There is a kind of theft of public resources that does not appear in the reports of the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission. No safe is cracked.
The thief wears a pressed suit, sits on an armchair in a red-carpeted office, drives an SUV, and is protected by armed bodyguards. He steals through delay. This is the story of the Mombasa Gate Bridge – and Kenya’s taxpayers are the victims.
The facts are damning enough without embellishment. In 2019, Kenya and Japan signed a loan agreement for a bridge across the Likoni Channel – one of the most dangerous crossings on the East African coast.
The terms are the envy of any finance minister in Africa: interest at 0.1 percent, a 12-year grace period, a 30-year repayment window, and an outright grant element worth Sh6 billion.
The first tranche of the loan was disbursed. Advance payments flowed to consultants. A procurement competition was run to its conclusion. A winner emerged. And then – nothing. For nearly two years, the procurement entity has sat on the award while the Kenyan taxpayer has haemorrhaged an estimated Sh4 billion in commitment fees.
Four billion shillings for a bridge that has not broken a single centimetre of ground.
Procurement delay of this nature – deliberate, sustained, after a competition has produced a winner – is not administrative backlog. It is the machinery of corruption in its most sophisticated form.
Someone is using bureaucratic inertia as a weapon. The goal is to manufacture enough fiscal pain and political fatigue that the original arrangement collapses – and a new one, more favourable to different interests, takes its place.
Now, a new narrative is being floated within government circles: that the project is too expensive and the financing model should be rethought. That Kenya could instead mobilise domestic resources -pension funds and institutional investors – through an infrastructure fund model.
That a securitisation structure, possibly involving a Chinese contractor, could deliver the same project more cheaply. We are told that now that the Dongo Kundu bypass road is complete, the Likoni crossing is less urgent.
Each argument deserves to be called what it is: financially unsound, strategically reckless, or both. Pension fund money carries market return expectations – a far higher cost of capital than 0.1 percent.
Securitisation with a Chinese contractor embeds financing costs inside the construction price, making it opaque and almost always more expensive in aggregate.
Do we really want to hand back the Sh6 billion grant element on the Japanese loan? As for the bypass argument – have you driven on it on a Thursday or Friday when it clogs? The ambition was to build a link of higher quality to support and attract investment at the Ndongo Kundu SEZ.
Then there is the diplomatic cost, which appears to have entered no calculation at the National Treasury. Japan helped author the Mombasa master plan. Japan is funding the ongoing rehabilitation of Mombasa port.
Japan designed the Dongo Kundu Special Economic Zone as the flagship of Kenya’s entire SEZ programme – the first domino in a sequence intended to include Naivasha and Kisumu.
Cancel this credit, pivot to a Chinese deal, and we must look Tokyo in the eye and explain ourselves. We must be prepared for the consequences at the port, at Dongo Kundu, and in every future ODA conversation with an ally cultivated over decades – all to spare someone the inconvenience of a transparent procurement outcome they did not control.
The 12-year grace period on the Japanese loan was structured with a specific intention: that it expires at roughly the same time the bridge opens, so that toll revenues service the debt from day one.
Every month of delay closes that window. At some point – and the government must be honest about how close that point is – Kenya will begin repaying a loan on a bridge that does not exist. No minister will volunteer to explain it. But the taxpayer will feel it.
The government should award the contract immediately. Not merely because Japan deserves the gesture, though they do. Not merely because the diplomatic relationship demands it, though it does.
Award it because the people of the South Coast have waited long enough. Award it because the Likoni Channel has claimed lives that a bridge would have saved. Award it because the law requires that a completed procurement be concluded – and the law is not a suggestion.
Grand corruption does not always arrive with a smoking gun. Sometimes it comes as a memo recommending delay. Sometimes it wears the language of fiscal prudence and alternative financing mechanisms.
Sometimes it sits in a procurement committee and does absolutely nothing – and collects its reward precisely because nothing is what was required. I rest my case.