OP-ED: Kenya: The need to match hardware and software By Greg Mills BrenthurstF
The East African Tea Trade Association is a venerable institution, established more than 60 years ago. The new building was opened by Mr JGH Thwaites, scion of the famous Ceylon botanist who developed the Assam tea seed variety, in October 1994. Today it hosts the regional tea auctions, where more than 600 million kilograms of tea from 10 countries — Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Madagascar, Zambia and Zimbabwe — were sold in 2018.
So far, despite big expenditure on infrastructure, Kenya has not put in place the package of policy necessary to turn obvious opportunity into real jobs. To the contrary, if anything, it seems to be moving in the opposite direction. The problem with logistics in Kenya is, second, not only that there is congestion and road transport is expensive. This much is true. There were 3,000 trucks on the Mombasa-Nairobi stretch of road at peak. The road freight system was indubitably unwieldy and dangerous.
So far the linking of logistics with fresh employment initiatives has not happened. To the contrary, business complains that things have become more difficult, in part because of the impact of a loss of logistics services to the port. The government has neither aggressively pursued free trade agreements which characterise successful industrial zones elsewhere.The third problem is that the Standard Gauge Railway revenue model reputedly hinges less on passengers than freight.
The discounted Standard Gauge Railway tariff ended in December 2018, rising to $500 and $700 for a 6m and 12m container respectively, plus the additional delivery charges. And the blanket ban on trucks is still in place.
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