Geza, you should prepare yourelf for total defeate, all these years Kenya has been dominating using only one hand, once we open the other half of kenya, and consolidate on what already exist, you guys will be in trouble
If you did not bilieve the pictures, you can bilieve the word from the source mouth...
A long interview with transport Minister
jubilee plan to make city heart of east africa
Jun. 27, 2016, 5:00 am
By PAUL ILADO
@iiadopaul
Transport Cabinet Secretary James Macharia talks about immediate plans to decongest Nairobi and its challenges, KQ’s future and how the Jubilee administration plans to truly transform the city into a regional hub.
The growing demand for transport services has left the road sector facing many challenges. Poor infastructure in terms of road maintenance, vehicle congestion, lack of an effective public transport system. The government however, is working on ensuring the issues are being addressed despite the huge financial burden.
What are your main challenges after being reshuffled to head the Transport ministry?
Balancing the books. The demand for money is very high. We are currently experiencing rain in the country. Everybody is knocking on my door to say the roads have been damaged, the bridge has been swept away,
so if you aggregate all these, it is over one trillion shillings required and that is money you don’t have. One has to prioritise your programmes to make sure they match the money you have. That is a big challenge. However, getting the private sector to come and invest will help greatly and that’s why we started the annuity programme. I’m very happy that after a long struggle we’ve signed the first contract of annuity three weeks ago so we’re making good progress.
The other challenge is it’s a huge ministry having five departments and so you have to make sure you have a proper management structure.
What infrastructure projects were discussed on the recent trip to Brussels, the EU headquarters?
It’s important to put into context the support given to us by the EU and European Investment Bank both historically and ongoing.
In terms of the historic support, there’s the EU Roads 2000 project by way of grants up to 20 million Euros (Sh3 billion) to support paving of roads in Lower Eastern, in particular Machakos, Makueni, Embu, Tharaka Nithi and Meru. Now this key programme basically supports the rural sector which as you know is very critical in terms of our development.
Then we have the Merile-Marsabit road which has been supported also by the EU in terms of a grant of Sh8.7billion out of the total cost of the project at Sh13.7 billion shillings. That project is 90 per cent complete and we anticipate the 121 kilometre road will be open by October this year.
Other roads which are either ongoing or complete are the Eldoret-Webuye road (Sh4billion grant) and the Webuye-Malaba road (Sh4.5billion grant).
So now to answer your question.
Top of the agenda was the Mombasa-Mariakani road. Getting out of Mombasa today is a big, big problem with all the trucks, buses and saloon vehicles. The road shall be done in
two phases; Phase 1, a, 11km six-lane highway from Mombasa town to Kwa Jomvu costing about 112 million Euro (Sh15 billion).
Then from Kwa Jomvu we go to Mariakani, a four-lane highway project we have been discussing with the EU, in particular with the European Investment Bank. The EU together with partners KFW, the Germans, have committed to support this project to the tune of Sh18 billion.
And then finally in terms of
opening up North Eastern and the corridors, we are trying to do
a road from Lamu to Isiolo, then from Isiolo in terms of the Lapsset corridor, we shall have one branch heading North Easterly towards East Moyale which is Ethiopia,
then another branch from Isiolo going North Westerly towards Southern Sudan and these projects are supported by our partners including the EIB.
How far have we gone into putting a rapid commuter transit system in place?
Good question because Nairobi is supposed to be the hub. Let us admit that the planning for Nairobi was a bit slow historically. If you look at, for example, the congestion within the city, we should not be where we are today. Adequate city planning involves having a special lane dedicated for the buses or public transport. Clearly some of the projects we are discussing now should have been done 20 years ago.
Right now we’re talking about doing the
elevated road from JKIA to Rironi in Limuru, critical in easing traffic movements towards west of Nairobi.
Commitments have been made by both the African Development Bank and the World Bank. That should have been done 20 years ago we admit, but we’re fast-tracking it. T
he contractor will be on site in the next six weeks.
In terms of the commuter tram system, even that we are fast-tracking. What we have done, as part of the SGR, the train will come up to Syokimau and that will be complete by June next year.
However, to avoid the problem of traffic congestion from Syokimau to the city, we have discussed with the Chinese government how we shall have a commuter rail from Syokimau to the city and how to make the process very fast. We agreed with the contractor last month at a meeting chaired by the President that the ground breaking for this will be within the next three months.
More so, we are just about to complete the Nairobi Metropolitan Authority, a joint initiative between us and the Nairobi Government.
Once it is launched, it will mandated to address all the issues regarding public transport.
Have you addressed concerns raised by truck drivers?
Some of these issues are very multi-sectoral and what we’ve done is involve our ministry, Treasury because of KRA, Interior ministry because of the Police, to sit down and see how we can get rid of the issues raised by the drivers including many road blocks and harassment.
The President has given directive that the issues need to be cleared.
Kenya has spent over Sh300 billion constructing the SGR, will it be value for money?
The i
mpact on GDP alone will be at least two per cent...just from one project.
In terms of employment, right now up to 27,000 people are engaged in the project. Along the route of the SGR, we have businesses coming up. If you go to a place called Kithekani, you’ll see a factory there producing slippers which are used in laying of the track. At Emali, there is another big factory. If you aggregate all the benefits coming from this SGR, it is massive.
Up to Nairobi I think, nobody is questioning. The
issue is now from
Nairobi going through to Kisumu and Malaba. What you realise is that inevitably we
have to go through very harsh terrain, especially from Nairobi to Naivasha. That section alone is costing us Sh150 billion. The reason being for you to get from
Nairobi to Rift Valley, you have to go through a
tunnel which we’re doing of
six kilometers into the Rift Valley. When you exit the tunnel there’ll be a
bridge, 120 metres high.
There’s no other way of going to Naivasha so Kenyans should understand that whereas this cost is high, it’s inevitable.
There are complaints that those who were compensated in the purchase of the SGR land were not the actual owners…
Any issue regarding money whether it’s SGR or roads, is always a big challenge. When you start planning for a road you find people putting up structures, issue of land speculators pushing up the cost of land.
Sometimes people use fake names and so along the way if there are 1,000 claimants, you can be sure that maybe five or ten per cent of those either will be fraudulent but we’ve asked the Kenya Railways corporation and the National Land Commission to make sure they carry out due diligence because we don’t want even one person saying they were denied their rights.
How will we power the SGR?
The current configuration is to do diesel. However the protocol signed by the four countries was to do electric.
We agreed with our partner states that we can start with diesel but have a provision for electricity.
In the long run it’s cheaper to run electric traction for SGR as opposed to diesel. It’s also more environmentally friendly so that provision has been made so that in future we actually use electricity.
Why is the Western bypass costing so much per km?
You have to appreciate that the Western bypass is critical to us. No city globally does not have a ring road. You go to London, you have the North Circular. You go to China they have the Four Ring roads to avoid people going through the city and causing more traffic.
We have the North and Southern bypass which is to be completed next month, the Eastern bypass from Embakasi to Ruiru, then we have the Northern bypass from Ruiru to Ruaka near the Village Market.
The missing link is that bit from Ruaka to join the Nairobi-Naivasha highway. That’s what we’re calling the Western bypass. Those are already developed areas so you can expect the cost to be much higher. However, the cost has not been fully determined. What we signed were commercial agreements to allow us now to negotiate the financing but obviously now we have to look at the numbers very critically to make sure we get value for money.
What is the significance of the visit to Port Antwerp?
To benchmark with one of the best ports globally. Antwerp is the second busiest port in Europe. It is about 80kms inland and this is what we’d wanted to see because having such a layout avoids congestion within the sea port. Because of that they have 900 companies which have invested in the Port of Antwerp.
If we have the same kind of thing, even half, even 10 per cent investing in Lamu port or 20 per cent investing at Mombasa port, the impact will be massive. So to make these corridors more valuable to us, we must make sure the sea ports, the origins of the actual corridors are effective.
How far are we with LAPPSET?
As you know we decided to do 32 berths but mainly through the private sector. Now to convince the private sector that you are serious as a government, you must make the first move so we decided we shall do the first three berths through the China Roads and Bridges Company.
We already secured the funding and
anticipate to complete those three by March 2018 and that was part of the discussions we held in China last week.
We’re inviting the private sector through consortiums. That’s why we are approaching five companies to deal with the various projects within Lapsset.
How do we now compare to the Port of Durban?
We have a very big advantage compared to Durban given the geographic location of our port. Central and very much accessible to the far east.
If you look at the growth of Mombasa over the last two years,
we’re actually on track to overtake Durban. Two years ago, Mombasa had a capacity of about one million, 20 feet equivalent containers. Currently, after opening a second container terminal, we have 1.5million capacity.
We just signed another agreement to do phase two of the container terminal to give us another half a million container capacity.
If we continue the same way I believe within no time we shall pull ahead of Durban.
Has the Chinese contractor on the Greenfields project refunded the Sh4 billion?
We got legal advice, indicating that indeed the contracts were null and void. So what we’re doing now is coming up with an amicable agreement that will be mutually beneficial to both parties.
We cancelled that contract as we have capacity of up to 14 million passengers and currently are only serving about 6.5 million which means we have capacity to take us up to 2025.
Has JKIA attained category 1 status, direct flights to the US were to begin in May and will the government bail out KQ?
In terms of direct flights, the final audit was done last week by the US Federal Aviation Authority. The TSA came earlier and we scored 88 per cent and the pass mark is 75 so we’re very optimistic.
KQ is a strategic institution for this government and country but we cannot put bail out terms in the finance bill because KQ is a private company; government only holds 29 per cent. What we’re doing is to sit with the Board of Directors to see how we can help them raise money to restore the financial viability of the airline.
We’ve come very far. If you look at the kinds of things which have been done to trim down to reduce the ‘fat’, I believe going forward you’ll see a very big impact.
We’re also changing management at all levels. This is not a secret. You’ve seen us asking senior management to leave.
Is the CEO leaving?
That is not a matter we can discuss right now but as I said we’re reviewing the entire structure of management to make sure we have the best people running that key corporate.
Does government have plans to sell off its shares?
That’s not the priority right now. The priority is to restore the airline’s viability. That’s why we’re to do all we can including selling the slot in London to create liquidity, sub-leasing the big aircrafts which were not making money.
We want to trim it down and thereafter can start expanding the airline when already we have a profitable business concept.
Has Qatar expressed interest in buying KQ?
We have many proposals, about three of four which have come to us; some from the Middle
ast, some American companies, but at the end of the day expression of interest is different from actually buying it.
What we are doing is actually looking at the best interest not just of KQ, but the country. I believe after it’s all settled down; after we make sure the balance sheet is intact, then we can go back and negotiate to make sure we get the best deal from those wanting to invest in KQ.
What about the KCAA bill?
It’s being finalised in Parliament and as you know it’s a very critical element in terms of Kenya getting direct flights to the US. I was told that by end of this month, Parliament would have passed the bill which gives more powers to the director general of the Kenya Civil Aviation, moving it away from the Cabinet Secretary, to make sure they are more independent in planning the safety of our aviation sector.
jubilee plan to make city heart of east africa