An earlier strategy by Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) to equip its three Inland Containers Depots (ICDs) with state of the art equipment to increase efficiency has been shelved, and now the parastatal is planning to concession them to private entities.

According to KPA management, the three ICDs -Embakasi, Eldoret and Kisumu- were not cost-effective and that the parastatal was at pains to give incentives to importers to make use of them.

ICDs provide dry port operations far from the port of Mombasa and by extension they are container terminals as a shipper can use a Through Bill of Lading (TBL) to all three deports.

The Government sets KPA tariffs and the parastatals management is static on the same, which means that if it intends to make any adjustments it has to follow all the government bureaucracies. Such bureaucracies are also experienced by all parastatals.

Last year, KPA had announced that it had ordered cargo handling equipment and that some of the equipment was destined for the Eldoret ICD.

Of the three ICDs, the Eldoret one has never been operated by KPA since it was constructed in 1998 and the announcement of its opening was seen as a step in the right direction to tap potential customers for the port of Mombasa.

Eldoret lies between Mombasa and Uganda, and it is also perfectly positioned for goods moving to and from Southern Sudan.

In the past the Southern Sudan government has been requesting for a special area to be set aside for its national cargo and the mooting of the Eldoret ICD was seen as the facility that could have answered their cargo transfer problems.

"After our study we have realised that other than the Nairobi ICD, which also generates some revenue which by the way is not even enough to cater for its recurrent expenditures, Kisumu is operating at a loss. That is when we shelved the plan of equipping the Eldoret one which as you know has not been operated by KPA since it was built. We are now planning to privatize them; in fact the concession was supposed to be done when the same happened to Kenya Railways," says KPA reforms programs manager James Mulewa.

He says that for the ICDs to operate to required standards, new organisational structures need to be installed and that can only be done by a private entity and not KPA.

KPA says that it would have subsidised tariffs for shipping lines interested in keeping the containers at three deports but the tariffs were rigid as they were set by the government.

Nairobi's Embakasi is the main ICD and its intended to handle not less than 40,000 Twenty Equivalent Units TEUs) a year, but the 2006 statistics provided indicates it only huddled 36,234 TEUs.

And the Kisumu ICD which dabbles up as the getaway to the great lakes region, which accounts for 13 per cent of the transit goods, in the same year 2005 handled only 3, 025 TEUs.

Already some shipping lines have expressed interests to purchase the ICDs and were only awaiting the approval of the privatization committee, said Mr Mulewa.

KPA however maintains that the ICDs would not be sold to individuals and they wanted them to operate as entities.