PLUNDER: Ministry plans to import 25-year junk trains from Spain

In a closely guarded secret kept away from the public, the Ministry of Transport is suspiciously trying to purchase very old trains from Spain at whopping Sh10 billion.

The reconditioned Diesel Multiple Units (DMUs) are expected to arrive in the country any time from June this year in a rushed plan that raises suspicions on just how they are going to operate given findings of a report that questions their low capacity, weaker engines and in Nairobi’s single-track railway system.

RAW DEAL

Details of the purchase plan contained in a report released last month by two global consultants commissioned by Kenya Railways Corporation have remained a carefully covered secret with only superficial references made to the public.

The deal is now at an advanced stage, pushed by influential Transport ministry officials despite operational challenges being pointed out.

The team handling the matter first convinced the Cabinet to approve a government-to-government deal with Spain, effectively insulating the plan from procurement scrutiny.

Kept off discussion

Senior government officials including Transport Cabinet Secretary James Macharia and principal secretaries Charles Hinga and Esther Koimett have kept off commenting on the procurement of the units as old as 25 years, amid concerns that taxpayers may get a raw deal.

In the deal, a single train is priced at between Sh71 million and Sh137 million (without spares or any upgrade).

A benchmarking tour to Spain by a team of 11 officials drawn from KRC, the World Bank and the ministry, led by Ms Koimett and Mr Hinga in September 2018, is said to have marked a major turning point in what is increasingly appearing to be a bad deal.

Sugar-coated deal

Kenya had just completed a year-long study funded by the World Bank on how to decongest its capital city through mass movement of people in and out of Nairobi.

The report, which had detailed vital prerequisites for a long-term plan to make commuter trains and high capacity buses attractive to private car owners, specified the types of trains, capacity, routes and the frequency that would be able to handle the city’s bulging population. There was even a “quick win” component of the report with a specific work plan.

“All that was no longer relevant after the trip to Spain. Some ministry officials even separated themselves from the rest of the delegation and began making calls back in Kenya, just two days after we had a presentation from the Spanish train operator in Barcelona,” a source who was in the September 6 to 15 trip said.

Barcelona trip

Two weeks after the trip to Barcelona, which was not meant to shop for trains in the first place, the Cabinet approved the decision to purchase the trains.

This was hinged on a government-to-government procurement arrangement with Spain, bypassing rigorous procurement requirements as happened in the multi-billion-shilling Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) project.

A ministry official, who is said to have blamed the team for “planning too much”, reportedly teamed up with a KRC technical consultant to come up with a sweet-coated proposal on the trains whose technical assessment had not been done and operational plan in Nairobi had not been ascertained.

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