Infrastructure Information

I was in a meeting with a client last week and it became apparent that a lot of information necessary for some construction work should be consolidated in one place so that it is easily available for interested parties. This is to avoid a situation like this one where a Chinese road construction company (do this guys have one road making machine they seem to be taking ages to fix Mombasa Road) cut Kenya Data Networks fibre optic cables.

With Kenya apparently the regional hub and Nairobi its economic hub, detailed maps of where fibre optic cables are laid will have to be put into a central repository like the University of Nairobi or one of the Ministries if the minions do not hold you hostage with a "lost" map. Nairobi currently has 4! fibre-optic cables ringing it! I do not know their locations. The maps should also have information about water pipes, drains, electrical lines, telephone lines (unfortunately becoming extinct though much more reliable than those wireless lines Telkom is pushing to consumers) etc. I do not trust The Nairobi City Council or the Ministry of Lands to keep any records especially after the suspicious fire in the Engineering Department office and the parrallel lands office title deed scam.

Information that should also be readily available are: the geological formation of Nairobi and its environs...actually every major city and town in Kenya, Civil Aviation map, Telecommunication "corridors" and future government plans like the bypasses etc. Detailed Nairobi maps can currently be obtained from Survey of Kenya, but you have to be vetted by Department of Defence! So we will have to do with shitty maps like this one or Google Maps.

With the undersea cable war on, its interesting to note that worldwide cable maps have already been updated to show the cables connecting the East African coast. Lets hope that SEACOM, TEAMS and EASSY become a reality by the end of next year.

CDF can kill you & Muthurwa Market News

Seems like being anywhere near the Community Development Funds can get you killed. CDF has been a topic of discussion in our office for a long time with debates being on whether to raise it and who should manage it. It seems like some people see it as a way to enrich themselves quick leading to intense competition on control of the funds.

Apparently the Muthurwa residents are not happy with the Bus park & Hawkers market developments around them. At first there was joy that a market has been opened close to them and also that matatu's are nearby. Now the joy has turned to agony as complaints about noise, dust, fumes pollution and thugs have become common! Like I wrote before, the whole thing was half planned almost as if the planners do not look at the whole picture and the residents reaction does not surprise me!

Rogue Contractors and Working for the Government

Well it seems like the new Vice President House or is it now the Prime Ministers House is not complete. It was meant to have been completed in 2005...well its 2008 and it's nowhere nearing completion. various reasons for the delay are given which I will expound on. There are two main issues-:

1. Working for the government is not easy. While tendering, the government is required by law to publish the tender details in a local daily, which is a good thing or you will never get to know about these things. The bad side is that what happens in such situations is, everyone who has a jembe and a wheelbarrow considers himself a contractor and applies for the tender. This person normally wont have the capacity to do the job at the required skill level and will probably be the lowest in terms of cost. These are the guys who get the jobs mostly and later on when there are delays you realise that the guy shouldn't have been given the job in the first place.

Another problem is the inspectors from the ministry. They look at your contract value, come along to site inspect and check that you are complying in every way possible to their specifications and find that you are doing a better job than expected. This is when they claim that you are earning too much money and you can part with Ksh. 1m or more without it hurting your pocket...the guy then proceeds to hold you ransom by not signing the necessary certification papers!

Also the government is a very slow moving behemoth of a bureaucracy. It takes ages to get paid and if you are not a big company with enough capital and deeeeep pockets, you are done for. If you can forget those government contracts.

2. The contractors, due to the above mentioned "problems" resort to political patronage to get jobs. You will find a contractor getting a job and actually getting paid the full amount (they have connections to a person with weight to throw around) and they still end up not doing the job. Why should they? They pay their patron some cut from the total amount and he protects them from any minion trying to get to them. All they will do, if its a road, is patch it up till the next payment that they get and basta!

For example whoever has been to western Kenya will note the poor state of the roads. All these years, all the western Kenya road repair contracts have been going to a major firm based in Kisumu (no names). They do get paid every year for the "work done" (actually to be done) What they do is very evident in the state of the roads! This is a company that could recently afford to go all the way from Kisumu to Mombasa to do a 10km stretch of road beating out all the Mombasa contractors! As far as I can tell they do have political patronage so no one does anything to them and they still get on getting all the road repair contracts.

Political patronage can be dangerous some times since our politicians do like overstepping their mandate and increasing their job description to cover areas that do not concern them.

Contracting in Kenya is a challenging business.

Buses vs. Matatus Redux

My last post about buses vs. matatu's got some guys going about the cost of buying those articulated buses vs. cost of a matatu. I do not know why everyone thinks that matatu's are cheaper to operate just because you buy them cheaper than a bus. I just found out that a new articulated bus costs about $500,000 (Ksh. 32.5m). That's a (edit) high price. If you find the price prohibitive then let me propose a way out where one can share the cost.

Let a public transport company for Nairobi metro (Nairobi and its surroundings i.e. Thika, Kiambu, Muranga, Athi River, Ngong, etc) be set up. The company should have shareholding in the following percentages:

Government - 20%
Nairobi City Council - 20%
Matatu Owners / Operaters - 45%
Public (floated in the Nairobi Stock Exchange) - 15%

The Government can even reduce its shareholding and those added to the matatu operators and the public. I am sure the company would be able to raise the capital to buy the buses and get rid of all the small 14seater minibuses. The main reason for having the City Council as part of the ownership structure is that they could at some point build extra lanes for these buses to operate on, thus avoiding any traffic jams like they have done in Curitiba, Brazil. This link has some interesting facts about how the city coped with their rapid population growth.


Now looking at the radial Curitiba transport pattern one cannot fail to see the resemblance of the transport pattern what Kenya Bus Service used to have them days. Presently the matatu's have split their operations along the former KBS routes into two. Where previously you would take one bus form Eastlands to Westlands, today you have to take two or even three. All the matatu's end their service at the city centre thus congesting it. Before, KBS used to pass through the city and only stopped at bus station to change the crew at around 1200-1300hrs. This is something that Uhuru Kenyatta should ponder about. He would decongest the city centre simply by ordering the matatu's to travel the WHOLE old KBS routes.

If Uhuru wants to keep his Muthurwa-market-bus-stop-model, then he has to do it to all public transport businesses coming into the city centre and not only those who serve Eastlands (apart from metro and companies). That will mean keeping the city free of traffic and if he really wants the CBD decongested, he should extend it to affect private cars.

By the way have you guys seen the double decker bus on the 58 route...maybe we should get all those decommissioned double deckers from England over here to help us cope with our transport issues.

The Kenyan Press Rant

I must confess that I do not own a TV. I do not see the need to have one. After watching Kenyan TV for a few months I decided that it was just extra baggage unless I got DSTV or GTV meaning I would have to find time to sit and actually watch TV. When I came back from Germany, I just could not stand the way our reporters talk and report things. The news reports are stretched unnecessarily long and they report on trivial matters almost as if to mask the viewers from things that matter like development.

On TV presenters, KTN's Njoroge Mwaura phonetics are terrible. He accents and cuts sentences at totally the wrong places making him stress the wrong thing. He seems to be the role model of all the new staff that KTN has hired.

Beatrice Marshal is following Mwaura's footsteps and could someone please tell her not to be wearing those trouser suites...she is tall thin, wears high collar shirts ala Karl Lagerfeld to hide her long neck and she would look nice in a long dress since KTN has taken the format of having presenters stand in front of the desk before going to the news is not really good for her.

The NTV reporters are kurutus. An report that has stuck to my mind is the time when Chinese President Hu Jin Tao was in Kenya and the local press were told to ask 1 question... a reporter from NTV was given the task and he wasted it on a totally irrelevant question about some shenanigans that took place the day before in Parliament. Hallo this was the Chinese president...think neo-colonialism, cheap knock-off's, trade imbalance, human rights, Dafur...Their report of the visit started with the remark "who is in town..." and I am meant to take them seriously. They did though take some timeless pics of the First Lady in some awkward situation on the State House balcony.

Julie Gichuru also wasted a once in a lifetime chance to ask Obama some hard hitting questions about his future political relationship with Kenya like why is he in Kenya, apart from visiting his family, when he clearly says that he represents his state Illinois interests...she gets soft on controversial or charismatic figures.

Robert Nagila keeps on bobbing his head while speaking. Sometimes I think that our future presenters are last years winners of the Poem & Insha category in the School Music Festival.

Oh yes and why do all reporters pause while saying the last caption of their report, stressing their location right down to the street corner/ meter?

KBC is the worst Parrot in this category and Citizen TV... just cannot shake that Papa Shirandula look no matter how much they re-launch themselves... even the matter of objectivity is a no no. K24 TV is too casual for my taste. All TV stations stretch the 9 o'clock news unnecessarily long (1 hour! Airtime must be cheap in Kenya!) so that some times the sport presenters have to rush and read fast to keep time!?.

KTN has the best editors but ever since they were raided they have become sooooo overly critical of the government that they lost their objectivity and cut their reports to suite their view. For example the recent Nairobi mayoral election was painted by KTN to be a huge PNU rigging scheme just like the election. Remember that KTN (stepping into a mine field here) had made everyone believe that Odinga had won the presidential election and Kibaki had rigged himself in through the ECK. To prove my point, every 2007 election result sceptic quotes KTN as their authority! By the way, the EU final report on the elections is still pending though it was due in February...I am not surprised since the EU was very vocal to support Odinga without checking their facts...now they will have to cook their books somehow considering that most of their observers were mostly in the national parks. At least NTV tried to remain objective during the chaos but lost it when the media ban was imposed. Anyway Odinga has now got what he always wanted but broke the back of our Judiciary system along the way which he incidentally so trusted to try and stop the Safaricom IPO just before the elections but not to settle the election dispute. I digress.

The reason I am seriously condemning our Pressmen is that I cannot really say that they are objective / research in depth all articles and reports that they present at all. I do not see any form of professionalism in them. They are not critical enough to focus on development issues or uncover government scams. They are also very Nairobi centric in their reporting. I really miss WDR 5 in Germany a radio station dedicated to news & documentaries or Phoenix the current affairs channel which covers parliamentary debates, shows news conferences and rallies UNCUT and in full length. I also miss The Weekly Review as it was before 1984. No wonder in Kenya news has become Newsshot / Bullseye and in the print media Nairobi Star / Metro "newspapers".

I still have more rants about the press and have just started.

Arthur C. Clarke dead at 90

I heard of his death on the BBC last night. He is one of my favourite Science Fiction authors alongside Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein and I fondly remember his three laws of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Read more here: Clarke Foundation, Famous Quotes, Sir Arthur Clarke.net

Obama Race Speech

Digressing from my usual topic to cover the "candidate"!
Powerful speech titled "A More Perfect Union"

Cape Cod Rentals | Big Bear Cabins | mp3 songs

You can get the text and video from his site, the MP3 of the speech from here or download an MP4 video direct from Google Video using this link

spider spider on the wall...

This post has no meaning and is meant for spiders....Technorati Profile

Vision 2030

News is out that the much hyped vision 2030 will be implemented in July. I really wonder how one can set up a plan to develop Kenya as can be read in the brochure and not mention anything to do with infrastructure (roads & railway). The only thing I have seen is a powerpoint picture of "how Nairobi can become".

Anyway there are now plans to extend the railway to the airport as announced by Hon. Makwere the same one who suspended a swoop on defective matatu's in 2006 claiming he owned one and the police action would be shooting himself in the foot. I will blog on the proposed light rail network later on.

linking to something

Nairobi City Council Website

Nairobi City council website hosting service has expired. Follow the link and you find this message:

nairobicity.org expired on 02/25/2008 and is pending renewal or deletion.

The website had very inadequate information for someone seeking to find out which services are offered by the Council...it was just like any generic tourist information site for a city i.e. aimed at tourists and not the locals who live in the city. What the site really lacked was information on who does what and how to contact the relevant person / department.

Nyeri Town Council website is good but not perfect. At least the phone numbers and contacts of the various officials can be found there.

What Kenya really needs is transparency and accountability so that when things go wrong with something like the Muthurwa market transport fiasco we know who to ask and not some elected official who has held the job two months. Its the minions on the ground who we need to be looking at.

Reports are out that matatu operators are striking in town. Nothing new there...from my previous posts it was inevitable.

More on Muthurwa Market and the Dog's Master

I am attaching a Google Earth screen shot to highlight the magnitude of the planning problem our city planners have created by re-routing the matatu's. Marked blue are the major road arteries used by matatu's. Of course when there is a jam then other alternatives are used. Now all the matatu's from the east have been directed to go to the stop right before the Muthurwa market. The road is narrow and a dead end...leaving no room for our favourite road rules flouters...matatu drivers. No wonder people have to go to city stadium to get their transport home.

Michuki just announced that Thika Road will be made into a 10 lane superhighway. That is good news as long as thoughts are made on how and where the 10 lanes will end. I hope we do not get into the Nigerian situation where 4 lanes converge into 1! I cannot find photo of the highway online but its in Rem Kohlhaas book Lagos: How It Works.

On a lighter note now that we are talking of Lagos, I am sure by now you must have received a picture like the one below in your email inbox taken somewhere in Nigeria. I remember receiving a similar one taken from a mobile phone some years back and my Nigerian relatives told me that the boys were either selling bush meat (yani these guys eat hyenas!) or they were selling "fierce dogs". Well I stumbled upon an explanation which can be found here and photos can be found here.

Matatu's v.s. Buses

I must confess to have enjoyed ridding the bus in Europe...in cities i.e. not the long distance ones. In Kenya I enjoyed ridding the Kenya Bus Service, who used to be punctual and operate also in the wee hours of the morning... that was a long time ago. Well gone are the days and we now have matatu's which come in two versions:

14 seater -
or 29 seater.

The Muthurwa bus terminal problem with its 3000 odd matatu's could be easily solved by getting bigger buses with capacities of up to 190 passengers. These buses should be low to allow those of us who are getting old to get into them.

I find the Citi-Hoppa's, Double M's and KBS'es too high for comfort that I am always afraid that they would topple over when over speeding round a corner (most citi hoppa buses have disabled their speed governors!) or I would fall off while alighting through their narrow high doors.

The buses should look something like this:
Or on high volume routes like the Eastlands one the buses should be the articulated ones.

There are many advantages of using such buses. Not only do they have a lifetime of about 12 years when properly maintained but there is a possibility to have them running on natural gas or have hybrid ones running on both diesel and electricity - they can have batteries or have connections to electric pylons on designated routes.

To get them the Michuki rules will have to be revised to not apply to these buses, since most of the passengers will be standing as one can see from the bottom pic depicting the standard interior of such a bus.


Anyway I haven't witnessed this in a long while and hope that we do not go back there any time soon!

Muthurwa Market and Bus Park

I think the Muthurwa Market idea is noble and good. Our planners are at least trying to solve the issues that plague us. Hawkers are a nuisance especially for pedestrians in town. Two weeks ago on a Saturday, I dumped my car opposite city hall and walked all the way down to OTC. It didn't take me long to realise that it was faster to walk on the road watching out for speeding matatu's coming from behind than on the curb which had been taken over by hawkers.

Though the hawkers offer cheap products for the masses, they are really a nuisance. The market came at the nick of time to save and sort out the situation. After a few hiccups while distributing the stalls (a 1m x 1m space marked on the floor of a mabati sheet covered space) the rent was reduced from Ksh.100 ($1.53) per day to Ksh.50 ($0.76) per day. To add value to the location (bring people to the hawkers rather than have the hawkers follow the people), the minister for Local Government Uhuru Kenyatta ordered that all matatu's plying the Eastlands route (Jogoo road) terminate their services at the market.

My take on this is:

Good:
- The market will pay itself back in 5 years at the current rate.
- Nairobi CBD will mostly be free of hawkers!
- The CBD will also have less matatu's

Bad:
The planning was half done! The matatu directive has actually led to congestion. The matatu's are rightly terminating their services at City Stadium. The problem here is that Jogoo Road is a 3 lane highway and the entry to the "bus park" (this is an entry to the railway residence on a road located off the city stadium roundabout) is two lane opposing traffic road with no real turning area at the end. Considering the way matatu's are impatient, they will always overtake and end up blocking each other for hours in the terminus. This is exactly what is what is currently happening! Think of 3000 matatu's, hawkers and commuters at rush hour on a 500m stretch of road! Please do not move any more matatu's to the terminus!



The market was grossly over priced! The Ksh.700m ($10.7m) - mostly taken to be Ksh. 1billion / $14.3m - price tag is about the same as what it cost to put up the Rahimtulla Trust Tower on Upperhill. The market is just a concrete floor with metal shed covering the area. Even if inflation is factored in and the current price of steel which has gone through the roof there is no justification for the figure.

There are two factors that could have led to the enormous figure:

• Consider the scandal that hit Uhuru Kenyatta personal assistant regarding the nomination of councillors, it would not surprise me if the City Council principals involved in the construction and planning of the structure took home a huge cut.

• The current procurement act as used by the government favours those who are supplying stationery but it is totally inadequate for the construction industry. Do not be surprised when you hear such sums in all government projects!

First Post

The post election violence / clashes / ethnic cleansing or whatever you want to call it in Kenya, opened my eyes to the need for a clear development structure either by the government or by us Kenyans since in my opinion our parliamentarians all seem preoccupied with power, wages, terms in office and cars (login required). I am yet to see a Kenyan leader who really has a vision for Kenya and the will to develop the whole country and not his pocket or region alone.

I know the ninth parliament gave us the vision 2030 which has not really been properly decimated to the public. All I know are bits and pieces about the vision and I am willing to have a look at everything. I might have missed the opportunity to add my voice to the vision in some public forum. I will try and use this blog to address those development issues which will mainly be those affecting infrastructure and development.