Blame Kibaki and his corrupt fatcats who gave Kenya-Uganda railway to a South African farmer for 25yrs. Then attempt to run it via their corrupt trancentury think. It wasnt until 2017 when Uganda and Kenya agreed to terminate the farmers hold on our old railway - with concession set to expire in 2031.
So we had no access to the old railway.
2ndly however much you rehabilitate the old MGR - we did 25B for this Kisumu/Malaba - it wont be used except for poor - as the design speed remain 30-40kms.
Nairobi-Mombasa passenger service is big winner - for kenyans and even tourists - from middle class to the poor.
Let us not be short term minded. Our cargo when Ndii was writting his nonsense was 17-20M metric tonnes. Now it's 35-40M tonnes - and in few more years it will be 70M metric tonnes.
SGR will not be enough - we will need more huge investment in more rails and roads.
For me the real white elephants is ISIOLO and LAMU port. LAPSET has doubtful ROI but we should continue...because when British was building MGR in 1900...they DID THINK LONG TERM.
That MGR that we want to piggy back until forever was built when kenya economy was zero.zero but British knew it would open up the region.
It question of chicken and egg. Do you wait until Turkana develop to build roads - or do you build roads to develop Turkana.
MONEY INVESTED IN INFRASTRUCTURE CAN NEVER BE A WASTE.
We need to avoid short termism. 100yrs from now - that SGR running at decent 120kms per hour will serve us. This Kisumu is only useful for poor people who dont care about time.
If the loan will be repaid in 30yrs - why are we so woried? By 2043 - we would have finished paying for this - and next generation will find a working railway.
SGR was always a vanity project by spoilt Uhuru and greedy Ruto. Back when Ndii still had his wits about him, he laid out this very simple plan that NASA was going to implement if it had run govt and that was open to Jubilee to implement INSTEAD of the 3-trillion haemorrhaging SGR which was just for show and corription.
At a TOTAL cost of UNDER 500 billion, all Jubilee needed to do was modernize the entire old railway network in the whole country. Why? Because it already connects the whole country and because the govt already owns ALL the land the rail line runs through and needs to buy absolutely zero land in Naivasha or elsewhere. THEN, all they needed was to buy modern trains and lastly, they just needed to make sure to build roads everywhere that connected all counties to the rail line. Then they needed to build modern storage facilities in all the agricultural counties. This alone would go a LONG, LONG way to helping in several sectors, not just agriculture. And it would come down to under half a trillion for the whole thing, NOT 3 trillion for a non-finished project. But noooo. The disaster duo had to make such careless, foolish decisions. I will always blame them for our economic mess. I don't know why people want to sanitize them.
If Jubilee had done just this, along with the electricity lines they connected, he wouldn't need a "big 4" agenda and wouldn't need to steal the August 2017 election. The economy would have gotten better, not worse and the theft wouldn't have been AS bad without a 3-trillion shilling project.
Topic: Maiden Nairobi - Kisumu train roars back to life after 15 years in the dark (Read 1880 times)