Rwandan President Paul Kagame has poured cold water on Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway (SGR), calling it “a big sham and a rip-off.”
Speaking at the sidelines of an international seminar at Kigali, Kagame said it was “extremely disturbing” that Kenya’s ruling Jubilee Regime would escalate the costs of the SGR to astronomical levels so as to fleece Kenyan taxpayers of their sweat “for the benefit of a few people at the top.”
“They are now trying to excite Kenyans with the refurbished trains that weres used in China in 1950s, running on diesel engines. Terrible!” Kagame said. Tanzania’s SGR is four times longer than Kenya’s but only two times as expensive.
Rwanda and Uganda recently shunned the Kenyan SGR, choosing instead to connect their countries to a railway line running from the Tanzanian port of Tanga through to Kigali and then up to the Ugandan capital, Kampala. High level corruption being perpetrated by Kenyan top officials, leading to inflated costs, was mainly blamed for the decision to eschew the Kenyan route.
“They should wait until we start running our electric trains. They will be very ashamed of themselves,” said the Rwandan President as he chided the Kenyan Administration for being insincere to its people.
