Luvei Times Kenya's Social Online Magazine

Improve Kenya’s transport system for meaningful economic growth

road under construction : western kenya needs good roads and efficient railway system

Kenya’s transport system continues to remain in shambles, forty-seven years into independence despite promises by subsequent administrations to prioritize plans to improve infrastructure.

The hype by the Kibaki administration to have the northern corridor running across the country from the Port of Mombasa at the sea coast to the boarder towns of Malaba and Busia upgraded to a dual carriage have hit a snag and the promise now remains a far-fetched pipe dream.

The country’s western region in particular remains hardest hit despite its huge economic potentials. The region, described as the nation’s food basket is endowed with agriculturally rich soils as well as a presence of a fair number of industries in the town centers of Nakuru, Kisumu and Eldoret.

Land locked economies

The over reliance on road transport, especially in transiting heavy commercial goods across the boarders to the land-locked economies of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and The Democratic Republic of Congo further compounds the situation. There are limited alternative modes of transport especially to the western region.

Though the rail network offers an alternative, its pathetic state of late and the wrangles between the government and the concessionaire, Rift Valley Railways, has had little to win investor confidence. Already news of both the Kenyan and Ugandan governments having plans to withdraw the contract of the South African contractor have killed any hopes of the rail transport regaining its relevance like it was in the last decade. The obvious implication of this has been the piling pressure on the already over-stretched road-network.

Kenya’s huge exports in the world are imported by Uganda with statistics indicating that there is a combined transit and transshipment traffic through the northern corridor of goods over 2.2 million tonnes per year with a 20% growth rate.

Expansion of international airport

The government intends to expand and upgrade the Kisumu airport to International standards so as to ease congestion on the western transport infrastructure but the plans are yet to set-off. It is worth noting that the previous regime executed similar plans and had the Eldoret International Airport constructed but the project is yet to pay any dividends owing to poor prior logistical and feasibility studies.

A pipeline transporting petroleum products from the Mombasa based Kipevu oil refinery runs all the way to the upcountry termini of Eldoret and Kisumu though plans are underway to extend to Kampala in Uganda. This has cut down on transportation costs of the commodity impacting positively to its price in the region.

But with the Kenyan economy so much driven on diesel and petrol power, there is need to further extend the pipeline and connect it to other busy town centers of Kakamega, Kisii, Bungoma and Busia to reduce the costs to much affordable levels.

The delay of goods in transit occasioned by poor roads has time and again prompted the land-locked countries to threaten to shift to the Dar-es-salaam port in Tanzania as an alternative despite the distance. If such threats are made true, then the Kenyan government is poised to loose huge amounts of foreign currency as a result of lost revenue.

As a tool of inducing national economic growth, there is need for the government to improve the existing transport infrastructure as well as venture into new options such as rail-lake transport and inland water routes.