Reviving Nanyuki railway makes no economic sense

Driving from Nairobi towards the north, one can notice ongoing manual activity rehabilitating the old Nairobi/Nanyuki railway which has been unused since the late 1980s. This is not the first attempt by the government to revive the railway for in 2005, the late John Michuki, as a minister for Transport, made an attempt to resurrect the line for passenger transport to Nanyuki which proved commercially and technically unsustainable.

I will attempt to revisit the history of this railway, because it is important to understand why it was at one time a very successful piece of infrastructure before it finally collapsed, perhaps irretrievably.

The railway from Nairobi to Nanyuki was built by the colonial government around 1908 to primarily open up commercial farming for the newly arrived white settlers in Laikipia - which also included the present-day Kieni section of Nyeri, and Timau in Meru. The colonial government was concurrently relocating all the Maasai pastoralists from Laikipia to the Narok areas to make way for the settler farmers. The railway communication was also meant to facilitate colonisation of the Kikuyu territory.

Large scale commercial farming in Laikipia comprised mainly beef ranching with live animals transported by rail to the Athi River meat factory. Wheat and barley were large crops as was wool (sheep) and dairy farming, with some coffee farming in the areas adjacent to the Nyeri native reserves.

During the Second World War in the 1940s, Karatina had a large vegetable drying and packaging factory fed by an elaborate irrigation system across Mathira.

The packaged produce was transported by the railway to Mombasa for export to the battlefields. The story surrounding the unfortunate demise of the factory and the irrigation project is for another day.

Along the railway nearer Nairobi, the white settler was in large-scale sisal farming which was feeding a large bag and cordage factory at Juja. Coffee was the other major commercial commodity in this area along the rail line. The Africans from the Kikuyu reserves harvested the bark (magoko) from the wild wattle trees for transportation by train to a tannin factory at Thika. Africans were not allowed to plant commercial cash crops until 1950s when coffee and tea were permitted.

Northwards, trains ferried machinery, farm inputs, bulk petroleum, and consumer goods. The railway was also the main inter-town mode of passenger transportation, with a mixed (“mugithi”) passenger/goods train making three trips a week from Nairobi to Nanyuki and back.

Then independence came in 1963, and the Laikipia white farmers suddenly sold their land to local land buying companies. Land was chopped into smaller pieces mostly for subsistence farming with much area remaining idle under absentee ownership.

The few wazungus, who remained in Laikipia, maintained some commercial farming while others converted their land into wildlife conservancies.

By the 1970/80s, the Nanyuki railway had very little produce to carry as commercial agriculture diminished, and Kenyan entrepreneurs invested heavily in alternative road transportation capacity to ferry goods and passengers.

The short distances between the city and the Mount Kenya towns are now best served by door- to-door road haulage. The economic model that initially justified the Nanyuki railway cannot hold today.

What is not in dispute is the urgent need to rehabilitate the railway between Nairobi and Thika into a modern mass commuter train system, and if possible extend it to Kenol.

Further the government should now focus on funding and implementing the planned dual-carriage highway from Kenol to Nanyuki, which is good enough infrastructure for central Kenya for the time being.

On a wider scale we have the planned Lapsset highway heading west from the new Lamu port to Isiolo which will provide alternative import/export route for the upper Mt Kenya region of Meru and Laikipia. There is also another pending plan for a branch oil pipeline to Nanyuki/Isiolo from the main Mombasa/Nairobi pipeline.

It is a fact that the real estate occupied by the entire Nairobi/Nanyuki railway infrastructure is massive and idle. What to do with the land should not be allowed to cloud decisions on revival of the railway, which currently appears uneconomic.