By Brian Kiprono - Reporter
Kenya, 24 December 2025 - Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi has lifted the lid on a little-known chapter in Kenya’s development history, revealing how entrenched interests thwarted a bold plan to modernise the Port of Mombasa with help from Singapore more than two decades ago.
Speaking about his time as Finance Minister in the 1990s, Mudavadi said the government had identified Singapore as a strategic partner to help transform Mombasa into a world-class port.
At the time, Singapore’s port was already globally admired for its speed, efficiency and disciplined management—qualities Kenya hoped to replicate.
According to Mudavadi, the initiative was not a casual idea but a deliberate effort to benchmark Mombasa against one of the most successful ports in the world. He personally travelled to Singapore to negotiate the partnership, eventually convincing a technical team to visit Kenya and support improvements in port operations and infrastructure.
But what began as a promising collaboration quickly ran into trouble back home. Mudavadi said powerful cartels operating around the port viewed the proposed reforms as a threat to their control and illicit benefits derived from inefficiencies. As a result, the visiting Singaporean experts faced sustained resistance and obstruction.
“The hostility was intense,” Mudavadi recalled, noting that the environment became so unwelcoming that the foreign team was eventually forced to abandon the project altogether. In his view, the collapse of the plan was not due to a lack of vision or international goodwill, but deliberate internal sabotage.
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He argued that Kenya has often missed critical development opportunities because of resistance to change from within, warning that such attitudes continue to hold the country back.
Mudavadi stressed that sustainable growth requires openness to external expertise and a willingness to learn from countries that have successfully navigated similar challenges.
His remarks come at a time when the current administration is openly drawing inspiration from Singapore’s development model. President William Ruto recently unveiled a Sh5 trillion infrastructure financing plan aimed at accelerating economic growth, a proposal that has already sparked sharp political debate.
Mudavadi sees the lesson from the past to be clear: without confronting vested interests and embracing global best practices, Kenya risks repeating old mistakes—at a high cost to its future.
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