Politics of roads, railways and dams

On February 3, Rwandan President Paul Kagame visited with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta in Nairobi. He posted a tweet about which, as of Tuesday, had received 20,300 Likes, and 3,001 Retweets. It was the most engaged tweet on his page since January 1.

It said (abbreviations written out in full and punctuations added):

“I had a brief but very productive working visit with President Uhuru Kenyatta in Nairobi today morning. Now back home! I like it this way - 1 hour to Nairobi; 1 hour back to Kigali. One hour + discussion. One hour from airport (JKIA) to (Nairobi) State House and back to airport. A lot was covered!!!”

Of the many comments, one understood that it had taken President Kagame one hour to get from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) to State House in Kilimani, and opined that that was simply unacceptable. Because the roads and streets would have been closed for the Rwandan leader, with police sweepers ahead, it is likely it took him 30 minutes to get to State House, and another 30 to return to the airport.

However, the point had been made; the short trip to and from JKIA (if your journey doesn’t allow you to get off on one of the by-passes) can be a nightmare. On a bad day, it can be two hours long just between Westlands and the airport. On some very bad days, with the disruption of the construction of the Nairobi Expressway to the airport, all night. When the Expressway is opened, that distance between Westlands and the airport will be slashed to 15 minutes for ordinary motorists.

What the Nairobi Expressway will do, at the basic level domestically in Kenya, is ease traffic congestion. What it will do at a global level, however, is make JKIA more competitive as an airport. In that way, it is part of the trend of the Africa infrastructure race.

It was evident on Sunday when Ethiopia began generating power from its $4.5 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). As soon as GERD, the largest hydroelectric project in Africa was up, Ethiopia’s ambassador to Kenya, Meles Alem, said Nairobi and Addis Ababa had started talks on the latter’s plans to buy cheap power from across the border.

However, we then had a split-screen moment. Sudan protested the launch of generation, rejecting it as a “unilateral step” by Ethiopia.

Sudan and Egypt have a long-running beef with the dam, arguing that it is a threat to their national security because all they have as their main source of water is River Nile.

At the inauguration ceremony, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sought to assure Sudan and Ethiopia that their water supply is safe.

“As you can see, this water will generate energy while flowing as it previously flowed to Sudan and Egypt, unlike the rumours that say the Ethiopian people and government are damming the water to starve Egypt and Sudan,” he said.

Ironically, the now ebbing Tigray war in Ethiopia might have handed Abiy the leverage to switch on the GERD without losing sleep over Sudan’s and Ethiopia’s feelings.

At the height of the war in late 2020 and into half of 2021, when it looked like the rebels might overwhelm Abiy’s government, Ethiopian officials and nationalists accused Sudan and Egypt of backing the Tigray insurgents. Cairo and Khartoum didn’t help matters by seeming to delight in Abiy’s troubles.

Abiy then donned military uniform, and went to the frontline. The boost to morale, and a deadly deployment of drones, dramatically turned the war in his favour. They might not be defeated, but the Tigrayans and their allies have been routed for now. And with that, Egypt’s and Sudan’s hands over the GERD terms essentially collapsed.

A similar play is happening with Kenya’s standard gauge railway, the recently extended line to Kisumu, and the Kisumu port. In Kenya itself, it seems there is little awareness of the stakes.

In the recent 75-kilometre truck snarl to the Malaba border, and a shorter one to Busia, which sent fuel prices in Uganda skyrocketing, Kampala officialdom took the opportunity to urge the country’s fuel industry to shift to railway and water transport from Kisumu Port to Port Bell. They showed how that would be several times cheaper, but Uganda’s State Minister of Works in charge of transport, Fred Byamukama, also let the cat out of the bag.

“Has Uganda learnt or forgotten anything from its past experiences? With the Kenyan election in six months, can Uganda’s freshly opened economy afford another disruptive fuel crisis?” he asked.

In the 2008 Kenya post-election violence, Ugandan trucks were attacked in the Rift Valley and western Kenya. It seems Kampala sees the railway, especially from Nairobi to Nakuru, and on to Kisumu as risky yes, but less so than the truck route beyond Nakuru to Malaba through Eldoret, should the August Kenya election go sideways.

To Uganda (and northern Tanzania), the renovated but perhaps underwhelming Nakuru-Kisumu line, and Kisumu port, are a big deal – especially in the dark hours of Kenya’s electoral witching.