The curse of Thika Road

Sections of the Thika super highway. [Photo: Peter Muiruri /Standard]

Last week, President Kibaki commissioned the Thika super highway with many calling it an infrastructural milestone. To some businesses along the highway, however, the road’s construction has brought them nothing but suffering, writes PETER MUIRURI

The construction and last week’s commissioning of the Thika super highway has been hailed as one of the greatest achievements of the Kibaki administration.

The benefits to be accrued from the Sh27 billion venture, a flagship project under the country’s development blueprint, Vision 2030 are numerous.

Already, the legendary traffic snarl-ups that have been the hallmark of the road have eased. The road has also opened up much of the areas bordering the road to mega investments mainly in the real estate sector. Owing to the new development, property prices around the area have also skyrocketed.

But under this rosy picture is a group of people ruing the day the road project was conceived. Some small and medium enterprises have been forced to move out of the area for lack of access to their locations while others have scaled down operations.

Among those heavily affected are a number of petrol stations that dot the area, car bazaars, and some hotels. Proprietors of Fuelmax, Kenol-Kobil and National Oil petrol stations on Murang’a Road continue to count their losses after the contractors blocked access to their properties. Some were completely sealed off with iron sheets indicating a complete cessation of services.

A few of the car dealers Home & Away spoke to said the Government should not be seen to curtail businesses established long before the road construction was conceived.

“Everybody agrees that we need the road. However, let us not forget that it is these same businesses that will pay back the money that was used for the construction. Closing any big business along the road means a depletion of taxes to the Government,” said a car dealer along the road.

While on a tour of the area last week, Home & Away found John Njuguna, the manager at National Oil petrol station walking around the newly refurbished, but deserted station. As he watched vehicles zoom past, he knew only too well how much he would be making were some of those vehicles to stop for fuel.

“The losses we have incurred since we stopped selling fuel in July are enormous. National Oil, our mother company, could be losing close to Sh2 million monthly. I have personally been losing close to Sh500,000 monthly for the last five months. Multiply that by five months and you can get the idea of what we are talking about,” says John.

He says that apart from personal and company losses, the petrol station had a workforce of 20 employees who are now out of work.

What hurts him most is the fact that a total of Sh40 million was spent to relocate the fuel tanks and the office building away from the road, an investment that may take ages before it makes any returns.

John and other affected businesspeople put the blame squarely on the Kenya National Highway Authority (KeNHA) for giving them conflicting information regarding their plight.

According to a letter in our possession, KeNHA had initially written to the National Oil Corporation of Kenya giving them the authority to construct an access road to the petrol station.

The letter, reference number KeNHA/P&E/S/2655 of June 27, 2012, contains 20 conditions that National Oil had to abide with to carry out the construction of the access road.

The authority gave National Oil six months from the date of the letter within which to complete the works.

“A few weeks later, the authority was cancelled by yet another letter from KeNHA and we have been out of business since then. The Chinese contractor was instructed to block the Murang’a Road access to our property,” says Njuguna.

Correspondence

Jiten Gosrani, the proprietor of Fuelmax Service Station for the last 13 years went a step further, writing letters to at least 13 individuals and organisations involved in the design and social aspects of the road. Some of these are senior officers in the Ministry of Roads, Nairobi City Council, Kenya National Human Rights & Equality Commission, the State Law Office and the Kenya Alliance of Resident Association.

According to Jiten, blocking the entrances to their property is not just a matter of access, but a violation of their constitutional rights as well.

“This is a clear violation of the Bill of Rights, which guarantees all Kenyans freedom of movement and gives all Kenyans a right of access to their homes, education, health services, housing, water, social security and to clean and healthy environment,” he argues.

“It surprises me that while everyone in Kenya have access to their properties, why the discrimination just for these plot owners along that stretch on Murang’a road?” wrote Jiten to the Chairman of the task force committee for draft policy on aligning the roads sub-sector with the Constitution in a letter dated September 11, 2012.

In addition to the correspondent from Jiten, a number of affected businesses along the road, through their lawyers, wrote to the road authorities seeking further redress to this matter.

They argued that the Government had compensated them for the parcels of land acquired from them and they had, in turn, pushed their boundaries further inside to create the road way leave. To date, they have received no reply from any of the respondents.

“We find it puzzling that after writing to more than a dozen institutions, nobody has had the courtesy of writing back to us, at least to acknowledge the receipt of our correspondence,” says Jiten.

However, what surprises the affected entrepreneurs is the fact that access to some other properties a few metres from their premises have their access intact.

When contacted, KeNHA’s engineer S Omer, the general manager in charge of planning and environment said authority to work on any given part of a road could be withdrawn at any given time in view of new information that may come to light.

“We have no intention of frustrating businesses along the road since that is one reason of having the road in the first place. However, public safety overrides any business interests. The revocation was done after evaluating all issues. In any case, this is a fast super highway where vehicles are not expected to stop. The revocation of the authority to construct an access was issued in view of such considerations,” said Omer.

Regardless of the situation, affected business owners are still hopeful that the Government will listen to their pleas to have them construct access points to their properties.