DONGO KUNDU TO START IN JANUARY – LETS WAIT AND SEE
(Posted 25th November 2014)
The announcement by Kenya’s Principal Secretary for Transport and Infrastructure that the long overdue construction of a bypass road from the international airport and the Nairobi to Mombasa highway to the South coast will commence in January was met with outright skepticism by many Mombasa tourism stakeholders. PS John Musonik further added that only two contractors were remaining to select the one to construct the road which has been on the drawing board for decades in itself of course no guarantee that the losing bidder may not go to court and delay the process yet again.
Local tourism stakeholders were also swift to point to the traffic bottleneck which exists and has traffic often come to a standstill with kilometre long jams, when leaving the city of Mombasa towards Nairobi, starting from Changamwe and stretching all the way to Miritini.
Said one Diani based source: ‘You know very well that there is in fact a road already which connects Kwale to the Nairobi highway but it is in such a pathetic state that you only use it when the ferries are down. If this or previous governments had any true sympathy for this part of the country they would have at least kept this road in better repair but we all know that the coast always came last. Likoni is a bottleneck and a dangerous one, the conference centre has never started and even the coast branch of Utalii which was promised more than ten years ago is still not there. A lot of the political problems in Mombasa are a result of people feeling disenfranchised and are disillusioned, they feel they have been left behind the rest of the country. When they see the development in and around Nairobi, they know for sure they have been had. So forgive us for being skeptical when they tell us the road construction will start in January. Let them bring the bulldozers and people with shovels and pick axes before we believe it’.
Another source though did confirm that the promised loans from Japan have been released and that once the main contractor has been selected and the contracts been signed, work would be able to begin within weeks. Until then however it is wait and see.
