Tapping Chinese skills to enhance national capacity

 

The ongoing construction of the Nairobi Expressway along Mombasa road. FILE PHOTO | NMG

  

By GEORGE WACHIRA
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SUMMARY

• Driving through the Expressway construction along Uhuru Highway, and also along the ongoing dual carriageway under construction from Kenol to Marua in Nyeri, I feel encouraged when I see young Kenyans performing (and even supervising ) nearly every aspect of the project.
• And this includes a fair number of women.
• One can indeed call these projects “Chinese polytechnics” where practical skills are gained through hands on coaching. Many of these workers may not be in possession of formal paper qualifications and certifications.

We have often focused on Chinese geopolitical intentions and global economic domination especially in areas of trade and infrastructure. Many debates have also taken place about skewed debt financing of Chinese projects.

Here , I will discuss how the Chinese infrastructure projects have delivered to many young Kenyans, practical technical skills which would otherwise be difficult to achieve in institutions of formal learning, and how Kenya can leverage these skills to scale up its technical capacity for construction projects.

Driving through the Expressway construction along Uhuru Highway, and also along the ongoing dual carriageway under construction from Kenol to Marua in Nyeri, I feel encouraged when I see young Kenyans performing (and even supervising ) nearly every aspect of the project.

And this includes a fair number of women. One can indeed call these projects “Chinese polytechnics” where practical skills are gained through hands on coaching. Many of these workers may not be in possession of formal paper qualifications and certifications.

There will be need to work out how these young people who started on the practical end of projects skills, can be linked to technical institutions to get “formal” technical training and certification. This is essential for their future employability and careers , as it will assist in assessments and grading .

This formal training is an opportunity for TVET institutions across the country and can be in the form of sandwich release programs, or training in between projects. Knowledge of theories which support the practical experience is equally important. Even untrained teachers do often end up in Teacher Training Colleges .

Secondly, these field skills can be assisted to launch themselves as SMEs to undertake smaller projects in the counties and cities.

This makes technical certification of their skills through TVETs and polytechnics even more important. This is why the recently launched SME programmes and partnerships with banks should seek out such technical entrepreneurs and provide financial and managerial support, a grassroots opportunity we cannot ignore.

Thirdly, with plenty of Chinese trained workforce, we can now seriously embark on recreating the ‘lost” Kenyan contractors. During the Moi regime, many local contractors were “captured” and compromised by the government for political and corrupt ends.

When President Kibaki came in he opted for a clean slate with foreign contractors and within the last twenty years the institutional memory of local contractors is all but lost

There will be need to institutionalise in law requirements for local content in all future infrastructure projects. We need to set minimum project values that will be ring-fenced for local contractors.

There is also the option for genuine partnerships ( or sub-contracts) with foreign contractors, as long as such arrangements clearly deliver on local content. Further, local content should be part of any funding arrangement negotiated with foreign governments or financial agencies.

The caveat for supporting local contractors should be delivery of projects on specification, on time and on budget , deliverables key for attaining value for taxpayers’ money. The Chinese have generally demonstrated that these cardinal standards can be achieved.

Once our local contractors have matured we should as a government encourage and support them to increase capacity to compete and secure construction contacts in other countries . We have seen this happen with our KENGEN , the power generating company, which has demonstrated technical capacity for geothermal wells development projects in other countries.

For those developing economic manifestos for 2022 elections , they may need to detail how to transition Kenya from over-dependence on foreign contactors by leveraging on experience already gained on various projects.

In the meantime, we cannot wish away infrastructure projects, for indeed many of these projects are still work in progress or irrevocably committed , and these will have to be completed by whichever government that is elected.

We also need to correct the misconception that large infrastructure projects have not delivered on grassroots benefits. Jobs and skills have been delivered while creating economic linkages across the country, both rural, urban, and even regional , and these continue to open up new economic opportunities and grassroots benefits across the country.