Leave Alone Sigiri Bridge, Another Multi-Billion Project Collapses

In July, President Uhuru ordered the completion of projects before new ones are initiated. This came after reports emerged that a lot of money is lost on incomplete projects.

This saw the country straining with borrowing of money for development projects, which were found to bring no return to the nation. The president was right!

And now, Uhuru’s Ksh7.2 Billion Galana-Kulalu project that was meant to help solve the country’s food crisis has collapsed.

According to investigations by Nation, the construction stalled due to sour relations between the contractor, Green Arava, the National Irrigation Board (NIB), the implementing agency for the project, and the Ministry of Water and Irrigation.

Green Arava accused NIB of failing to honour requests for payments before threatening to stop any further work until all its requests for payments are addressed.

On the other hand, NIB accused the contractor of going rogue, failing to respond to numerous letters, demobilising from the construction site contrary to contractual obligations.

“We have reached a point of no return. We cannot continue with more payments for work whose progress we are not pleased with. We have written to the National Treasury so that they can advise on a way forward,” Charles Muasya, the head of design and planning of irrigation projects at the National Irrigation Board revealed.

The Galana-Kulalu Food Project is being financed by the government and an Israel bank known as Bank Leumi, which provided a loan of Ksh6.35 Billion towards the scheme on condition that an Israeli firm be picked to start the farm.

Initially, the project was to run for 30 months, with March 9, 2017, set as the completion date. However, Green Arava requested an extension to January 2018 after failing to meet the deadline but again failed to deliver. 

In September 2018, the firm asked for another extension to finalise by April 2019. On January 17, Noam Ftecha, a project manager at Green Arava, wrote to NIB complaining that the agency was solely to blame for the incomplete project.

He cited various issues, among them a lack of funds to start cropping small parts of the farm before preparing the rest of it for the same purpose. 

Green Arava also blamed the weather for the woes facing the project, pointing out the El Nino of November 2015 to January 2016; the short rains of November to December 2014 and long rains of March to April 2015,” which they say caused delays to the project. 

When contacted, the country director of Green Arava, Ofir Meroz, refused to comment on the issue stating that he was not interested.

These issues are cropping up at a time when the project should be making Ksh1.2 Billion in maize sales per season, as per projections. This output would have solved the country’s maize shortage crisis.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *