The Standard Gauge Railways run by Afristar, a Chinese company is not making profits, even as Transport CS Jame Macharia wants Kenyans to believe.
“SGR is already making profit. Every month, it makes Ksh. 1.3 billion revenues compared to the cost of Kshs. 800 million. So, every month, SGR is making between Kshs. 300 million and Kshs. 500 million in profit. These are facts.” Macharia claimed in a TV interview on Monday.
The Jubilee Government has been the champion of churning out imagined data in its entire existence. Over the years, SGR has been running on losses and nothing has changed.
In fact, things have changed for the worse as the trains now stall more than in the past due to vandalism and bad maintenance.
In September 2020, the government revealed that the SGR had posted a cumulative operating loss of Ksh 21.68 billion in the three years it has been operational.
Nothing in its operating manual has changed, apart from keeping a lot of Kenyan employees at home, ostensibly to curb the spread of covid-19 in the firm.
SGR averages a monthly loss of Sh1 billion from operations.
The illegal employee cost-saving drive has not done any good to the company’s bottom line as they were replaced by expensive ones from China. The Kenyan staff who were told to sit at home till they are called back, have not even received information on their fate.
Most wonder if they were sacked or not.
‘Putting the staff in limbo serves the purpose of making them not seek legal redress because they don’t know their fates’.
Kenyan National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS)
The KNBS delayed the release of critical economic data for 2021.
This was all meant to spice up things for the IMF and the world to be in line with what the World Bank then called, ‘good place for doing business’.
World Bank was forced to pull the ratings for the Ease of Doing Business due to fake data submitted by some states, it was easy to accuse China, but the claim that it was easy to do business in Kenya was also not adding up.
Macharia’s claim that the extension of SGR from Naivasha to the border town of Malaba is unviable also falls into the category of lies.
“From our end, we wanted to ensure that so long as those countries do the SGR, then we can take the SGR to the border, but if they cannot give us a commitment that they were going to do SGR, we can do the railway line to the border and it becomes a hanging project,” the CS had said.
The truth is that China denied more loans to Kenya in this endeavour because it was not clear how the existing one would be serviced.
That delay forced poor Uganda to concentrate on revamping its MGR lines.
Point to note is that not all data from KNBS is crooked, some are good.
Kenyan Business Feed is the top Kenyan Business Blog. We share news from Kenya and across the region. To contact us with any alert, please email us to [email protected]