30/09/2026
Lamu Was Not Born in Lagos: Half a Century of Kenyan Planning
Some Kenyans are frothing at the mouth about the Dangote refinery in Lamu. Some call it a white elephant others say it was dreamt up last month on a flight to Lagos. Before we break ground on Wednesday, let us go back into history. Let us read the plan.
Half a century in the making, The Lamu idea is older than most of the people shouting about it. The LAPSSET Corridor Development Authority's own record sets out the timeline:
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๏ธโข 1975: The Government of Kenya, with the assistance of the Government of Japan, carried out a feasibility study on a port at Lamu.
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๏ธโข 2003/04: While drafting the Integrated National Transport Policy, Government proposed a second transport corridor with a deep-sea port at Lamu and road and rail links to Ethiopia, South Sudan and Uganda.
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๏ธโข 2006: Cabinet directed that LAPSSET be studied as a wider regional project.
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๏ธโข 2008: Vision 2030 made LAPSSET a flagship project, and a full corridor study was commissioned covering the port, road and rail, a crude oil pipeline from South Sudan, Uganda and Kenya, a refinery and a product pipeline, three international airports, three resort cities and special economic zones.
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๏ธโข November 2011: The studies were completed.
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๏ธโข 2 March 2012: President Kibaki broke ground at Lamu alongside Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and South Sudan's President Salva Kiir.
The African Union then admitted LAPSSET into its Presidential Infrastructure Champion Initiative, the first project in East Africa to earn that recognition. The refinery was on the list from the day the corridor was designed. It is not a Ruto idea, and it is not a Dangote idea. It is a Kenyan idea, half a century in the making, whose time has finally come.
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๏ธThe 2017 master plan reserved the land
In April 2017, the LAPSSET Corridor Development Authority launched the Preliminary Master Plan for Lamu Port City and Investment Framework. It was prepared by WS Atkins, one of the world's leading engineering consultancies, funded by the UK government, and endorsed in Nairobi by more than 100 government, private sector and civil society stakeholders.
That document did not merely mention a refinery. It reserved 53 hectares at Lamu for oil tank storage and a refinery, and described its components: crude and product tank farms, primary and secondary processing units, and service areas. It placed the refinery firmly in the medium-term development phase, right beside the port. It also noted that earlier studies by Toyota Tsusho and Japan Port Consultants had already identified the opportunity.
So when someone tells you this project was cooked up in a hurry, ask them one question: have you read the master plan? The planners answered "Kenya has no oil" nine years ago.
The loudest objection today is that Kenya does not produce enough crude to feed a refinery. The master plan dealt with this in one sentence. Demand for a refinery, it observed, is normally driven by end-user demand, in Kenya and across the wider East African market.
The planners never built the case on Turkana oil. They built it on the millions of East Africans who buy petrol, diesel, jet fuel and gas every day. The plan envisaged products moving to Kenyan and Ethiopian markets, and noted that Kenya and Ethiopia had already signed a bilateral agreement to develop a product pipeline. It foresaw exports by sea, by rail, and by pipeline.
That is exactly how Singapore, Korea and Dangote in Lagos operate. Refineries follow markets, not wells. The port was designed for it
Lamu Port was never conceived as a small regional harbour. The master plan describes a 32-berth deep-sea port, with a bulk liquid terminal including a crude oil berth for tankers of 200,000 deadweight tonnes. It set aside land for heavy industry next to the port, including sites of around 300 hectares per industrial sector, and specifically anticipated a petrochemicals cluster in the Port Industrial Area.
Fertiliser, chemicals, packaging: the industries President Ruto spoke of in Lagos last week are the same ones the 2017 plan pencilled in beside the refinery. Even the financing model was foreseen
The master plan recommended a joint venture model for Lamu, with the Government contributing land as equity and a private partner bringing capital and expertise. It cited Djibouti and Dakar as precedents.
Look at today's structure. Private capital from Dangote and lenders carries the construction cost, and Kenya has been offered a minority stake. That is the plan working as designed. In fact, LAPSSET's 2015 funding strategy was explicit. The first three berths, roads and electricity would be public. The crude oil pipeline and railway would be public-private. And refineries, product pipelines and the remaining 29 berths were placed squarely in the private sector column. The same studies judged every corridor component economically viable, with an overall economic rate of return of about 20 percent against a 12 percent opportunity cost. The critics are attacking the one part of LAPSSET that was always meant to be built with someone else's money.
What changed is the scale, and that is the good news . In 2017, planners were thinking of a refinery of about 125,000 barrels a day. Today's project is 700,000. Critics see that as recklessness. I see a region that has grown into the opportunity. East Africa's population, urbanisation and fuel demand have all climbed, while the region still refines only a tiny fraction of what it burns. A refinery sized for Kenya alone in 2017 is now being sized for Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and eastern DRC. That is not a white elephant. That is scale, the single thing every successful refinery on earth has in common.
The Ethiopia bargain, power for ports
There is a bigger regional deal hiding in plain sight, and it makes Lamu even more logical.
Kenya already runs partly on Ethiopian electricity. The 1,045-kilometre EthiopiaโKenya High Voltage Direct Current interconnector, from Wolayta-Sodo to Suswa, cost $1.26 billion, was financed largely by the World Bank and the African Development Bank, and can carry up to 2,000 megawatts. Kenya has imported 200 megawatts of mainly renewable Ethiopian hydropower since November 2022, and from December this year that rises to 400 megawatts at peak.
Ethiopia is now the third-largest supplier to Kenya Power, close to 10 percent of total supply. At Suswa, that Ethiopian hydro meets our own geothermal from Olkaria and the 310 megawatts of Lake Turkana Wind.
The 2017 master plan saw this coming. It listed both the Ethiopia interconnector and the Lake Turkana wind project as part of the power backbone that would serve Lamu. Now look at what Ethiopia needs in return. It is a landlocked nation of over 120 million people that moves the overwhelming majority of its trade through a single port, Djibouti. That port sits at the mouth of the Red Sea, one of the most volatile waterways on earth, with the Bab el-Mandeb contested, Sudan at war and Somalia fragile. Addis Ababa has made no secret of its search for alternative sea access.
Kenya is offering exactly that. LAPSSET's road from Isiolo to Moyale on the Ethiopian border is already done; the master plan recorded that it cut travel time from Moyale to Nairobi from about 60 hours to 8. Kenya and Ethiopia have signed bilateral agreements on the railway and on a refined products pipeline to Lamu and Ethiopia has been invited to take equity in the refinery itself.
So the bargain writes itself: Ethiopian electricity flows south to power Kenyan industry, and Kenyan fuel and port access flow north to secure Ethiopia's economy. Each country trades what it has in surplus for what it lacks. That is not a white elephant. That is regional integration, the kind the East African Community has talked about for decades and rarely delivered.
From Jomo Kenyatta to Ruto, one vision
The first Lamu port study was done under Mzee Jomo Kenyatta's government in 1975. Kibaki put LAPSSET into policy, into Vision 2030 and into the ground. Uhuru produced the master plan. Ruto is delivering the refinery. Whatever our politics, this is one of the rare ideas that has outlived four presidents, because it was never about one man. It was about turning Kenya from a fuel customer into a fuel producer and a regional industrial hub.
Kenyans deserve better than outrage built on headlines. Lamu was studied in 1975, written into our national blueprint in 2008, mapped onto the ground in 2017, and its refinery is being built in 2026. The vision was never the problem. Ex*****on was.
As always, we should choose to remain optimist.
Hongera Rais๐ฐ๐ช William Samoei Ruto
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