Employment opportunities favour outsiders, lament local workers
One of the factories in Mtito Andei,where materials for construction of the railway are being manufactured.
Steve and David (not their real names), are workers in Section 3 of the standard gauge railway (SGR) factory located a few minutes out of Mtito Andei town. Steve was employed as a turn-boy while David was employed as an unskilled labourer.
Steve says through his own initiative, he has been able to learn how to operate the cement-mixing machine.
David on the other hand says he has learnt some new skills in the section where he works using steel-cutting and bending machines.
Earlier, CRBC announced that it had trained about 1,000 of the 5,000 Kenyan workers it plans to train for railway construction and management, including roadbed construction engineers and culvert construction engineers. This was in May.
They both agree that the coming of the project into the area has brought about tremendous change, socially and economically. They say the standard of living among many local residents has improved because many young people have been employed and have built houses, something they could not afford to do previously.
Steve says through the earnings he gets from his employment in the factory, he is now able to pay school fees for two of his children in high school.
However, the two lament that their employers have not put in place deliberately plan of skills transfer, as is the belief by many. Moreover, learning new skills is difficult because all the machines in the factory are written in Chinese and the locals cannot operate them unless they have a Chinese supervisor around to instruct them.
Another challenge they face is that the technical drawings for the project are also written in Chinese and so even the local engineers are not able to read them without the help of the Chinese workers. This is very frustrating for them.
They also face the challenge of language barrier, because most of the supervisors are Chinese and they don’t understand English. Exchanging information between the workers and the supervisors becomes a big problem.
In May, Lu Shan, the general manager of CRBC, said the company planned to send 60 Kenyans to study in China for five years, including a year’s preparation for Chinese language and four years study in railway related majors. This was during an inspection tour led by President Uhuru Kenyatta.
The two lament about nepotism in employment in Section 3, since the method of advertising for new positions is opaque and ends up benefitting outsiders at the expense of non-locals.
“We don’t know when new positions come up and the locals are not benefitting,” they say.
They are of the view that the CRBC should have a policy of promoting to the next level those already working rather than brining in new people into vacant positions that arise in the factory.
They blame the Kenya Building Construction Timber Furniture Workers Union for concentrating only on the issue of salary negotiations while neglecting other pertinent issues pertaining to workers’ welfare.
They add that the management has failed to provide the required protective gear – industrial boots and gloves for handling steel. Currently they use rubber shoes and gloves which are not durable.
But the local field organizer for the union, Dorcas Wanjiku says she is not aware of any unfair employment practices in the factory.
“As far as we know, the employers are trying to give skills and even certificates for those that they train,” she said.
She added that the company has an agreement with the union to provide the rubber shoes as the company makes plans to provide the required industrial boots.
“Initially, the workers did not have any protective gear so we agreed for them to have those in the mean time,” she said.
In response to our queries, Mary Oyuke, Kenya Railways Corporate Affairs Manager says some of these issues had been addressed earlier by the company.
The Section 3 factory where they work has employed over 600 employees while another factory close-by has employed close to 1000 workers. Most of these are Kenyans from other parts of the country.
They lament that most of the raw materials used in the factory are imported. This includes cement and steel. Only last week, Kenyan cement producers complained that they are being left out of the railway project after the company gave an assurance it would source all of its raw materials domestically.
Companies including Lafarge and ARM Cement had asked Kenya Railways Corporation, the implementing agency, to provide clarity on CRBC’s local procurement plans, five months after work on the project started. Kenya Ports Authority data show that CRBC has imported at least 7000 tonnes of cement so far in 2015.
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No one wants to live this kind of life…
Lorries and trucks moving construction materials around the China Road and Bridge Corporation factory in Mtito Andei.
As with any other good things, the implementation of the standard gauge railway (SGR) project in Mtito Andei has come with some negative socio-economic challenges.
Twenty-five year old Vera (not her real name), left her home in Tigania, Meru, years ago to go to work in Nakuru. In Nakuru, as fate would have it, the county government authorities pulled-down illegally-constructed kiosks and that is how Vera found herself without employment, and a 5-year old child to take care of. That was sometime last year.
With the help of her uncle, she started a second-hand clothes business but this went down after a few months. This pushed her to the Nakuru-Nairobi highway, where she joined a friend and they became part of the commercial sex workers who lure long-distance truck drivers along the way.
Early this year, Vera and her friend got wind of information that there was plenty of money in Mtito Andei and an influx of men who had been hired to work on the railway project. They found their way to Mtito Andei.
Today, they ply their trade on the main Nairobi-Mombasa highway, where they entice men along the street at night. During the day, the street is as innocent as any other. But at night, it becomes alive with activity from commercial sex-workers, who come from as far away as Western Kenyan.
Secrecy is the name of the game here, and Vera knows so little about her friend, apart from the fact that she comes from Nakuru.
“The little you know about each other the better,” she tells me.
Vera rents a room for Ksh. 300 per month, which she uses when she gets clients. Her clients per her money ranging from Ksh. 200 to Ksh. 2,000, based on the number of hours they spend with her.
In a month, she tells me she can make as much as Ksh. 30,000. She Sends her mum back at home around Ksh. 15,000, to help with taking care of her daughter. But her mum does not know her source of income.
“I wouldn’t even want her to know…she wouldn’t accept to take the money if she knew where it was coming from,” she says, chuckling shyly.
Her mother believes that she works in a hotel in Nakuru, where she went to when she left home some years back.
When I ask her if she intends to get out of the business, she says she is just in the business temporarily and is seeking to get into some the business of selling household wares. She says to start the business; she only needs around Ksh. 5,000.
She says that her clients are men of different ages. But she doesn’t know whether they are married or not since they don’t share much with her. She says there is no love or intimacy in her business.
“There is no romance. The issue is whether you have money or not,” she reveals.
To keep herself safe, she says she check her HIV-status frequently. She also reveals that most of her clients insist on them using condoms while having sex.
And like any other human being, she needs some intimacy. And this she gets. Vera says she has a boy friend who lives in Nairobi, but who is not aware that she engages in commercial sex work.
Her intention is to go back to Nakuru once she has enough money to start her own business. She says life in the town is expensive compared to where she came from.
I ask whether she would like her daughter to live like her in future. Vera says she wouldn’t like her daughter to live the kind of life that she lives.
“No one wants to live this kind of life,” she says matter-of-factly.
This article was the result of a grant from the China-Africa Reporting Project managed by the Journalism Department of the University of Witwatersrand.
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