Energy needs

POOR, drought-prone and populated by pastoralists, northern Kenya was largely overlooked for decades. But new-found oil and Africa’s largest wind farm could be set to change all that. “This country has long been divided between low potential regions and high potential regions, according to a very deliberate government policy,” said Mzalendo Kibunjia, who heads the national cohesion and integration commission.

“But now the low potential is becoming the high potential,” he told a recent conference on the future of the north, organised at Loyangalani on the shores of Lake Turkana, one of the hottest and most desolate regions of Africa.

It started in early March with the launch of what has been presented as Africa’s most ambitious infrastructure project: an oil pipeline, a railway and a highway across northern Kenya to Lamu on the Indian Ocean where a port will be built in order to give Kenya’s landlocked northern neighbours Ethiopia and South Sudan port access.

A few days later UK-listed Tullow Oil said it had found very promising quantities of oil in the Turkana region.

Moreover in the coming months a consortium of European and African companies is to start building Africa’s biggest wind farm, also in Turkana; it will have the capacity to supply 20 per cent of Kenya’s energy needs. A few months may be all it takes to invert the historical con guration of the more developed south and the under-developed north.

Currently the north, which covers half of Kenya’s surface area of 582,600 square km is home to a mere 10 per cent of the country’s 39 million inhabitants. The three regions that make up the north of the country are also by far the poorest in Kenya. More than 94 per cent of the population of Turkana lives below the poverty threshold, compared with 22 per cent in Nairobi, according to the last census in 2009. The north has long been cut off from the rest of the country.

Without coffee, tea, or industry, the British never saw any reason to build a railway to the north. Even today the macadam road stops just north of Isiolo, normally considered the frontier town between north and south.