Good trade lessons for Mombasa from a city in California

When Mombasa Governor Hassan Joho visited the United States at the end of April, I learnt that my home town of Mombasa and the city of Long Beach in southern California were sister cities.

In all fairness, there wasn’t any way to know about the sibling connection. There haven’t been any shared projects between the two cities; no business ventures; nothing to connect the west coast of the United States to the east coast of Africa except for a static website that needs updating.

But the surface similarities between the two cities are impossible to ignore.

Long Beach and Mombasa are both port cities that control a significant portion of the shipping business in their region. The two are ranked among the world’s top container ports: in 2013 Long Beach ranked at number 22 while Mombasa ranked at 117, according to a study by the international shipping magazine Container Management.

The island city of Mombasa was established as a trading centre in the first century AD by the Indian Ocean trade winds, and it is strategically located about half way between the major Middle East ports and the port of Durban in South Africa.

Long Beach, by comparison, is a much younger port and was only founded in 1911. In the last century it has expanded from 800 acres to over 7,600 acres, and has become the second busiest seaport in the United States.

It serves as a major gateway for trade between North America and Asia and connects the two largest economies in the world: the United States and China.

Today Long Beach has 22 terminals and 80 berths, and in 2013 it handled 6.7 million TEUs (twenty foot equivalent units). This is six times the amount of container traffic that Mombasa handled (which was just over 1 million TEUs in 2013, according to the World Ports and Trade Summit 2013) with 19 berths at its Kilindini harbour.

Plans to construct a second terminal in Mombasa by 2016, which will handle half a million containers in its year of completion, are under way and promise to significantly boost capacity as will the Lamu port, which is expected to have 32 berths and handle an estimated capacity of 23 million tonnes.

Upon completion the Lamu and Mombasa ports may come to mirror the relationship between the Californian ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, which at present are mired in discussions about whether to merge.

The economies of both Long Beach and Mombasa are therefore heavily reliant on the ports. In the city of Long Beach, one in eight jobs (12.5 per cent) is generated by the port.

While national figures on the number of jobs generated by the Mombasa port are unavailable, the 58,000 membership of the three largest trade unions affiliated to the ports suggests the figure could be as low as six per cent.

Both Long Beach and Mombasa are located on major oceanic reserves — the Pacific and the Indian Ocean respectively — and they have access to a bounty of marine and aquatic life. And so the second T that both Long Beach and Mombasa depend on is Tourism.

Long Beach drew the short straw when it came to warm weather, but its aquatic activities overshadow Mombasa’s attempts.

Long Beach has built an industry around water sports such as sailing, water and jet skiing, kayaking, wind surfing and fishing. The American city is home to some of the most famous sporting activities in the world including the Congressional Cup (one of the oldest and most prestigious match racing events in the world) the Transpacific yacht race and Olympic trial races.

Mombasa, on the other hand, despite its warm water and weather, which make it ideal for sporting activities such as snorkeling and deep sea diving, has not developed its tourism offerings beyond beach hotels even though its natural coral reef barrier has facilitated the creation of the Mombasa Marine Park.

In 1941 Long Beach made a series of offshore breakwaters to protect its shoreline and coastal residences, and as a result, Long Beach Marina is home to a bevy of commercial and recreational vessels, and is the largest municipally owned and operated marina system in the United States.

Ambitious plans are expected to allow luxury yachts to dock at Mombasa’s English Point Marina and help it attract international boat races and water sports competitions such as wind-surfing and kite-surfing, but whether these plans bear fruit will become clear after the project is completed this month.

Long Beach’s success in marketing itself as a tourism destination has in many ways been contrived. Tourism only took off in 1997 after the US government moved its Naval Shipyard from Long Beach to San Diego, prompting the bereft city to find an alternative source of revenue to keep its economy going.

And so, the third T on which the port city focuses — Technology — was strategically chosen for the benefits it would offer. In 1998, Long Beach deliberately set out to establish itself as a top digital city, and as a sign of its success in 2011 it was named one of the top 10 digital cities in the United States.

Since then it has attracted a gathering of technology focused enterprises, which neatly complement the bevy of technology companies that the state of California is home to.

Unfortunately, however, the third T which seems to define Mombasa is Terrorism. And unlike technology, it threatens to derail the gains that the coastal city makes from Trade and Tourism.

Because of Mombasa’s proximity to the Somali border, its high rates of youth unemployment and increased amounts of religious radicalisation, the city has become more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.

Explosions

The twin explosions in Mombasa last Saturday night at a bus depot and a popular beach hotel on the north coast, and a matching set of attacks on commuter buses in Thika on Sunday afternoon, have compounded perceptions about insecurity in Kenya; these will hit the tourism sector hard as it prepared for its mid year peak season which begins in July.

And so while the shared interests of Trade and Tourism could form a strong basis for the exchange of skills and knowledge between the sister cities of Long Beach and Mombasa, the fork in the road threatens to derail any potential gains.

Long Beach takes its name from its greatest asset— a long beach; perhaps it is time for its sister city of Mombasa to live up to its name —mambo ni sasa — and act now.

Ms Aamera is a freelance journalist.