Kenya and China have restated their commitment to deepen what both sides call a strategic partnership, The Kenyan Diaspora Media reports.
What the relationship is built on
China is one of Kenya’s largest bilateral lenders and by far the most visible builder of its recent infrastructure, from the standard gauge railway to expressways, roads and power lines. It is also the source of a very large share of Kenya’s imports, from machinery and steel to phones, textiles and the hardware stocked in every Nairobi street.
The trade balance runs heavily one way, which is why every round of talks produces language about market access for Kenyan tea, coffee, avocados and horticulture. Those pledges are the part worth checking a year later.
The debt question
Loans taken for the railway and other projects fall due on a schedule that has nothing to do with the political calendar, and servicing them competes directly with county transfers, salaries and health budgets. Any new agreement should be read for what it adds to that schedule, and on what terms.
Concessional finance, commercial finance and contractor credit are not the same thing, and the difference decides who pays for the next twenty years.
The Kibra angle
This relationship reaches the ward in three ordinary ways. It sets the price of imported goods that traders resell, it decides which road and drainage contracts are built and by whom, and it shapes whether local labour and local subcontractors get any of that work.
Residents who have worked on Chinese built sites in Nairobi tell us the same two things: the work is there, and the terms are worth checking before signing.
What we are watching
Which agreements are actually signed, whether any of them open Chinese markets to Kenyan produce in practice, and the local content and local labour clauses in the next round of construction contracts.
Read the full report at The Kenyan Diaspora Media
Source: The Kenyan Diaspora Media
