By PAUL GOLDSMITH, Special Correspondent, East African Standard – Sunday, September 18 2011 at 19:00
The Kenya government’s plans to build a port in Magogoni linked by railroad to Nairobi date back to the early 1970s. The project reflected the fact that, as the crow flies, Lamu is closer to the capital than Mombasa. But while the idea appeared to make sense at the time, it certainly does not now — at least not in its present form.
Viewed from afar, it may not be immediately apparent why the Magogoni port has become so contentious. But closer inspection of the project reveals serious problems across several interlinked domains.
Size
The port is part of a massive infrastructural initiative called LAPSSET, or the Lamu Port and Southern Sudan-Ethiopia Transport Corridor, an ambitious blueprint to construct a “land bridge” of roads, railways, and pipelines connecting Lamu to Duala in Cameroon.
The idea, according to its planners, is to open Africa”s most inaccessible regions to capital investment, creating peace and prosperity in its wake.
The large project approach to development in Africa is problematic. Since the infamous Tanzania Ground Nut Scheme of the 1950s, this mindset has produced numerous developmental boondoggles.
In addition to the financial resources wasted, the costs of such fiascos that one Western analyst exonerated as “policy experiments” include displaced communities, environmental degradation, and ramped-up levels of state corruption on both beneficiary and donor sides of the fence.
The sheer size, regional scale, and the $20 billion and rising price tag of this particular “policy experiment” militates against its success.
In the case of Kenya’s Coast, even comparatively modest set-piece projects — like the Ngomeni fish farming project, the Kilifi cashew nut factory, the Bura irrigation scheme, the Magarini settlement scheme, and a World Bank funded cold storage facility in Lamu — all flopped.
The legacy of mismanagement, corruption, land grabbing, and disillusionment is now driving local communities to reassess the Coast’s legal incorporation into the Republic of Kenya. LAPPSET may look like a gift horse, but viewed against this background it is really a Pandora’s box.
The regional equation
China has already provided a Ksh1.2 billion ($1.33 million) ante to the government of Kenya to get the LAPSSET ball rolling. Landlocked South Sudan and Ethiopia are understandably keen on establishing alternative links to the Indian Ocean. China wants to insure access to future supplies of oil. But there is no guarantee that the quantity of oil and other commerce justifying the massive investment will materialise any time soon.
A study in the latest issue of the Journal of Eastern Africa Studies concluded that known oil deposits in South Sudan and the prospects for new discoveries are insufficient to finance a pipeline.
Uganda’s new oil reserves are — but it makes more sense for that pipeline to follow the already developed Northern Corridor route.
There is little evidence to suggest the transport links will spark agricultural development along the dry rangeland corridor it transverses.
If economic production in the turbulent South Sudan—eastern Congo hinterland, where the potential does exist, fails to take off in the near future, Kenya will be left with a sterile investment repeating the lessons of the Chinese-financed port at Gwadar in Pakistan.
Magogoni is morphing into a mirror image of the Gwadar project. Designed to serve as the end-point of “a new silk road” spanning Central Asia and linking eastern China to the Indian Ocean, the Gwadar port spurred massive land grabbing by corrupt state elites and added fuel to the insurgency raging in Baluchistan.
Timing
At a time when Kenya is labouring to restore order to its own house, it does not make sense to commission such a controversial new annex. The scale and conceptualisation of the project places it on a collision course with major constitutional reforms of critical importance for the situation in Lamu and across Kenya’s Coast.
The currently febrile state of affairs gripping Kenya and the manner in which this initiative is being pursued suggests the alliance of politicians and speculators behind the port project are eager to make as much hay as possible out of the Magogoni project before the new Constitution takes effect.
Upcountry districts including Isiolo, Samburu, Marsabit, and Turkana present another set of ownership and impact problems to be resolved. There are many issues of governance, land tenure and ownership, social equity, cross-border security, technical capacity, and management on the national level — in addition to similar issues across the larger region — that have to be sorted out before embarking such an ambitious infrastructural plan facilitating foreign capital penetration.
There are far more important fish to fry at this time. Kenya’s potentially lucrative but underdeveloped marine fishery, for example, could be kick-started for a fraction of the costs. A rail system reducing Nairobi’s traffic gridlock arguably takes priority over a rangeland Lunatic Express.
Ownership
There is a queue of donors interested in funding the project and there should be enough work to keep almost everyone happy.
In addition to the construction of road, railway, and pipeline, the construction of the port itself and its diverse components — international airport, tourist city, petrol refinery, fish processing plant, channel dredging, reef busting, another planned settlement for workers, electrical plants, water systems, computer networks, etc — will generate all manner of build-operate-transfer tenders.
But who will own the facilities in the end, what is the stake of the new county governments, and how will the local population along the route benefit?
The issue of Kilindini port privatisation has sparked protests and stoked negative Coastal sentiments about the province’s relationship with the rest of Kenya. The Magogoni port is raising the same questions on a larger scale.
People from outside the Coast have been the primary beneficiaries of the beachfront allocations and settlement schemes established by the state since 1963. When a delegation of Digo leaders petitioned one hotelier to employ more locals, they were told, “Go build your own if you want to work in beach hotels.”
Not surprisingly, land and employment have become volatile political issues feeding a burgeoning crisis of citizenship on the Coast. All of this is proceeding at a time when abuse of the citizenship rights stipulated in the 1963 memorandum of understanding that formally ceded the Coastal strip to Kenya has introduced the vocabulary of secession to the political narrative.
The Chinese recently signed an agreement with Lahore to convert the Gwadar port, which remained unused after construction, into a naval base. Magogoni already has a naval base, but this has not stopped foreign trawlers from looting Kenya’s marine fishery.
Growing militancy over insecure land rights, insecurity, and economic disenfranchisement in Lamu are replacing decades of passive acquiescence.
The process
Hope over the new Constitution, especially the new land policy and its provisions for redressing historical injustices, is the main factor preventing an explosion of Coastal anger.
But the state has provided meagre information on the port affair and there has been even less public discussion.
According to the Hansard, the feasibility study was to be tabled and debated in parliament. This has not occurred. Instead, the government proceeded to advertise tenders for the first three berths before the preliminary draft of the feasibility study was completed.
Even ranking officials of key state ministries in Lamu say they do not know what is going on. The current Minister of Transport responded to calls for more transparency by stating the Lamu people will be informed of developments on an as-needed basis.
This is aggravated by the disinformation campaign. A former Cabinet minister who visited the area claimed no one lives in the area of Magogoni except some wild animals. An article in the Standard claimed the Bajuni are exclusively an island people.
Since Independence in 1963 the mainland Bajuni, Boni, Sanye, and Kore have repeatedly been forced to relocate due to shifta attacks and the grabbing of their ancestral lands, including farms with mature cashew trees, mangoes, and coconut palms.
The Lamu East MP’s claim that there are no internally displaced persons in Lamu is hard to explain; the explosion of public fury forcing him to flee a meeting in Faza is not.
Overlapping insecurities have forced many to migrate and most of those who remain are still squatters.
Outsiders are pouring into Lamu district; the population has grown by 18 per cent over the past decade. Forests are being hacked down as settlers use quasi-legal methods to acquire land.
Rumours of allocations to state elites, high-ranking civil servants, and tycoons are rife.
Large tracts of land in the Tana Delta and adjacent areas of Lamu district are part of the stakes. The memorandum of understanding for the Kuwaiti-backed Roola project, a forerunner of the current project, included sweeteners in the form of large land allocations to the investors.
Mounting local anger over the issues explains why legally established upcountry settlers on settlement schemes are fretting over a Rift Valley-style backlash.
Upcountry settlers in Mpeketoni told the Njonjo Land Commission the government should halt the process of informal settlement. Yet state sources remain silent over such controversial developments despite the accumulating early warning signals of violent conflict.
Costs
The current estimated cost of the project is equivalent to one-third of Kenya’s GDP in 2010; the same escalating costs of commodities and services that are leaving many Kenyans gasping for air are sure to propel the real expenditures to a much higher level.
Under the current neo-liberal economic regime, we should expect to see much of this capital investment ending up in bank accounts abroad.
The blatant shortcomings of the multibillion-shilling feasibility study, the most expensive such study ever commissioned by the government, raise questions of their own.
The document produced by the Japan Port Consultants mentions the need for mitigations due to habitat fragmentation, increased noise, vibration, and air pollution.
It does not mention the local population and culture; although the document estimates the Lamu district population will increase to one million, it totally ignores issues of the local population and their maritime economy.
An important reef, Mwamba Kasani, is to be cut into blocks and used as building materials for the quays. It does not mention that the routinely cited 38 metre deep channel spans only a small part of Manda Bay.
The port will require massive dredging. Extending the exercise to the Manda Island side of the channel will cost less than importing the expensive Japanese underwater machinery required for chopping up a million year-old coral reef.
Permanent loss of other environmental services from mangroves to marine life (including the archipelago’s endangered turtles, dugong, and other species) to the area’s wetlands and forests are too enormous to quantify.
We can add the looming extinction of the region’s most iconic and tolerant Islamic culture — with the heightened potential for jihadi blowback — to the mix.
There are other anomalies. The report, for example, profiles existing ports from Berbera to northern Mozambique, but does not explore alternative sites on Kenya’s Coast for the proposed facilities, including sites better suited for the offshore depot for transferring oil to supertankers.
The logic of future development
The LAPSSET concept does have obvious merits as a long-term blueprint for regional development.
During a Kisumu forum in 2005, I listened to Prime Minister Raila Odinga articulate the Coast’s potential to rival Dubai as the eastern Indian Ocean’s pre-eminent transhipment hub.
Objections cited here notwithstanding, one should not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
All this baby needs is time to sort out the major issues on the ground while reassessing the viability of the project’s components.
It follows that it should be put on hold pending implementation of the Constitution and new national land policy.
A revitalised approach will begin with consultations engaging the communities involved, and their county governments — and include strategies to develop the renewable energy supplies and environmental safeguards that will make Magogoni the world’s greenest port.
The new approach should also seek to prioritise the role of domestic private sector contractors and industries. Although the local private sector may not possess the capacity at this point in time, a rationalised schedule for the project’s diverse components will present a time frame for Africanising LAPSSET implementation.
Foreign investment can proceed without antagonising local stakeholders on the Coast, as Australia’s Base Titanium solution for the mining crisis in Kwale demonstrated.
Among the other issues that could be raised, there are the many unknowns — like rising sea levels and other effects of climate change — that need to be addressed in the long-term planning.
During the interim, government stakeholders can advance the larger LAPSSET objectives by upgrading the road network linking regional states.
During a visit last year, Tanzania’s Prime Minister Mzengo Pinda stated regional development is better served by investing in a series of smaller ports.
For now, it will suffice to note that constructing the project’s fish storage and processing facility offers an important opportunity to restore a measure of goodwill among Lamu’s various communities.
The extra brain food may also add some much-needed clarity to Vision 2030. Investment adding value to coconuts and all the rotting mangoes may do the same for other Coast people supporting the snowballing Pwani si Kenya (the Coast is not Kenya) campaign.
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