Lamu port reminds us Vision 2030 still matters

Thursday’s start of operations at the country’s second major seaport in Lamu presents an interesting moment in Kenya’s development journey. In today’s highly competitive global and regional economic environment, data might be the “new oil” in our digitalising world, but good old “point A to B” transport and logistics underpins everything from trade to daily living errands.

Here are a couple of positive soundbites one hears and reads on this new port initiative. “Game-Changer”; not just in the Eastern Africa region and coastline, but along Africa’s entire “Eastern Seaboard”. “Transshipment Leader” that will out-fox Djibouti and out-do Durban, the seaboard’s current behemoth. “Opening up Northern Kenya’s hidden economic potential”, “Firing up Kenya’s Blue Economy”, “Repositioning Kenya for long-term regional and continental economic leadership” or “Connecting Africa’s East (Lamu) and West (Dakar in Senegal)” sound like real news headlines.

Lamu port is only one of seven mega-components of the single largest project undertaking under Vision 2030 (and Kenya’s largest ever mega-project); the $2.5 trillion Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia (Lapsset) Corridor project. Lapsset’s vision also covers new highways, crude and product oil pipelines, oil refining, international airports, resort cities and inter-regional SGR railway lines.

As we celebrate now, what does this ambitious picture look like today? Well, referring back to the earlier news headlines; here’s one I’m now watching live on TV - “Lappset roars to life”.

To be fair, Thursday was about opening business for the first of three initial deep sea port berths, with the other two almost complete, as well as brand new trade-enabling road infrastructure linking Lamu to inland Kenya. The ultimate vision is Lamu as a 32-berth African super-port (in contrast Mombasa, the main current gateway to East Africa’s hinterland has half the number of berths). Let’s leave out for now Tanzania’s potentially competing envisaged Bagamoyo port; their Dar-es-Salaam to our Mombasa. Let’s figure out how to see this port project as the beginning of the end, not the end of the beginning.

As with the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), the question will be asked, correctly, about whether this is a “build and they will come” (create the supply/product hoping for the demand/customer) project. The usual queries around technical feasibility (not answered these days because China can build anything), operational efficacy (will it work?), financial and economic viability, socio-economic inclusivity, environmental sustainability and even political necessity will emerge. Away from mega-project fears, I ask the simpler, SME-style question, what’s the demand generation or customer acquisition and retention strategy, not simply for tomorrow’s short-term, but the long-term of forever?

In this current positive mood, I have a couple of other takeaways outside the usual discourse. As one concerned that our penchant for “projectization” is a drag on, not a boon to, our development, planning is at the back of my mind. After painful recent experience of mixed project completion, could this “project delivery” reverse-engineer a return to proper long-term development planning? If that’s the case, then let’s hope Lamu port and Lapsset will be well established in the 50-year Integrated Transport Master Plan that was an equally critical Vision 2030 flagship project that is yet to be delivered.

Second, is this the moment our Kenya Transport and Logistics Network (KTLN) - the operational, if not corporate or legal, equivalent of South Africa’s TRANSNET - truly comes to life to consolidate our transport and logistics agenda? Think Lapsset, Mombasa Port Modernisation and Expansion, Kisumu Port Development, inland dry port development, SGR, Meter Gauge Railway rehabilitation and upgrade, Urban Commuter Rail development initiatives in Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu and other pipeline development or upgrade under one roof. Think positively about this trillion-shilling asset entity.

Unlikely? Well, one could quietly consider a Business Daily report this week on KTLN’s emerging interest in using the rehabilitated Nairobi-Nanyuki railway line as part of a trade-connecting platform to Ethiopia.

One roof is good. Our planning and budgeting is unable and unwilling to cope with big ideas like Lapsset. You’ll find it under Infrastructure in our Vision 2030 policy and current 2018-2022 Medium-Term Plan. Then under the National Treasury (as a transfer from the Ministry of Transport) and the Ministries of Petroleum and Mining, and Regional and Northern Corridor Development, in the 2021/22 budget estimates currently before Parliament. Good luck figuring out this Lamu port project, even as a public-private partnership, from that! Or its likely private-financed 29 remaining deep-sea berths!

Which brings us a final point already hinted at. KTLN operated on good principle is at best a sectoral solution within which our National Transport and Logistics Master Plan should and must be housed. But where is the overall warehouse for our long-term development planning, across all sectors? Somewhere equivalent to, but more institutionalized than, our present time-bound Vision 2030 support structures?

Though it must still deliver on its promise, Lamu Port’s commissioning reminds us of our development possibilities; of the idea that success is 90 per cent preparation, 10 per cent perspiration. Wasn’t that Vision 2030? Not an ad-hoc project list, but an institutional platform mapping our futures. So that we wouldn’t have to ask what problem each project we came across was actually solving. Food for thought.