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Abstract: The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aims to integrate Africa into an ambitious Chinese-constructed infrastructure network that seeks to link the economies of participating countries to that of China's. However, serious concerns about its cost for the host countries, the legacy and sustainability-alongside the social and environmental costs-of its projects have raised questions as to its value and long-term future. The Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), linking Mombasa to Nairobi and beyond has been portrayed as a centre piece of the BRI in East Africa. Both the Chinese and Kenyan governments have represented the SGR as an example par excellence of SinoAfrican cooperation and the ubiquitous "win-win" partnerships that this is said to engender. However, serious issues with the SGR in terms of its cost, viability and practicality has meant that it is increasingly being seen within Kenya as an expensive white elephant beset with numerous intractable problems.
Introduction
In the late nineteenth century, the United Kingdom began building the Kenya-Uganda Railway, connecting Mombasa to Lake Victoria. Its expense and the various hazards encountered in its construction provoked a British parliamentarian, Henry Labouchere, to write a satirical poem about the railway:
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.1
By looking at the latest incarnation of the Mombasa to Nairobi rail line and the problems that have beset this venture, this article seeks to make the case that history is apparently repeating itself in Kenya, only this time under the rubric of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI, unveiled by President Xi Jinping in 2013, is an enormous project to finance and construct predominately infrastructure schemes across c. eighty-seven countries, of which twenty are African. It is China's current global development strategy and seeks to construct an elaborate web of trade routes (and facilities to support this), all to be integrated within a China-centred trading network.2 Thus far, more than one trillion dollars in infrastructure...