Motorists to pay for use of Nairobi’s Southern by-pass
Nairobi Southern Bypass project resident engineer Saleh Parpia with Paul Omondi (left), the manager, special projects at Kenya National Highways Authority during a tour of the road in May. Photo/FILE
What you need to know:
Plans are underway to have a private contractor manage the tolling services and maintain the 30-kilometre dual carriageway under a public private partnership (PPP) arrangement.
On Monday, the government invited bids for advisory services to determine the most viable PPP model for the project, set a legal framework and help pick a suitable contractor to manage the road under a 25-year concession.
Construction of the Sh17 billion Southern by-pass project was launched in March 2013 and is scheduled to be completed in 36 months.
Motorists using Nairobi’s Southern by-pass will be charged pay-for-use fees as the government moves to establish Kenya’s first ever private management of the country’s roads.
Plans are underway to have a private contractor manage the tolling services and maintain the 30-kilometre dual carriageway under a public private partnership (PPP) arrangement.
On Monday, the government invited bids for advisory services to determine the most viable PPP model for the project, set a legal framework and help pick a suitable contractor to manage the road under a 25-year concession.
“The required investments payback would be funded from the proceeds of toll revenues and any associated ancillary income related to the project,” Stanley Kamau, the director of the PPP Unit at the Treasury said in a statement.
Construction of the Sh17 billion Southern by-pass project was launched in March 2013 and is scheduled to be completed in 36 months.
Once completed, the road will be mainly used by heavy trucks seeking to by-pass the Nairobi central business district (CBD) en-route to western Kenya. The road is designed as a dual carriage with four lanes and will cover 28.6km with 12km slip roads and 8.5km service roads.
Vehicles will enter the by-pass from the Nairobi-Mombasa highway near Park Side Towers and run on the edge of the Nairobi National Park, Langata South Estate, Ngong Road, Dagoretti, Gitara and Thogoto in Kiambu County where it will then join the Nairobi-Nakuru highway.
If successful, the by-pass would be the first major road to be covered under a new PPP law that became operational in March this year.
The PPP law offers investors risk mitigation measures such as letters of support and guarantees and compensation for termination of contract in the event of drastic review of laws.
The law further provides for the establishment of a Viability Gap Fund to support economically viable projects that may not attract investments from outside government.
The government is banking on the law to trigger an inflow of new investments and help ease some pressure as it grapples with massive budgetary shortfalls arising from a slowdown in economic activity and high interest rates.
The Southern by-pass is seen as the most viable candidate for toll charges owing to the nature of vehicles targeted.
“We are mainly targeting special category of vehicles for this road and we expect enforcement to be easy because one cannot hide a truck or drive it through unauthorised routes in the CBD,” an engineer with the Kenya National Highways Authority (Kenha) said.
The government has twice failed to introduce tolling services on key roads around Nairobi.
It has this week shelved plans to introduce pay-for-use charges on the Nairobi-Thika highway, choosing instead to distribute the cost of maintaining the road to all motorists countrywide.
Kenha said it had decided to outsource the maintenance of the 54km road to a private contractor and pay for it from the Road Maintenance Levy Fund (RMFL). The agency has since invited bids for contractors interested in the job.
Under the new performance-based maintenance model, a contractor would be required to undertake all maintenance work on the Nairobi-Thika highway, including sealing potholes, fixing broken road signs and safeguarding equipment such as guardrails.
“The deal with the contractor picked to do the maintenance work will be a two-year one with monthly payments for service rendered,” Kennedy Mudulia, the general manager in-charge of maintenance at Kenha told Business Daily.
Besides the Nairobi-Thika highway, the government failed to erect toll stations on the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA)-Rironi section of Kenya’s main trunk road.
Under the initial plan, the 53km road would be built and managed through a concession consisting of six sections totalling 77km.
The 30-year build-operate-transfer (BOT) deal would have seen motorists pay for use of the road to the concessionaire.
Initial estimates indicated that users would pay about Sh572 per day.
However, the plan was abandoned after businesses and property owners opposed the proposed demolitions along the highway.
Questions were also raised about the integrity of Strabag, the Austrian firm that had won the concession tender.
This caught the attention of the World Bank, which reacted by withholding funding for the Sh67 billion project until a comprehensive due diligence was conducted on Strabag International – leading to a two-year delay of the works.
Strabag unsuccessfully tried to convince the government and the World Bank to proceed with the project
The road project has since been redesigned with the government excluding the controversial tolling concept that risked delaying the project aimed at decongesting the city.
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