Forefront Excerpt: The Infrastructure Promise

An introductory excerpt from this week’s Forefront.

Credit: Dayo Olopade

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A $24 billion, 1,700-mile ongoing infrastructure project seeks to lay oil pipeline, roads and rail through three East African countries: Kenya, Ethiopia and South Sudan. In Forefront this week, Next City and German Marshall Fund International Fellow Dayo Olopade explores what the endeavor will do to this fast-urbanizing part of the world.

It was a bright day last March in the village of Lamu, on Kenya’s northern coast. Mwai Kibaki, Meles Zenawi and Salva Kiir — the respective heads of Kenya, Ethiopia and South Sudan — had traveled to the sleepy town where they would mark the groundbreaking of a massive, multinational infrastructure project. Designed to jump-start East Africa’s economy and give autonomy to new democracies, the project is the most ambitious attempted in this part of the world in a century.

Each of the three men had good reasons to be there. For Zenawi, the project, known as the Lamu Port South Sudan Ethiopia Transit corridor (LAPSSET), would open distribution routes to accelerate his nation’s already-booming GDP growth. For Kibaki, the rail, road and tourism blueprints presented a chance to bring activity to Kenya’s dusty, impoverished north. For Kiir, the oil pipeline would free South Sudan from the indignities of exporting crude through its northern neighbor, with whom it spent the best of 25 years locked in bitter civil war.

To commemorate the occasion, each planted a tree of symbolic value.

Kibaki chose a fig tree, which, in Kikuyu folklore, gives the planter dominion over the land in which it takes root. Rather like the tribes that make up the majority of his country, Kiir’s tree was the tallest. Zenawi dug a hole and planted a tree as well. Today, both he and his tree are dead.

This is LAPSSET one year in. It’s hard to imagine that the site — now a ragged opening in the shore paved with mangrove stalks left to bleach in the sun — will one day become a massive shipping jetty. But the $24 billion idea is drawn from the oldest and grandest of planning instincts.

It was more than a century ago, in 1898, that this area last entertained a vision of this scale. Then, European colonizers started blasting a railway from Mombasa, another port city on the Indian Ocean, to Kampala, then the capital of British East Africa. Construction halted when workers hit the escarpment of the Great Rift Valley. They paused to contemplate next steps, and the dry highlands where they waited are now Nairobi, the region’s largest city. Most economic activity in modern-day Uganda and Kenya takes place within 50 kilometers of the railway.

LAPSSET will build another railroad, roads and resorts along a 1,700-kilometer proposed route, linking a new deepwater port at Lamu to the fledgling state of South Sudan. The port will host bulk, container and general cargo docks to supply the many landlocked countries dotting East Africa. Its rail and roads will steer through Ethiopia’s southern half. The keystone of the project is a pipeline and refinery to turn the region’s crude oil finds, confirmed and new, into cash.

The joint venture — approved in Kenya in 2010, signed as a memorandum of understanding by South Sudan in 2012 and inaugurated, with Ethiopia’s blessing, at Lamu — is also an unusual example of regional cooperation. Each participating government will finance the various moving parts. Addis is to provide electricity. Juba will provide oil. Nairobi promises to open the sea. Beyond the three main partners, landlocked Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and parts of eastern Congo also stand to benefit from cheaper imports and surer exports. It’s a revival of blueprints dating back to the 1970s.

If completed, LAPSSET will mean big changes to local politics and economics. Most obviously, the changes will be felt in idyllic Lamu, a region projected to swell from 100,000 to 1.25 million people over the next 20 years. In theory, the boomtown will employ dockworkers, machinists, engineers and an associated class of service workers. Some will cater to a new glut of tourists eager for flashy dance halls and casinos one finds in other coastal hotspots like Malindi and Mombasa. A housing and construction boom will spur promises of hospitals, schools and other services to support a more populous constituency. At the other end of the pipe, South Sudan will have a stream of oil revenue reliable and large enough to finally build the state of its people’s dreams.

In short, LAPSSET will be a test case for infrastructure spending as an economic development tool in 21st-century East Africa.

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Tags: infrastructureeconomic developmentenergy

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