Friends of the Rail Forum

There is some good news coming from the metre-gauge railway. The Nairobi-Nanyuki line is undergoing some serious rehabilitation. But this is not about Mwisho wa Reli (rail’s end), as Nanyuki was christened, but about the previous classic failure to turn around the metre-gauge line. It was a scandal. Sometime in 2005, a little-known man from Pretoria arrived in Nairobi to cut a multimillion-dollar deal. Few people in Kenya had heard of Roy Puffett. Soon, he attracted the attention of the media because he was a smooth talker, wore bespoke suits and had all that hubris that accompanies a man with a perfect sales pitch...

Kenya and Uganda had agreed to privatise the railway and rescue it from the jaws of death and whoever won the deal would have been given a 25-year contract to run the business from October 2005. Mr Puffett had heard of the deal and cobbled together a consortium that would include his company, Sheltam Rail Company based in Port Elizabeth, Tanzania’s Mirambo Holdings and Kenya’s Prime Fuels (K) Ltd as the main shareholders. Sheltam had 61 percent shareholding, Primefuels 15 percent and Mirambo 10 percent. South African private company Comazar held 10 percent while a South African trust, CDIO, had four percent shares... How he convinced both Kenya and Uganda to hand him the age-old railway is not clear...

after he settled at the Nairobi railways headquarters, he registered a management company, RVR Investments (Proprietory Ltd), which was to enter into a management agreement with Rift Valley Railways Kenya Ltd, equivalent to two percent of monthly revenues. This way, Mr Puffett would make money and pay his company, whether the railway made a profit or not. In essence, he had not made any money, but he started rebranding the wagons with his logo...

Mr Puffett blamed everyone else but himself. Railway properties under Kenya Railways were grabbed, stocks sold, wagons disappeared and wanton looting continued. Nobody seemed to care...