Kenyan and Chinese officials last week inaugurated a 290-mile-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.
Kenyan and Chinese officials last week inaugurated a 290-mile-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, farther 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 China is playing in Africa. Its activities are also growing in Latin America, the U.S. 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.
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.
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 also were 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 290-mile rail line.
America has in recent years had the bad habit of fighting expensive wars instead of building expensive railroads.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette