The Lunatic Line v2.0

This satirical poem was penned some 120 years ago by a British MP, upset about our now historical Uganda Railway line. There was considerable political resistance to this “gigantic folly”, as Labouchère called it. The claim that it would be a waste of taxpayers’ money was also dismissed by the Conservative government of the time. Deja vu?

Yet, this feat of engineering opened up East Africa and for almost a century the ‘Lunatic Line’ was a proud success story of how a “..railway line built a country and not vice versa.”,  before sinking into a sad mire of corruption and mismanagement now an accepted norm in Kenya.

One hundred and twenty years later we have a remake and The Lunatic Line 2.0, only now steeped in far more controversy.

“What it will cost no words can express,”  Given the expenditure and all the eye watering figures being quoted from World Bank and other economic sources one has to wonder. The environmental cost is a whole different thorny issue. That the original benefactors of the grand scheme have backed out of the third phase of the project is ringing alarm bells. “Financial Viability” is the reason they have given and it is fairly obvious the government is spinning the numbers.

“Where it is going to, nobody knows..” Phase 2a was commissioned this month. The track ends, literally in the middle of nowhere, well Suswa Station in the Rift Valley. Not at the proposed inland container port in Naivasha 20 kilometres further away. Or is it at Mai Mahiu? Who knows?  Joe Public certainly doesn’t.

“What it will carry, there is none can define,”  Who will ship containers to Suswa where there is no cargo handling terminal, yet ?
A passenger service will run between Syokimau, Ongata Rongai, Ngong Town, Mai Mahiu and Suswa! Who wants to go to all these places from all these places? And, we hear this project needs to shift goods not people. 50+ million tonnes a year we are hearing.

Analysts doing fairly simple mathematics established that the current annual cargo volume needs to be tripled, including to the Uganda border for version 2.0 to show taxpayers a return on their investment. But, there isn’t that much cargo to shift and even if there was, the SGR does not have the capacity to move 3 times its’ current limits without burning more money.

“It is clearly naught but a lunatic line.” Or a stroke of genius. If All the Presidents Men would simply tell us, rather than spin maybe we’d see. We’re not complete idiots, it is our money and we want to believe.