African agency in the Belt and Road Initiative: Kenya’s rail investment as China’s flagship BRI project in Africa

Uwe Wissenbach

Chapter 10 in The Belt and Road Initiative and Global Governance, 2020, pp 204-224 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter illustrates how Chinese financing and contractors have created a new development option for African governments seeking to deliver infrastructure megaprojects. It provides a study of the Standard Gauge Railway built by Kenya with Chinese assistance under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) between 2014 and 2017 – a project previously assessed as non-viable by the World Bank. The chapter emphasizes the ability of the Kenyan government to set up a powerful centralized organizational structure to overcome governance challenges and coordinate work with the Chinese contractor to successfully deliver the railway. However, opacity and ballooning land-acquisition costs suggests that rent-seeking has inflated the cost to taxpayers, echoing several previous international corruption scandals in Kenya. At the level of the private sector, Kenyan agency was partly visible in vested interests opposing the project, partly in successful lobbying to access the closed procurement markets of the Chinese contractor. One of the most frequently raised issues regarding developing countries’ engagement with the BRI is (over)indebtedness, and in this case Kenya has developed a fiscal instrument to repay the Chinese loans. China’s follow-up trade and investment in East Africa is believed to be a major element of the rationale for the rail project, although concrete measures to achieve this are still lacking and regional connectivity is limited. Data on this will have to be analysed in the next decade or so. The case suggests that a centralized approach in African government engagement with the BRI can deliver projects for a reasonable (albeit inflated) cost, while development benefits and socio-economic change require active management beyond the temporary governance model to organize project delivery.

Keywords: Asian Studies; Economics and Finance; Law - Academic; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781789906219/9781789906219.00017.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:19220_10

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().