Kenya Railways announced on Wednesday that, beginning in 2024, tickets to ride the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) from the capital, Nairobi, to Mombasa would cost 50 percent more than their current price.
The SGR is the biggest and most ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in Kenya, long ago pitched to the Kenyan people as a profitable, state-of-the-art infrastructure development that would help Kenya become a fully developed nation. The BRI is Chinese dictator Xi Jinping’s global infrastructure plan in which Beijing offers predatory loans to poor countries to be spent on paying Chinese companies to build dubious infrastructure projects; when the countries cannot pay, they take out even more Chinese debt to keep up or relinquish control of their land to pay what is owed.
Kenya is one of China’s most egregious BRI victims. The financial dealings that resulted in the SGR being partially built — the original project was meant to connect Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda — remain a mystery to the public at press time. The construction of the SGR was marred with outrageous reports of Chinese workers establishing an “apartheid” system at work sites, where local Kenyan workers were forced to use different buses to work sites, different cafeterias, and all other facilities from imported Han laborers. The Han Chinese workers were brought in despite Kenyan politicians promising that the SGR’s development would bring in jobs for them and created a sizeable immigration problem for the country, as Chinese workers would obtain tourist visas to Kenya, then fraudulently take SGR jobs.
Current Kenyan President William Ruto won the presidency last year in part on a promise to make the details of the BRI deals with China public and questioning the suspected corruption around the construction of the SGR. Ruto has yet to fulfill those promises, instead asking China for even more money and visiting Beijing last month for the Belt and Road Forum, an event to mark the tenth anniversary of the program.
Kenya’s Daily Nation reported on Wednesday that tickets to travel from Nairobi to Mombasa in economy class would see their fares go up from $6.63 to nearly $10, while first-class tickets would rise from $19.89 to nearly $30. Kenya Railways blamed the price increase not on the country’s mounting debts but, rather, “changes in the energy and petroleum sector where prices of fuel have significantly increased thus affecting the cost of our operations.”
The Associated Press noted that the fare hike followed a comment from the governor of the Kenyan Central Bank, Kamau Thugge, saying that Kenya had enjoyed an “artificially strong exchange rate” due to the Kenyan shilling being overvalued, suggesting Kenya’s sluggish economy may have informed the decision as much as rising oil prices. The AP also quoted experts who described the SGR itself as not a viable project for profits.
“The Kenya SGR desperately needs cross-border expansion to make it a financially sustainable project,” economist Aly-Khan Satchu told the agency. “The SGR, as is, is a dud. To make it sustainable, it needs to connect Uganda’s oil to the sea, and (Congo) minerals.”
Despite his campaigning as a reformer skeptical of Chinese influence in the country, as president, William Ruto has governed in line with predecessor Uhuru Kenyatta. During the Belt and Road Forum in October, Ruto reportedly asked China for a billion-dollar loan and to restructure the nation’s debts, which China mostly holds. As a presidential candidate last year, Ruto promised he would not seek to restructure the debt.
Publicly, Ruto boasted of the success of the BRI, and the SGR in particular, in remarks alongside Xi.
“Kenya has benefited greatly from cooperation with China, especially since President Xi Jinping put forward the Belt and Road Initiative,” Ruto reportedly said, according to the Chinese government. “Important projects such as the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway have greatly enhanced Kenya’s economic development capacity and improved the well-being of its people.”
“Ruto expressed the confidence that the eight majorsteps proposed by President Xi Jinping for high-quality Belt and Road cooperation will further help Kenya and Africa achieve industrialization, agricultural modernization and economic integration,” a Chinese readout of the meeting continued.
Prior to his visit, Ruto also sought to expand the SGR. Kenya’s the Star reported in July that Ruto was seeking loan funds to begin the construction of the railway to connect with Kenya.
“This, as the public continues to question the value for money in the first and second phase SGR projects, which included the construction of the Mombasa-Nairobi line, and the later extension to Suswa (Naivasha),” the newspaper scoffed, recalling that Ruto’s party “promised to make public full details of the [BRI] contract but failed after assuming power.”
The Star was just as skeptical of the SGR in 2016, when it was beginning its construction.
“Large Infrastructure projects without qualified independent design consultancy and supervision services are like general elections where every party does its own vote tally and broadcasts only preferred results – a rigging absurdity,” the newspaper remarked in a commentary at the time. “And yet just such a confidence trick – or con – lies at the heart of the construction of the standard gauge railway project.”
The newspaper was far from alone in Kenyan media. A year later, the Standard‘s Cosmas Ronno wrote a commentary questioning the math behind the Kenyan government’s promises that the SGR would be a profitable enterprise, with a prescient note on ticket fares.
“A longer than expected travel time is not the only reality of the passenger SGR. The fare to Mombasa will present the real shocker!” Ronno wrote. “As advertised by the contractor and promoters the service will consist of 1st and 2nd Class coaches only. The former will be patronised by corporate clients, rich tourists, the political class (who will pass the fares to the taxpayer anyway) and upper income earners.”
“The latter will accommodate economy class tourists and upper middle income Kenyans. The working class and the unemployed will have to rely on the ‘Old Faithful’ namely, buses, matatus and private cars,” he noted. “Maybe this should be a signal to the financially struggling Kenya Railways to revive the 115 year old ‘Lunatic Express’ a.k.a. the Meter Gauge British-Built Kenya-Uganda Railways and not be tempted by some overenthusiastic government Think Tank into selling the steel rails as scrap to some Indian steel manufacturing mogul!”
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