Death of railway transport blurs Kenya’s pathway to Vision 2030

About 160 kilometres northwest of Nairobi, dozens of police officers on duty at Nakuru Railway Station take turns each day physically searching travellers before freeing them to proceed to their destinations.

Screening some of the approximately 100,000 passengers who pass through Kenya’s fourth largest town by road each day has become an important aspect of these officers’ routine for the last five years.

Yet when this station was established several decades ago, its mandate was security of the railway fleet—together with train passengers and cargo anticipated from Rift Valley and western Kenya.

“We are not here as a specialist railway force unit but as a regular police post whose officers take part in every general efforts to combat crime,” one of the officers told Business Daily.

To some extent, the Nakuru case highlights the gradual decline of the country’s railway transport network which began in 1980s, crippling one of Kenya’s oldest transport infrastructures.

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