foreign money markets to raise the fund.

The matter gets internationalised, and because the pot of money is so big, it becomes a honey pot that attracts world class crooks. And, sometimes, sources of political instability, as presidents have been ousted in Africa in rows over tenders.