For those who believe that the future of personal as well as public transport lies in electric cars and buses, there have been many consoling signs that Kenya is heading in the right direction.
President William Ruto personally drove an electric car from State House to the Kenyatta International Conference Centre to launch the Africa Climate Summit week in September last year.
Electric buses are already on urban roads. Not very many but enough to make a point. And of course, electric motorbikes as well.
But despite all this, most vehicles imported into Kenya are the usual petrol or diesel-fuelled cars and lorries. And we seem to have more and more service stations (referred to generically here in Kenya as “petrol stations”) being built, especially those which are part of a mini-shopping complex that also has a chemist, shops and a restaurant.
The continued proliferation of such petrol stations provides an illustration of what I believe will be the key barrier to any wholesale transition to electric vehicles. One American commentator writing on this subject branded it “the eternal chicken-and-egg conundrum.”
Taking Kenya as an example, this is what we have to consider:
Motorists will not join any broad-based transition to electric cars unless they are certain that there will be just as many electric vehicle charging stations, as there are petrol stations already available in Kenya.
Nobody will take his brand-new electric car for a trip from Nairobi to Nakuru, for example, unless he is certain that there will be electric vehicle charging stations every 50 km or so, just as is the case with the petrol stations.
Telling such a motorist that he should fully charge his vehicle in Nairobi so that he will not need to charge it again till he gets to Nakuru – since only major towns have such charging stations at this point – is not advice that will be gracefully accepted.
So, an extensive network of charging stations would be a prerequisite for any such wholesale transition to electric cars and buses.
But supposing that the electric vehicle charging stations were to be located on the same premises as the regular petrol stations – as happens in some countries – so that you could simply drive your new electric vehicle into the same place where in previous years you drove up to fill up your tank, would that solve the problem?
Actually, it would not.
Those petrol stations are built on the assumption that there is demand for such services on that specific location.
And although there have been many attempts by the government to have the state-owned National Oil Corporation evolve into an indispensable player in retail petrol sales, this has yet to be accomplished.
So even if the government were to subsidise the establishment of vehicle charging stations at each one of the roughly 100 service stations nationwide owned by NOC, that would not provide an adequate network of service stations to attract a mass transition to electric cars and buses.
Only with the full participation of the private sector players could we possibly have enough service stations to provide such a network.
And our private sector being profit-driven like any other, would of course insist that if there is to be a huge private sector investment in such electric vehicle charging stations countrywide, then there must be data confirming that there is demand for such services.
In other words, on the one hand there must be at least several hundred thousand electric vehicles already in Kenya before there could be any possibility of the private sector setting up all those charging stations.
And on the other hand, you cannot hope to see hundreds of thousands of Kenyans buying electric cars until they are certain that there is a network of charging stations available to service them.
How this will work out remains to be seen.
In rich countries, this problem is solved by the governments providing subsidies (some more generous than others) for the purchase of new electric cars.
But given our current levels of national indebtedness, I somehow do not see that working out in Kenya.
