Kenyan and Chinese officials on Wednesday inaugurated a 470-kilometer-long railway built and largely financed by the Chinese between Kenya’s and East Africa’s busiest port, Mombasa, and Kenya’s capital and financial and commercial center, Nairobi.
The Chinese also recently opened another important railway line between Djibouti, further up the East African coast, a country with America’s only military base in Africa, and another key African country, Ethiopia. Ethiopia is landlocked and, thus, the link to Djibouti is critical to the advancement of its economy.
There is a slight tendency on the part of Americans to weep and moan about the increasingly large role that China is playing in Africa. Its activities are also growing in Latin America, the US’ backyard. There is also a slight tendency to suggest that the active Chinese economic, financial and commercial role in these areas is somehow unfair. At the same time, there is virtually nothing that prevents American firms and banks from competing actively for these markets, for these opportunities.
One might suggest that what is missing now is the old, admired “Yankee trader” mentality, whatever it was that drove Americans across the centuries to push hard to build and to be active in pursuit of markets. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, is a still not particularly exploited market of 1 billion people. Its infrastructure needs are virtually limitless.
China, now, can be said to have excess capacity. On the other hand, the first Chinese traders came to the east coast of Africa in the 15th century. A bronze statue of a Chinese admiral of that period adorned the Nairobi-Mombasa railroad when it was inaugurated by Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of the father of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta.
The railroad itself responds to a profound need for infrastructure on the part not only of Kenyans, but also of the people of some five neighboring countries, to which plans indicate that the railway, the Madaraka Express, will eventually be extended. These include Burundi, Ethiopia, Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda, linking all of them to financial center Nairobi and port Mombasa.
The railroad is criticized as expensive at $3.2 billion, more than 80 percent loaned to Kenya, including by China’s export-import bank. The Chinese were also accused of using too many Chinese to build it and to run it for the first five years, while Kenyans are being trained as engineers and managers. On the other hand, it took only 2 1/2 years to build, some over rough country. It is hard to imagine how many years Americans would take to build a 470-kilometer rail line.
America has in recent years had the bad habit of fighting expensive wars instead of building expensive railroads.
