The Hindu Business Line : The long journey of Africa’s Railways

It was not just the Pope who carved up the globe with his famous ‘Papal Bull’ issued in 1493, granting to Spain and Portugal the ‘New World’, east and west of a certain longitude. Even Britain and Germany found nothing wrong in drawing up a treaty in Berlin in 1890 to split up the East African pie!

Railways being then the only known route to opening up the country, the British and Germans soon got down to building a rail network.

While the British were still busy consolidating their grip on India, the Germans were first off the block and, in 1893, began construction of a 2-foot wide narrow gauge system from Tanga, on the east coast, which by 1896, after reaching 40 km, ran out of funds. This grandiosely named ‘Usumbara Bahn’ was taken over by the German government and reached Moshi in 1912, just before the World War I broke out.

The end of the War saw the British walking into Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and taking over the Railway assets which soon became part of the East African Railway Corporation (EARC), which soon spread its sinews of steel to nearly 5,900 km, all set to exploit the natural resources of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

Built basically to reach the land-locked Uganda, the Railway began its tortuous journey across the Kenyan landscape in 1896, and in a year it had reached the Athi river plain at the foothills of the vast Kenya plateau. After some delay, because of the menace posed by a few man-eating tigers in Tsavo, it reached Nairobi by 1900.

Indian labour

A couple of years later, the line arrived at the shores of the vast Lake Victoria at Kisumu and the first service started in 1903, the whole train crossing over on a steam ferry. A 10-km link between Kisumu and Kampala, the Capital of Uganda, helped to complete the 1,400 km journey from Mombasa.

The metre-gauge was chosen, first as it would be cheaper to build, the second, and more important, reason being the ready availability of the vast army of cheap labour that had been engaged. At one time, more than 30,000 Indian labourers were engaged in this Herculean task, a large number of whom would ultimately choose to remain behind and adopt Kenyan citizenship.

By 1977, the original East African Community had been dissolved and each of its countries established its own national railway, with the Kenyan part of the Uganda railway — EARC — becoming the Kenya Railways Corporation (KRC), while the Ugandan part was transformed into the Uganda Railways Corporation (URC). The last in the game were the Chinese, who built from 1970 to 1976 the 1,860 km-long cape gauge (3’-6”) Tazara (TAnganyika ZAmbia RAilway) line from Dar-es-Salaam to Harare, the capital of Zambia, for shipping out valuable copper ingots.

A break of gauge was established at Kidatu since 1998 to trans-ship goods with the East African Railways system, which is metre gauge. Tazara perhaps provides the closest to a Cape-to-Cairo link that Cecil Rhodes had dreamt of decades ago! At present, the Kenyan arm of the EARC has 1,920 km, the Uganda Railway has 430 km. Only 41 per cent of the wagon fleet and 21 per cent of the locos of KRC, and 81 per cent of wagons and 73 per cent of the locos of URC are operational!

Falling freight load

From a peak of over 6 million tonnes carried by EARC in 1968, it carried just 4 million tonnes in 2007. Passenger traffic had been averaging about 750 million passenger km between the 1980 and the 1990s, with a peak of 823 in 1988.

At present, the KRC, as well as the UGC, are managed under a 25-year concession granted to Sheltam Rail Company Pty of South Africa, which began its operations as the Rift Valley Railways in December 2006. However, consequent to serious rioting up north, when rail track and equipment was extensively damaged, the company has fallen behind in its contractual obligations, including annual payment of concession charges of around $2 million each for October-December 2007, and January-March 2008.

Understandably, the RVR is claiming cover under the PRG (Partial Risk Guarantee) as the riots last year closed down the line between Kenya and Uganda. The PRG was recently introduced by World Bank as an instrument to mitigate the risk private companies face in investing in third world countries.

It provides cover for private investors against termination resulting from either breach of contract by government or a change in the national policy, and the Kenyan government has earmarked a whopping $45 million for the PRG. However, in political circles this affair in being talked about as one of the most messy attempts at privatisation of a public utility in Kenyan history!

(The author is a former Member, Railway Board. E-mail: acharya@bol.net.in.)