SGR is here, now let’s make it work for Kenyans

This week, President Uhuru Kenyatta launched the Madaraka Express bringing Nairobi and Mombasa even closer.

The completion of the Standard Gauge Railway project on schedule is one of the signature achievements of the government. It is a shame it took more than a century for us to improve on the original line built by the British. And so forgetting for a second how we got here, we should celebrate the fact that as a country we did this. This is now a Kenyan economic lifeline. And Kenyans of good will should do all in their power to make it work for citizens – ferrying goods to foreign markets and bringing in what we need, in addition to easing passenger traffic between our cities and towns. It is my hope the extension of the line to Kisumu and then Malaba will continue on schedule. I also hope the next government, whether NASA or Jubilee, will see the sense in dualing the Mombasa-Kisumu-Busia highway, in the same spirit of opening up all parts of Kenya for economic development.

The completion of the construction is the first part. We have to ensure the trains will be safe and run on time. That the tracks and facilities all along the line will be properly maintained. And that Kenyans, and not Chinese, will be at the forefront of all of this. The railway line must be made to work for Kenyans. Having midwifed its delivery, President Kenyatta must make a personal commitment to see the SGR works as intended. Hanging vandals won’t be enough (beside the small matter of the abhorrence of capital punishment). We need a concerted effort to ensure revenues from the passenger and cargo services are properly managed; and that the needed share of this revenue is redeployed to maintain and, if needed, expand the system.

And now that the first phase of the SGR is done, it is my hope the Transport ministry will take time to study the lessons learned over the last four years – from procurement and land acquisition, to the environmental assessment, to the design and engineering, to the effort to use local content in the construction of the railway line. It is common knowledge that the project was not perfect. And so as a country, we need an accounting of what went wrong and how we can mitigate it in future projects. The need for this kind of exercise is informed by an understanding that Kenya will outlast us all. We are lucky to be citizens of a country in its first 50 years of existence. As such, we must do everything in our power to ensure future generations will not have to reinvent the wheel, nor endure the same hardships we have. We should always act with an eye on posterity and history. It should not matter whether the report is made public. What matters is that it should be written and that its lessons inform future policy.

Of course such a report would not lead to a complete stop to corrupt practices in public tendering processes. Far from it. The goal will be to ensure that our systems become robust to corruption. China is a wildly corrupt country, but which delivers on massive public projects and services on time. The same applies to countries like Turkey and Malaysia. While their leaders may be corrupt, their actions are often also informed by system-wide ideas and ethos of what is right by their respective countries. This is the second best option short of becoming a corruption-free country.

The writer is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University.

Twitter: @kopalo