Kenya’s new multi-billion dollar standard gauge railway (SGR) was destined to fail even before it launched, argued Kenyan legal scholar Luis Franceschi in a new opinion column in the Nation newspaper. Franceschi joins a growing number of analysts who have long asserted that the railway was built using a faulty business plan and was never going to be able to generate the revenue needed to repay the loans.

Last month, Ian Taylor, a well-known China-Africa scholar at the University of St. Andrews reached a similar conclusion in a paper that he published in African Studies Quarterly.

Both scholars note that government planners predicated the feasibility study on the SGR nearly doubling its current cargo transport volumes, which would have been nearly impossible under normal circumstances and inconceivable now amid the ongoing pandemic.