The brighter side of train to Suswa, land of promise

There are many things to hate about President Uhuru Kenyatta’s biggest legacy project, the standard gauge railway, aka SGR.

The huge Chinese loan taken to build it and the inflated costs have unfairly saddled generations of Kenyans with a heavy debt, including the unborn.

The predatory Chinese lenders, in a hurry to recover their loan, appear to be applying unbearable pressure on the government to keep to the repayment schedule.

For its part, the government has resorted to bullying traders and transporters into moving their goods from the Mombasa Port to the Internal Container Depot in Nairobi despite higher costs than those they would ordinarily incur using trucks.

The long-simmering resentment for the forcible use of SGR cargo transport has boiled over in recent weeks into street protests in Mombasa.

Much of the blame for the standoff, of course, lies with the authorities who have remained unresponsive to the legitimate concerns being raised by the protesters.

But some of the criticisms levelled against the SGR project are also misplaced. Take the media narrative that Kenya is ‘building a railway to nowhere’, for example.

Granted, the phrase has been used in media reports to ridicule the abrupt change midway to have the SGR terminate at Naivasha instead of Kisumu or even Malaba, at the border with Uganda.

The decision, taken after the Chinese withheld further funding, has raised questions about the economic viability of the project.

But still that can’t justify the implicit characterisation of Suswa, the small township on the Nairobi-Narok, where the last passenger station is located, as some remote outpost. It’s no more than 80km from the capital city.

Every electioneering period, the famous Suswa Grounds plays host to widely reported public rallies, where local Maasai leaders make declarations about the political direction they are taking.

Tourists regularly make stopovers here for souvenirs and refreshments on their way to or from the world-famous Masai Mara Game Reserve.

More recently, the Suswa area has become one of Kenya’s key energy infrastructural hubs after the Kenya Electricity Transmission Company (Ketraco) built a huge power substation there.

Ketraco says that the Suswa substation, the biggest of its kind in the country, serves as an entry and exchange point for geothermal, wind and hydro-generation into the national grid.

With the entry of SGR, the future looks even brighter for Suswa. The jealous Nairobi middle class folks dismissive of the railway to Suswa also tend to overlook the sharp sense of ordinary Kenyan business people to spot new opportunities and the power of infrastructural projects like the SGR to shape new developments along the way.

All the country’s major towns sprang up along the SGR’s predecessor, which was also dismissed as The Lunatic Express.

Coming soon to your neighbourhood: a Loliondo-type bus terminus for matatus to Syokimau Railway Station, and a real estate agency advertising one-eighth-acre plots on sale at Suswa.