Moses Kuria’s Industrial Parks Project Becomes A Sh5 Billion Scandal

Three years after the grand launches, complete with fanfare, television cameras and promises that would rival any campaign trail pledge, Moses Kuria’s ambitious County Aggregation and Industrial Parks project has collapsed into a national embarrassment.

At least Sh5 billion has been swallowed by a venture that has produced nothing but empty warehouses, broken dreams and yet another cautionary tale of government waste.

The theatrical launches are now a painful memory.

Former Trade Cabinet Secretary Moses Kuria, flanked by governors and senators, descended on counties like a conquering hero, turning groundbreaking ceremonies into political spectacles.

They promised jobs for thousands, an end to rural exodus to cities, and claimed Kenya would catch up with Singapore.

The rhetoric was intoxicating.

The reality has been devastating.

A damning report by the Parliamentary Budget Office has laid bare the scale of the disaster.

Not a single one of the 47 promised industrial parks is complete. Thirteen counties have not even started construction. Another 16 counties are languishing below 30 per cent completion. In places like Narok, Murang’a and Mombasa, the implementation sits at a humiliating 10 per cent.

The financial hemorrhaging tells its own story.

Each county was supposed to contribute Sh250 million, matched by an equal amount from the national government.

The total budget was a staggering Sh23.5 billion. So far, only 10 counties have received their full allocation from the national government, totaling Sh2.5 billion.

Assuming the counties matched this amount, that is Sh5 billion already consumed by the stalled projects.

But the bleeding has not stopped. Another Sh4.45 billion has been allocated for this financial year, money being thrown at a project that has already proven itself incapable of delivering on its promises.

The bureaucratic failures are spectacular.

In the financial year ending June 2024, only Sh1.15 billion was disbursed against a budget of Sh4.5 billion.

The following year was no better, with just Sh1 billion released from a Sh2 billion budget. It is the kind of financial mismanagement that would sink any private enterprise.

Kuria himself has now turned into an unlikely critic of his own creation.

Speaking to the media, the former CS described the implementation as a lost dream.

His tone was almost wistful as he spoke of what could have been, urging those now responsible to salvage something from the wreckage. By the time he was moved from the Trade docket in October 2023 and subsequently fired following the June 2024 protests, he had launched parks in 16 counties. Now, those launches look less like milestones and more like monuments to failure.

The project’s fundamental flaw was exposed when Siaya Governor James Orengo appeared before the Senate County Public Accounts Committee.

His testimony was devastating. Counties were handed warehouses they never asked for, without any consultation about what industries they actually needed or what investors actually wanted.

In Siaya, they need a modern cotton and textile ginnery.

What they got was a warehouse that no cotton industry player will touch.

The same story played out with leather and sugarcane industries. Wrong infrastructure, wrong planning, wrong everything.

Taita Taveta Senator Johnes Mwaruma posed the question that should have been asked before a single shilling was spent: what is the point of building industrial parks when you have nothing to aggregate? The cart was placed so far ahead of the horse that the two are no longer even in the same county.

On the ground, the evidence of abandonment is everywhere.

In Laikipia, construction was supposed to take six months on a 100 acre site. Two months in, contractors walked away. Casual workers who were promised Sh800 a day are still waiting for their wages.

In Homa Bay, President William Ruto himself visited in February 2024 and directed Kenya Power to connect electricity within two weeks.

The park, launched by Kuria in October 2023, still sits idle except for a security guard and two shipping containers inside a perimeter wall. Farmers graze their animals there now.

The scale of waste extends far beyond the industrial parks. The Project Management Institute estimates that Kenya has lost over Sh600 billion to stalled public projects, money hemorrhaging away due to corruption, poor planning and incompetent management. The industrial parks fit perfectly into this pattern of ambitious announcements followed by spectacular collapse.

Kuria’s tenure was marked by more than just the industrial parks debacle.

He was at the center of the edible oil scandal that cost Kenya Sh6 billion, faced accusations of favoring politically connected companies, and engaged in public battles with the media that exposed his thin skin for criticism.

His removal from the Trade docket and eventual firing appear, in hindsight, to have come far too late.

For the thousands of young Kenyans who believed the promises, who showed up to launch ceremonies with hope in their hearts, this is more than a financial scandal. It is a betrayal. They were told these parks would reverse rural to urban migration, create jobs and transform their counties. Instead, they got tumbleweed blowing across abandoned construction sites and dust settling on broken promises.

The Kenya Kwanza administration came to power promising bottom up economic transformation. The industrial parks were supposed to be proof that the rhetoric matched reality.

Instead, they have become symbols of everything wrong with how government operates: big promises, poor planning, zero accountability and public money vanishing into projects that deliver nothing but disappointment.

As Parliament pushes for stronger project management regulations and certified professionals to oversee public works, the industrial parks stand as Exhibit A for why such reforms are desperately needed.

Countries like China excel because qualified professionals run their projects.

Kenya fails because anyone can be handed billions of shillings and a title without the competence to deliver.

The Sh5 billion already wasted, and the billions more still being allocated, represent hospitals that will not be built, schools that will not open, roads that will not be paved and young people who will remain unemployed. Every shilling thrown at this disaster is a shilling stolen from Kenya’s future.

Moses Kuria’s industrial parks were sold as a vision.

1. They have become a scandal. And somewhere in those abandoned sites, with their rusting equipment and unpaid workers, lies the credibility of a government that promised so much and delivered so little.