KAA’S Green Field terminal back on track

THE CONTRACT FOR the Construction of the US $640million Greenfield Terminal at JKIA is back on track. It had been sidetracked by disputes over the legality of the award. However, the Procurement Appeal Board has ruled that the contract was properly awarded and ordered KAA to sign it within a month. The tender goes to a Chinese construction firm, Anhui Construction Company,

Earlier, there was speculation that, CATIC construction company, the firm currently building Terminal 4 had won the tender. However investigation, by this publication have found this to have been a red herring meant to throw us off-guard by source who did not want us to know about the dispute.

Approval of the tender \means that ground breaking ceremony which was slated for August 2012, will now be pushed back. Sources indicate that the project is likely to start late October since this contract was the last hurdle in the process.

The supervision contract for the development of a green field terminal at Jomo Kenyatta international Airport, Nairobi is already in place. The terminal will be developed on a design, build, finance, operate and transfer (DBFOT) basis. The work will last 30 months, meaning terminal shall be completed sometimes in 2015.

The Greenfield terminal will have a floor area of 172, 000 m². It will be the premier hub terminal in Africa equipped for efficient connectivity for transiting passengers. It will have 50 international and 10 domestic check-in positions; 32 contact and 8 remote gates; an apron with 45 parking bays and linking taxiways and a Railway terminal.

The Greenfield terminal to be developed in two phases will expand JKIA’s capacity by 12 million passengers to more than 20 million passengers a year in Phase I. It will have a parking capacity, including “remote parking” for 60 aircraft bringing the total numbers of available parking slots over one hundred aircraft. It will also separate the arrival and departures gates.

The terminal complements a five- year plan that began in 2007 to expand the capacity of the airport from 2.5 million people a year to 6 million to date. The previous expansion plan which incorporates the construction of terminal 4 increased the size by creating a parking for 37 aircraft up from 20 previously. This phase cost a whopping US$200 million.  
For further details Read http://eaers.blogspot.com/2012/07/construction-of-JKIA’s-green-field.html

How Kenya became a market leader for Mobile Money transfer

 When I bought my first cellphone handset in way-back in 2000,  I was among the first lot of middle income Kenyans to own a mobile phone

 Then, Kenya was a laggard in adopting mobile telephony. We used to queue to make a call  at those phone booths owned by dear old Kenya telecommunication Corporation. To own a Telephone fixed line handset then was like owning ..well. It was not easy. You could wait in the queue of applicants for years. And you had to bribe every one  in the technical department to get a line.

I personally waited for four years for a  line-becauseI refused to bribe. What the fellows at telecoms did not realise is; they were killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

Then, we used to be regaled with stories of how Market women s in Uganda and Tanzania were doing business using their Mobile phones. Those are the times I was embarrassed to be a  Kenyan- except of-course when Paul Tergat, Catherine Ndereba, John  Ngugi and Paul Ereng were out there winning gold medals for Kenya.

Then the Mobile phone finally reached Kenya and we embraced it whole heartedly. To date, just 12 short years later, there are more mobile phone handsets in Kenya than there are adults. And we lead East Africa in this respect. By the end July 2012, there  were close to 30 million handsets in the country, never mind that an estimated 4 million of these are Mark Juma Mtambo (that is, fakes).

Five short years ago, Safaricom Kenya launched the mobile Money transfer, called M-Pesa. And I am proud that five year later this invention is a success story. It is the gist of the story from the world bank below.

The story says that in, addition to David Rudisha, Cheruiyot and all those guys who can do a Rudisha, M-PESA is a  gold medalist in the world. Well I am now proud to be a Kenyan.
To read the story Go to this link
http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/how-kenya-became-a-world-leader-for-mobile-money