A gate through auto dealer Car & General’s retail showroom in Nakuru town along the main highway ushers one into a slightly more spacious room where workers barely notice your entry.
The workers, some clad in grey overalls and navy blue dust coats, are busy piecing together metallic frames and parts.
The explosion of motorcycles has revolutionised transportation in rural Kenya”
A gate through auto dealer Car & General’s retail showroom in Nakuru town along the main highway ushers one into a slightly more spacious room where workers barely notice your entry.
The workers, some clad in grey overalls and navy blue dust coats, are busy piecing together metallic frames and parts.
They are undistracted.
Standing on either side of a moving motorcycle assembly line facing each other, the workers join components of motorbikes — technically called Completely Knocked Down (CKD) kits.
Before we are introduced to an approaching CKD plant head Girish Mhatarmare, a bike rolls off the production line.
Half a dozen rows of two-wheelers are taking longer in that space.
“With our plant, a bike comes out after two to three minutes,” Mr Mhatarmare says. “Our assembly line has 14 different stages and every stage has two minutes with an allowance of 20 seconds to finish up their work.”
Sh50m assembly line
The Sh50 million motorcycle assembly line for India’s TVS brand can produce up to 240 bikes a day, says Mr Mhatarmare, an Indian expatriate overseeing operations of the assembly set up in April 2013.
Motorcycle assembling industry is part of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s wider plan to grow job opportunities in local auto sector under the manufacturing pillar of the ‘Big Four Agenda’.
Mr Kenyatta is banking on modernisation and development of new factories such as auto assembling to help create targeted 800,000 new decent jobs for expanding unemployed youth by 2022.
The President in December 2016, for instance, directed government ministries, departments and agencies to buy locally assembled cars as part of a plan to expand the new vehicles market and attract more global auto investors.
“Priority must and will always go to that which is manufactured, assembled or value-added to some level here,” Mr Kenyatta said.
The Car & General plant has a workforce of 40 local staff, the bulk of them permanent employees, the firm with roots in Nakuru since 1936 said.
Motorcycle assembly is part of the listed company’s business which is largely in distribution and supply of power generation, automotive and engineering products.
“Initially, we used to assembly our motorbikes in Kisumu and it was purely a manual process. We could do up to 30 bikes in a day,” Car & General managing director David Chesoni said, adding the workforce at the time was 10.
“Our objective in setting up this plant was to try to increase our capacity because we saw demand was growing.”
The assembly line comprises 14 stages, each operated by two workers who use air tools preset for each nut and bolt.
After assembling, a counter-check is carefully done to ensure the engine and frame numbers are matching before the installation of the front suspension followed by the rear wheel.
A ready motorbike is taken to the pre-delivery inspection (PDI) where the engine is tested on fuel before they are distributed through branches and dealers.
Components, except for foot rests, stands and crash guards are imported as the country struggles to build capacity for local content in auto assembly.
Assembling process for one unit of a motorbike takes 23 to 28 minutes. But once the production hits top gear, it takes between two and three minutes.
The increased demand for motorcycles since 2007 has seen a raft of measures in place, including tax incentives, exemption of motorcycles below 250cc engine from the standard 16 per cent value added tax, making them more affordable.
Motorbike registration has, as a result, shot up from 16,293 in 2007 to 186,434 in 2017, data by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics shows.
Thousands of jobs
Besides TVS brand, other models on Kenyan roads include Japanese Honda, which also opened a local assembly with an initial capacity of 25,000 units a year in 2013, Indian firm’s Bajaj brands such as Boxer, Toyota Kenya’s distributed Yamaha as well as a myriad of low-cost Chinese brands.
The explosion of motorcycles has revolutionised transportation in rural Kenya as well as within towns due to its speed and convenience amid rising vehicular traffic on main roads, albeit with flaws such as little regard to traffic rules.
That has created thousands of jobs for youth who work as riders.
At the same time, however, accident rates related to motorcycles have also shot up, costing the economy millions of shillings in medical bills and deaths.
“As an industry, we are encouraging safe riding. The key thing is culture and attitude change among boda bodas so they know they are providing a very important service to this country,” the C&G Kenyan boss said.
A survey by a US-based consultancy TechSci Research in 2016 showed that the two-wheelers were increasingly becoming a key mode of transport in Africa.
The report suggested South Africa, Nigeria and Tanzania were the leading motorcycle markets in Africa, followed by Kenya, Algeria, Uganda, and Egypt.
The motorcycle riding business has interested taxi-hailing firms such as Estonia-based firm Taxify, which, in March 2018, ventured into the business, charging a minimum fare of Sh50 with a base of Sh30, Sh15 per kilometre and Sh3 per minute.
“Looking into the future, we see good prospects in terms of growth as more and more people take to riding as a means of transport in the personal segment and not just boda boda (motor cycle taxis),” Mr Chesoni said.
“If this happens, we can work in two shifts to increase capacity from the current average of 240 bikes a day in one shift.”
