Kenya is once again staring at a familiar and costly pattern. A major infrastructure project—years in the making, backed by exceptionally concessional Japanese financing, with designs completed, funds disbursed, and procurement concluded—now faces cancellation by Treasury directive. The Mombasa Gate Bridge, popularly known as the Likoni Bridge, risks being sacrificed not because it is unviable, but because its transparent, low-cost structure apparently offers insufficient room for the “cuts” that some elites prefer.
The facts are straightforward and damning. In December 2019, Kenya and Japan signed a loan agreement for the Mombasa Gate Bridge Construction Project under JICA’s Official Development Assistance. The original envelope was ¥47.8 billion—roughly $302 million at current exchange rates—on terms that border on the miraculous in today’s capital markets: 0.1 percent interest, a lengthy grace period, decades-long repayment, and a grant element estimated at around Sh6 billion. Detailed engineering was completed by a Japanese consortium. Independent design verification advanced as recently as August 2026. Consultants received advance payments. The first loan tranche was disbursed. Procurement processes ran their course. Then the project stalled for nearly two years. Now, according to veteran economic journalist Jaindi Kisero, a National Treasury letter directs the State Department for Roads to cancel all related commitments—contracts, procurement, consultancy arrangements, the lot.
Senator Okiya Omtatah has rightly called this out. Public policy, he notes, cannot be manipulated to satisfy an appetite for kickbacks. The emerging narrative inside government circles—that the project is “too expensive” and should be rethought through domestic pension funds, institutional investors, or a securitisation structure possibly involving Chinese contractors—does not withstand scrutiny. Pension money is not free; it demands market returns far higher than Japan’s near-zero rate. Securitisation can embed financing costs inside opaque construction prices, making the true burden harder to see and almost always more expensive in the aggregate. Trading a Sh6 billion grant and rock-bottom interest for these alternatives is not prudence. It is the opposite.
The engineering case for the bridge remains strong. Likoni Channel is a daily bottleneck for hundreds of thousands of people and thousands of vehicles. The ferries are congested, unreliable, and occasionally tragic. The cable-stayed design, with a substantial central span and navigational clearance suited to port traffic, was developed precisely to solve this while integrating with the wider Mombasa transport network and supporting the Dongo Kundu Special Economic Zone. Japan did not simply write a cheque. It helped shape the Mombasa master plan, funded port rehabilitation, and treated Dongo Kundu as the flagship of Kenya’s SEZ ambitions. Cancelling this credit after years of joint work is not a technical adjustment. It is a diplomatic signal that Tokyo will notice—and that future ODA conversations will carry a higher price in trust.
Kenya has seen this movie before. Japanese-financed projects have previously encountered late commercial-term changes, procurement disputes, and eventual collapse or re-tendering. The 2015 second container terminal episode is instructive. The pattern is not unique to Japan. Across administrations, large contracts have been awarded, delayed, varied, or cancelled, often leaving taxpayers with compensation bills while the underlying public need remains unmet. The Liwatoni floating bridge—built at Sh1.9 billion and closed within three years—stands as a recent local reminder of planning failure and wasted public money. The cumulative cost of such cycles is not only financial. It is institutional: it teaches that failure, or the threat of failure, can be more profitable than delivery.
Defenders of the shift will cite fiscal constraints, rising project costs after detailed design, or the need for domestic ownership. These points deserve examination, not dismissal. Costs did escalate, and counterpart funding for land acquisition and utilities is substantial. Yet the response to higher costs should be a transparent value-for-money analysis and negotiation with the existing partner, not the sudden abandonment of an already-signed concessional facility. If an alternative truly delivers a better net present value after accounting for the lost grant, higher interest, commitment fees already paid, termination liabilities, and diplomatic damage, the government should publish the full comparison. It has not. Instead, the public is offered the language of fiscal prudence while the practical effect is to reopen a multi-billion-shilling opportunity under different rules.
The deeper issue is governance. Japanese ODA, particularly under STEP terms that tie some procurement to Japanese technology and firms, is deliberately structured to reduce discretion and therefore rent-seeking. When that structure becomes inconvenient, the temptation is to pivot to models with more room for local intermediaries, variations, and side arrangements. Chinese contractors are highly capable and have delivered major Kenyan projects. Capability is not the question. The question is whether the financing and procurement framework that accompanies them is more or less transparent, more or less expensive in the end, and more or less aligned with Kenya’s long-term interest in diversified, rules-based partnerships.
Kenya needs the Likoni crossing. Residents of Mombasa Island and the South Coast have waited long enough. The solution is not to scrap years of preparation and a cheap financing package in favour of an unproven alternative whose principal advantage may be political rather than economic. The solution is accountability: publish the Treasury directive, disclose the full costs already incurred, clarify the legal status of any procurement awards, compare the total lifecycle cost of the Japanese option against the proposed alternatives, and explain the diplomatic calculus. If the Japanese deal is to be abandoned, the public deserves a rigorous case, not a memo and a narrative.
Grand corruption rarely arrives with a smoking gun. More often, it arrives as delay, as a sudden preference for “alternative financing,” as the quiet death of a transparent process that left too little margin for the middlemen. Kenya cannot afford to keep paying that price—not in shillings, not in trust, and not in the daily hardship of people still queuing for ferries while a better bridge remains on paper.