Kenya built a leg of the SGR to Nairobi, but it will take a while, if ever, for it to make its way to Uganda. PHOTO | NMG
About this time four years ago, Presidents Yoweri Museveni, Paul
Kagame, and Uhuru Kenyatta, as the newest member of the East African
Leaders Club then, had really got us excited.
They were
talking of hooking East Africa to booster rockets, and doing a lot of
New Age stuff. They conjured up visions of a connected electricity grid,
a new standard gauge railway running from Mombasa through Uganda to
Kigali, open skies, name it.
Today, those dreams have
faded. Kenya built a leg of the SGR to Nairobi, but it will take a
while, if ever, for it to make its way to Uganda.
A body was set up in Uganda to do the SGR, but it went the way many things in Uganda go these days.
Out
on East Africa’s Central African flank, landlocked Rwanda waited in
vain. Then John Magufuli came along, and Kigali will now build its bit
of the railway through Tanzania. Hopefully in the years to come, they
can form one big loop.
It’s a real loss, because though
the railway to Kigali was seen as an economic, not social engineering,
project, I think it could have refashioned 21st century East Africa like
nothing else.
The example of Ugandan expatriates in
Kenya reveals why. I know some of them who used to get on the express
bus from Nairobi to Kampala on Friday, even if they could afford a
business-class air ticket, because they wanted to take the longer time
to work all way to Kampala during the bus ride.
They
would see family in Kampala on Saturday, attend a wedding, visit their
building site, and even throw in a funeral on Sunday, then get back on
the bus to Nairobi in the evening and work all the way back into Monday
morning. On Tuesday, they would catch a flight to London to go and
present the project they were completing on the bus to and from Kampala.
I therefore conjured up images of the Mombasa-Kigali railway and the world’s longest innovation corridor.
The
trains would have Wi-Fi, and young innovators would crisscross the
region, blogging, writing code, making new friendships and dating.
They
would stop along the way, exploring what lies beyond the railway line,
getting drunk in the small towns, and discovering new realities.
If
you were a photo blogger, and hopped from Nairobi to Kigali and back,
with other likeminded explorers, you would probably be more likely to
find a young woman (or man) who isn’t from your village, tribe, church,
or country, whom you like and to whom you would perhaps pop the
question.
A new type of citizen, different from your
typical, parochial, corrupt, ethnic warrior of East African politics,
would emerge. They are already there, these new East Africans.
You
see their social media pages when they come from Uganda and climb Mt.
Kenya and post photos of their conquests. When they land in Uganda and
go water rafting. When they make their first visit to Kigali and post
photos of their teary and subdued moments at the Kigali Genocide
Memorial.
And a lot of them gather at that craziest of East African music festivals, Nyege Nyege near Jinja in Uganda.
Come
to think of it, the old industrial town would make just the perfect
place for their capital. For now, it will have to wait.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs.
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