Have you ever sat back to think what it really meant to Kenya when government hired or contracted Chinese construction companies to build the roads and other pieces of infrastructure in Kenya?

In order to be objective and avoid being drawn into a patriotic bias in this entire issue, I tried to get to understand the ramifications of that move by looking at the entire situation from a pure business perspective.

The governments reasoning behind the decision to use Chinese contractors was to deal with the issue of “cowboy contractors”, as they are locally referred.

The solution applied by government is a classic example how we can fail to identify our real problems at the expense of providing lasting and sustainable solutions. Consider this, the fact that we would end up selecting a cowboy contractor could be a symptom of a largely flawed tendering process and weak legislation than it is a problem about the ability to construct. You many even follow further in the chain and find out that the sourced construction material are of poor quality and the work force largely made up of half-baked engineers. The point here is that by using Chinese companies, we have not really addressed the question why/how we ended up having cowboy contractors in Kenya. Instead, we have just managed to paint atop the rust.

Nonetheless, let’s now take a look what the current scenario looks like from a business point of view. What do these deals mean for the Chinese company? (and the Chinese government to a certain extent).

Excellent article brother.

Nice piece.
Probably a few policy makers visiting this forum would benefit from your foresight.

Nation finds joy in engaging some colonial relic called Bloomfield instead of publishing such stuff. The online blogs are godsend

@eboomerang,
Will check out your article later but my view is that Kenyan Contractors are not serious,these guys do not know how to repair potholes and cannot even built a proper road bump!(Does KEBS have a standard for a road bump?).They cannot even mix cement and ballast properly !My suggestion is for gava to force some of them to be attached to the Chinese contractors so as to be shown how things are done.After the attachment,they should be given a mini-project to do and evaluated....

Obviously world bank has had their share of trouble with our cowboy contractors.

All it would take for government to do it is for example create a national company partly owned by private investors and bring in a highly competent CEO. That is a model that has proven successful to Kenya (I'm looking at Safaricom).

With Safaricom, we Kenyans have some benefits even if not all. E.g. We can buy shares, they created a platform for local people to build their businesses(mPesa), jobs etc.

If you gave someone like T. Naikuni the correct incentives, he can equally build a successful construction company from the ground up.