Impressively, the project was completed ahead of time, unlike most megaprojects globally. Environmental groups, which objected to the line cutting through Tsavo National Park, failed to stop it. Some design changes were made, such as elevating tracks in some areas, in response to their concerns. The decision to build a new line rather than use the existing railway also created disputes over land ownership, which is poorly documented in some areas of Kenya. Plenty of court cases remained unsettled, but the railway was completed and opened to the public on June 1, 2017.
Kenyatta’s reelection was just three weeks away, and the SGR’s opening ceremony was tailor-made for his campaign. Kenyatta boarded the train in Mombasa and stopped in seven counties along the way to Nairobi, pausing to address Kenyans at each stop. “Change is here,” he declared during the day-long event. “For over a century, Africans who gave birth to, and sustained a Pan-African dream of unity, have sought the free movement of African people and their goods.”98 The railway was opened to the public on Madaraka Day, a holiday celebrating Kenya’s self-rule, and was even named the Madaraka Express.
It was not the time to worry about whether Kenya’s debt could jeopardize its independence. Chinese officials were on board as well, but they understood that Kenyatta needed the spotlight. During the ceremony, Kenyan female drivers even appeared to take the train’s controls, reaffirming the railway as a symbol of progress. But when the cameras left, Chinese workers were back at the helm. “We just sit at the back and watch. There is no actual transfer of skills that is happening here,” an assistant locomotive driver said in July 2018.99
When I visited in April 2019, the atmosphere near the tracks felt like boarding a plane. Kenyan stewardesses, wearing red jackets, red hats, and black dresses, smiled and struck a pose next to the doors, cupping their hands with elbows outward. Male conductors, wearing dark-blue suits and hats, could have been mistaken for pilots. Dressed in simple white shirts, two Chinese supervisors milled about.
Chinese state media have publicized railway training efforts in Kenya, but the propaganda is also laced with paternalism. One article, for example, described a Chinese “station master” who “spends the bulk of his working hours monitoring the arrival and departure of the Mombasa-Nairobi train service while prodding Kenyan colleagues to be up to task.”100 Chinese staff will manage the railway until 2023.101
The SGR’s dependency on an outside power recalls the British railway it replaced. The British railway was a characteristically imperial adventure, motivated by a mishmash of geopolitics, commercial interests, and missionary zeal. Britain wanted to protect its control of the Suez Canal by expanding its claims near the source of the Nile River, which flows northward from present-day South Sudan. “Whatever Power holds the Upper Nile Valley must, by mere force of its geographical situation, dominate Egypt,” the British consul in Egypt warned in 1889.102 Steam and steel would carry raw materials from the Great Lakes region to the coastline and “modernity” to East Africa by demonstrating the appeal of superior technology and eventually settling more British citizens.
When Britain began building the railway in 1896, it was woefully underprepared. The rush to claim and map land in political terms far outpaced the mapping of its physical features. Political maps can be works of social engineering, none more so than those drawn by outside powers in Africa, but they are shallow compared to what is required for technical engineering. When Britain decided to build a railway from Mombasa to the shore of Lake Victoria in Uganda, relatively little was known about the challenge that lay ahead. Citing these concerns, Henry Laboucher, a British parliamentarian and writer, panned the proposal and one of its advocates with a poem:
What it will cost no words can express;
What is its object no brain can suppose;
Where it will start from no one can guess;
Where it is going to nobody knows;
What is the use of it none can conjecture;
What it will carry there’s none can define;
And in spite of George Curzon’s superior lecture,
It clearly is naught but a lunatic line.”103
At first glance, the new railway appears more futuristic than lunatic. Nairobi’s new station is a gray metallic structure that looks like it was teleported from another country, if not another galaxy. It stands out amid the brown brush and red soil outside the city, like a giant computer component that could be plugged into a colossal motherboard. Large red letters above the station—“NAIROBI TERMINUS”—announce that it is an origin and destination. No train service leads into the city center, requiring passengers to trek to and from the station.
The Mombasa terminal is similarly inconvenient and outsized, including a massive control tower that looks like it was stolen from an airport. After arriving, passengers heading into the city must pay for a taxi or bus that moves from the station’s new off-ramps onto crumbling roads choked with gridlock traffic and clouds of dirt.
Inside both stations, touch-screen machines dispense tickets, and turnstiles with ticket scanners provide access to the trains. On a Saturday morning in Nairobi, a large electronic board signaled that there were about thirty first-class tickets and four hundred second-class tickets still available half an hour before departure. Passengers can book their tickets in advance online and pay from their phones with M-Pesa, Kenya’s mobile payment system that has become an inspirational example of how local innovation can catapult African economies ahead of developed economies. When M-Pesa was launched in 2007, nearly three out of four Kenyans lacked access to formal financial services. A decade later, the ratio was reversed, with three out of four having access.104
M-Pesa also reflects Kenya’s shift toward China. A U.S. company, IBM, ran the system’s original servers, which were based in Germany. As demand increased, Safaricom decided to move the servers to Kenya, expanded them, and made Huawei its technical partner. Huawei not only provided the servers but also helped to design the M-Pesa platform, an app that was installed on twenty-one million phones as of 2019.105 In 2018, the equivalent of over 90 percent of Kenya’s GDP went through M-Pesa and, by design, through Huawei’s servers.106
The SGR’s embrace of new tools should have resulted in productivity gains, but whether out of cautious planning or pressure to create jobs, the Nairobi station did not appear to have reaped those rewards. Attendants and police are stationed throughout the building, in numbers that suggest they are ready, like the cavernous building itself, for much-larger crowds. In 2018, Kenyan authorities discovered that China Road and Bridge Corporation employees were siphoning ticket revenue from the railway. Seven employees, including three senior Chinese employees, were arrested in connection with the scandal.
The SGR has big challenges to overcome, but that is not stopping both sides from using it as a symbol of closer ties. Kenyan and Chinese flags sit side by side above the doors in the first-class wagons. The side of the train, painted white with orange stripes, carries a lofty and unproven slogan: “connecting nations, prospering people.” The SGR was intended to link Kenya with Rwanda and Uganda, a route that was projected to be responsible for over a third of the railway’s traffic, but those connections have not materialized.107
The SGR’s commercial future hinges on freight traffic, which is growing but not nearly fast enough. To increase freight activity, the Kenyan government mandated that container cargo arriving at the Port of Mombasa be transported to the Nairobi terminus, effectively requiring shippers to use the SGR.108 The requirement dealt a heavy blow to the trucking industry that previously carried that cargo, and while the SGR’s freight activities are increasing, it would need to move four to eleven times its 2018 levels to become profitable.109 In the meantime, the clock is ticking on Kenya’s payments for the railway, which begin in 2023.110
In December 2018, a leaked report from Kenya’s auditor general warned that China could take control of the Port of Mombasa if Kenya defaulted on its loans.111 The auditor general refused to confirm its authe
nticity, and President Kenyatta called it “pure propaganda.”112 Warnings about China’s “debt-trap diplomacy” and Mombasa becoming the next Hambantota are politically potent but somewhat misleading. Because the “trap” for taking control of the port is being laid by a separate project, the railway, the comparison assumes that Beijing has an even greater degree of centralized control and strategic motivation than it did in Sri Lanka.
The stakes are even higher. Unlike Hambantota, Mombasa is an established regional hub, with an estimated 80 percent of East Africa’s trade flowing through it.113 It can more easily attract outside investment and does not need to rely on Chinese support alone. Indeed, just feet away from the new SGR railway connection into the Port of Mombasa is a terminal that Japan financed, a reminder that even competing visions for connectivity can overlap in complementary ways. The presence of other international investors in Mombasa also means the stakes are higher. Taking over Mombasa would be like taking over Sri Lanka’s thriving Port of Colombo.
The Coming Collision
In the meantime, China is already building Kenya’s next major port. Kenya’s national development plan, Vision 2030, includes a $25 billion series of projects intended to connect South Sudan and Ethiopia with Kenya’s coast, called the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport Corridor, or LAPSSET Corridor, for short. Among those projects is a new thirty-two-berth port that China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) is building. Under these plans, Lamu will have eight times Mombasa’s capacity.114
Lamu brings China’s engagement with Africa full circle. Zheng He, the Chinese Ming dynasty explorer, is believed to have landed there, as well as at Mombasa, with his fleet during the fifteenth century.115 As Chinese officials are fond of reminding their Kenyan counterparts, their relations predated the Portuguese, and unlike the Portuguese, they claim to have arrived offering gifts rather than firing guns—an appealing message, even if embellished. But He’s visit was temporary, and the bar for establishing an enduring presence has always been higher and much messier.
When I visited Manda Bay, in Lamu, a massive dredging machine, the Tian Jing Hao, was pumping sand onto the shore. Stretching over four hundred feet and built at a cost of $130 million, it can extract enough sand every hour to nearly fill two Olympic swimming pools.116 It was Asia’s largest dredging machine until 2018, and before it arrived in Lamu, China used it extensively to build artificial islands in the South China Sea. Dredging is one of the many concerns about Lamu Port raised by Kenyan activists, who claim that the activity is damaging the environment and livelihoods of local fishermen.117
As our boat weaved between newly installed piers, Kenyan workers in blue jackets, orange life vests, and yellow hard hats walked the partially finished dock closer to shore. “They have shifts going 24/7,” a local fisherman explained. Underneath one section of the dock, and out of the hot sun, two security guards were taking a break on a small floating platform. On the way back to town, a speed boat raced by with piles of large brown sacks and three armed men. They were taking khat, grown in the Kenyan highlands, to sell in Somalia, just one hundred kilometers up the coast.
Lamu’s proximity to Somalia is why it also hosts a U.S. military facility, which is located just miles from the new port. The facility, Camp Simba, is used for training East African security forces as well as supporting drone strikes and other counterterrorism missions into Somalia and Yemen. Since the base was established in 2004, it has expanded to become one of the largest U.S. facilities in Africa. The facility includes a long runway, expanded over the years, that can accommodate C-130s and other large aircraft.118
In January 2020, Somalia’s al-Shabaab militant group attacked the facility, killing three Americans and destroying several aircraft and military vehicles before being repelled. After the attack, CCCC temporarily suspended construction at the port. Workers were asking for hazard pay, and CCCC was asking the Kenyan government for security guarantees.119 This reality flips the Wolf Warrior 2 script: rather than rescuing their African hosts from harm’s way, the Chinese were looking to them for help and, indirectly, to the U.S. forces that support them.
Help may take longer to arrive in the future. When fully operational, the port may not be able to operate efficiently unless Camp Simba is relocated. Port cranes will compromise the flight path of the runway, according to a 2011 study prepared for the Kenyan government.120 If Camp Simba remains, the study concluded, the port would need to be broken into two parts, one on either side of the military facility. That would be a losing proposition for everyone, compromising Camp Simba’s security and making the port and inland transport inefficient.
These tensions at Lamu and Djibouti are likely to play out elsewhere around the world and especially in the Indian Ocean. U.S. security forces and Chinese state-owned enterprises are not simply operating in closer proximity but, increasingly, competing for strategic space. For their hosts, this contest is not zero-sum. But geography is finite, and there is only so much coastline and even fewer stretches of it that balance access to the ocean with proximity to other priorities. No country wants to choose between the world’s leading military power and its rising economic power. But as their competition for access intensifies, so does the risk of collision.
CHAPTER TEN
Refining the Blueprint
XI LOOKED OUT FROM the podium and into the cavernous, red-carpeted hall. Below him, nearly forty heads of state sat in high-backed chairs in a long single line. Behind them stretched rows and rows of representatives hailing from 150 countries. They applauded as orchestra music came to a crescendo, cymbals ringing out. They clapped for him. The world clapped for him.
But as Xi prepared to address the second Belt and Road Forum in April 2019, he knew that not all was well. Australia, Canada, India, and the United States did not send high-level delegates. More conspicuously, missing among his friends in the front row was Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president. At the first Belt and Road Forum, Erdogan had said, “This initiative, particularly in the face of the rising terrorism in the world, will be an initiative that will virtually eradicate terrorism. We, as Turkey, are ready to give all kinds of support for it.”1 Two years later, he may have been having all kinds of regret. Officially, Erdogan’s absence at the second forum was unexplained, but China’s detention of one to two million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other minorities was becoming harder to ignore.2
If seats were Xi’s scorecard, however, he was still winning. Even more of the world’s most powerful people had assembled in Beijing. Despite China’s mass internment of Muslims, leaders from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates made the trek.3 Plenty of old friends remained faithful. Vladimir Putin was ready to take the podium next and would pitch his “Greater Eurasian Partnership,” trying to stitch a frayed idea onto China’s coattails. António Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations, spoke next. He failed to mention the two million missing people.
There were new faces, too. Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and Switzerland’s President Ueli Maurer wore wide grins in official photographs with Xi. A few weeks earlier, Italy and Switzerland became the first major European economies to sign BRI MOUs. Neither document was legally binding, but the approval of European governments carried symbolic value. Eager for British firms to finance projects and provide advisory services along the BRI, Phillip Hammond, head of the British Treasury, took the stage and gushed about a “Golden Era” of UK-China relations.4
Even leaders who shook their fists at the BRI while campaigning for office now took the stage to applaud it. “BRI marks a new and distinct phase in the onward march of nations of the world along the path of globalization,” Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan declared. “Pakistan is proud to have partnered and pioneered with China in this transformational endeavor.”5 Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad pledged, “I am fully in support of the Belt and Road initiative. I am sure my country, Malaysia, will benefit from the project.”6
Their praise did not come free. Less than two weeks before the forum, China and Malaysia announced a new deal for the East Coast Rail Link. The cost was cut by a third, but the loan terms were not yet finalized.7 One month before the forum, Pakistan announced it received a $2.1 billion loan from China to help alleviate its balance-of-payments crisis.8 Along with endorsing Xi’s vision, his former critics also came with ideas for improving it. To green the effort, Khan called for planting one hundred billion trees in two years. To supercharge east-west trade, Mahathir called again for building bigger trains.
Naturally, Xi agreed that the world needed more, not less, of the BRI. Cooperation, he emphasized, was the key. “Going ahead, we should focus on priorities and project execution, . . . just like an architect refining the blueprint, and jointly promote high-quality Belt and Road cooperation.” He called for “multilateral cooperation.” He called for “open, green, and clean cooperation.” He called for “high standard cooperation.” He called for everything that the BRI was not.9
Xi was doing his best to repair the Belt and Road brand, and these buzzwords were echoed in a mountain of announcements at the gathering. Among the “multilateral” accomplishments, Chinese officials noted the Network of Silk Road Arts Festivals, the Silk Road International League of Theatres, and the International Alliance of Museums of the Silk Road. To burnish their anticorruption and environmental credentials, they unveiled the Beijing Initiative for the Clean Silk Road and the Green Development International Alliance. Altogether, nearly three hundred deliverables were announced, as well as deals totaling some $64 billion.
The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century Page 22
