The high cost of moving cargo through Kenya is pushing most East African traders to Dar es Salaam despite reforms that have significantly raised efficiency at the port of Mombasa.

Traders based in Kigali, Bujumbura and Goma pay less to move goods from the port of Dar through Tanzania’s Central Corridor than from Mombasa Port through Kenya’s Northern Corridor, a new survey shows.

It costs $4,800 to transport a standard 40 foot container cargo through the Northern Corridor to Kigali, $6,500 to Bujumbura and $7,000 to Goma from Mombasa Port.

The same container transported through Dar would cost $4,300 to Kigali, $4,500 to Bujumbura and $4,700 to Goma, a survey conducted by the Shippers Council of Eastern Africa indicates.

Expensive rail

The survey launched in Nairobi Thursday also shows that that rail transport costs per kilometre for a standard twenty foot container (TEU) is $1.24 if handled by Tanzania/Zambia Railways Authority network and $2.66 by the Kenya/Uganda network.

“It is, therefore, clear that Tanzanian shippers pay three times less freight charges for railway services than their Kenyan counterparts,” the survey says.

Traders in Kampala and Juba, however, find it cheaper to move goods from Mombasa through the Northern Corridor than Tanzania’s Central Corridor.

The high cost of shipping goods to Rwanda, Burundi and DRC is likely to thwart a campaign by the Kenya Port Authority’s (KPA) to grow its transit cargo business.

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Under a strict directive from President Uhuru Kenyatta, the government agencies handling cargo at the port have significantly improved their efficiency raising the pace of goods movement within the national borders.

The changes saw the Mombasa Port dwell time (average number of days it takes cargo to leave the port terminal from the time it is offloaded from the vessel) improve from 5.8 days last year to 3.7 days by June.

Truck transit time also reduced to just three days from an average of seven days last year.

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KPA officials have been betting on the improvements to stake claim on Burundi, Rwanda and DRC-bound cargo, which Kenya controlled up to 2003.

“We in Mombasa have made effort to attract this business,” KPA managing director Gichiri Ndua said in Nairobi on Wednesday.

Data prepared by KPA indicates that Mombasa Port’s transit traffic increased by only 9.6 per cent, with Uganda accounting for 77 per cent of the 3.53 million tonnes of cargo handled by the facility last year.

Rwanda traders moved only 110,540 tonnes of cargo through the Kenyan facility.