If you want to understand just how little thought most Kenyans give to the residents of the semi-arid North Eastern region, you need look no further than the Isiolo International Airport. For whereas we have seen savage mockery flung at the standard gauge railway by those who define it as “the railway to nowhere”, I have not seen much reference to “the airport in the middle of nowhere”.
But that is precisely what the Isiolo International Airport is. As recently as November 17, there was a prominent article in a Sunday newspaper under the headline, “Bid to breathe life into Isiolo Airport hits turbulence as travellers keep off”.
The article explained that this airport had “a capacity to handle 350,000 passengers annually, [but] only serves the occasional charter flight”.
Meanwhile, the declared purpose for which this airport was built has changed. It was initially intended to open up the considerable tourism potential of that remote area, and to simultaneously – somehow – make Isiolo a “resort city”. It is now being alleged that its real purpose is “to decongest Wilson Airport” by diverting the airfreighting of miraa to Somalia from Wilson Airport to Isiolo International Airport.
There are two reasons why this airport is an insult to the people of the Northern Frontier.
First is that if indeed an international airport was to be built in this historically marginalised region, you would think that a lot more thought would have gone into it. That there would have been no doubt that this new “international airport” would have a strong multiplier effect on the economy of that region, creating jobs and generating new wealth.
But what we have is the government instead planting a Sh2.7 billion white elephant of a project, in the very place where a sum like that could have been used for institution building and service provision, aimed at improving the lives of the local communities.
But it is also an insult because we do not see any of the moral outrage that regularly washes over the SGR, especially on social media, being directed at Isiolo International Airport.
For all intents and purposes, outside of the mainstream media, nobody in “the rest of Kenya” (as the people of that region say) seems to care that the government has perpetrated such a cruel hoax on people who in past decades were simply ignored when it came to their developmental needs.
But there is more to this. For it is not as if Kenyans do not know how to invest in infrastructure that has a massive multiplier effect on regional economies.
The gold standard here is the expansion of Moi International Airport in Mombasa roughly 20 years ago, which was made possible by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).
As a frequent user of that airport in an earlier life, and as one who had many friends in the coastal hospitality sector, I can confirm that there was no bigger blessing to coastal beach resort tourism than the expansion of that airport. Especially as this went hand in hand with the building of key bridges which opened up the road transport routes all the way to the undeveloped beachfronts in Malindi.
Prior to that the single most powerful deterrent to the building of more beach hotels at the coast, was the congested Mombasa airport, and the transport bottleneck created by the old pontoon bridges and ferries to the north of Mombasa.
Following the airport expansion, weekly charter flights for package tours became a regular feature, greatly increasing tourist arrivals at the coast. It is noteworthy that of the dozens of beach resorts and residential apartment complexes which sprang up after the longstanding problem of the transport bottleneck was resolved, all were private sector investments.
The government merely upgraded the infrastructure and private investors did all the rest. Subsequently, a thriving beach tourism sector was created which to this day provides hundreds of thousands of jobs within the coast, directly and indirectly. Northern Kenya needed something equally well thought out to expand the economic opportunities in that region. Instead, it got the Isiolo International Airport.
