There are high hopes for Kenya’s new rail
project. The $13.8 billion standard-gauge railway, being built by a
Chinese company, is meant to connect the port city of Mombasa to Nairobi
and eventually the rest of East Africa. It should bring down
transportation costs and cement Kenya’s status as the region’s largest
economy. Most importantly, building it should create tens of thousands
of jobs.
According to workers and locals, the jobs haven’t
appeared, or at least not enough of them. On Aug. 2, residents of
Kenya’s southwestern Narok county stormed a construction site of the
project’s contractor, China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC),
attacking Chinese workers with clubs and knives and chanting “haki yetu” (“our rights”). Fourteen injured Chinese staff were sent to a nearby hospital, according to local media.
The demonstrators, mostly from Kenya’s
pastoralist Masai tribe, say they were promised jobs as plant operators
and drivers. “But the job opportunities we have been given are
negligible,” one protester told a local television station.
Complaints over pay and working conditions at the
Chinese companies that have built many of the country’s roads,
buildings, and infrastructure projects over the past few years have
become common. But one of the biggest gripes is that Chinese companies
in Kenya, as well as across much of the continent, import their own
labor.
CRBC,
a subsidiary of a state-owned Chinese construction company and one of
the biggest Chinese enterprises in Kenya, has become a particular
target. It was contracted to build the rail link between Nairobi and
Mombasa as well as other parts of a network that will eventually connect
Mombasa to hubs like Kampala, Uganda and Juba, South Sudan. In the two
years since it began construction, the company has been accused of firing workers without cause, importing labor, stealing water from local communities, and secretly dredging sand from Kenyan beaches for construction material.
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