Benefits of new railway begin to emerge in tales of local people at Emali, Kibwezi

Opinion and Analysis

Workers clear bushes at Tatu near Mariakani ahead of the construction of the new railway. Previously idle young men have found jobs on these sites. PHOTO | FILE 

By CAROL MUSYOKA

In Summary

• The benefits of the standard gauge railway are unfolding before our eyes in terms of job opportunities as well as growth of ancillary industries that make up the raw material supply chain for the project.

Tom decided to visit his sister who was living in France. He assumed that most French would speak English but found that many people spoke only their own language and this included the ticket inspector on the train.

He punched Tom’s ticket, then chatted cordially for a bit, making several expansive gestures. Tom simply nodded from time to time to show him that he was interested. When he had gone, an American tourist, also on the train, leaned forward and asked if Tom spoke French.

“No,” Tom admitted. “Then that explains why you didn’t bat an eyelid when he told you that you were on the wrong train,” she said.

A few weeks ago, I had the occasion to drive east on Mombasa Road on my way to Kibwezi town. As a child, the journey to our annual Mombasa vacation was one filled with giddy excitement as my late father put his faithful Peugeot 504 to the speed test.

We would drive for stretches without seeing another car or truck, noting dry savannah landscapes teeming with baobab and acacia trees for miles straddling both sides of the road.

In those days there were very few urban centres on that stretch. From the relatively sleepy truck stop of Salama to the placid, uninspiring settlements of Sultan Hamud, Emali and Makindu, one would only get relatively excited at Mtito Andei as it marked the halfway point of the five-hour road trip.

That was then. Today, these are all bustling roadside stops, whose growth has been driven largely in part by the vibrant trucking industry that hauls tonnes of local and East African cargo from Mombasa port into the hinterland.

What used to be a two-hour trip to Kibwezi, which lies 200 kilometres east of Nairobi, is now a hair-raising four-hour journey largely consisting of dodging heavy trucks driven by foul-mouthed people who brazenly lean out of their cab window and tell you to get off the climbing lane.

“Hamuoni kwamba hii lorry imebeba mizigo?” was shouted at us at least twice, when the only other option was to move to the lane of oncoming, hurtling trucks whose visibly smoking brakes hissed louder than a rattlesnake.

But hope springs eternal in the standard gauge railway (SGR) construction. The previously sleepy municipality of Emali is now a key construction base for the SGR project. I saw what looked like two different factories being built with large storage silos for sand, ballast and other construction material.

Trucks crisscrossed the highway, raising red plumes of dust in the distance from where they seemed to be collecting sand to be taken to the factories.

White banners with Chinese lettering would be the first sign that one was approaching a construction zone and there were many points between Emali and Kibwezi where the construction team had laid the foundation for the concrete columns that will carry the 21st century iron snake.

So I asked, when I got to my Kibwezi destination, about the impact the SGR construction was having on the population. I met an old acquaintance who I had not seen in years, who has now moved permanently to Mtito Andei.

He is supplying sand, ballast and one other thing that’s slipped my mind to the construction sites. His move was occasioned by the fact that he needed to be next to the business as demand was high.

“Mtito has exploded since the SGR started,” he mused. “Land is now going for Sh1 million an acre from less than Sh500,000 a year ago.” What was fuelling this growth I asked?