Prime Cabinet Secretary (PCS) Musalia Mudavadi on Tuesday assured Kenyans that the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) was not for sale.
The PCS who is also the Cabinet Secretary for Foreign Affairs was responding to a question in the National Assembly that the government wanted to hand over operations of the airport to private investors.
In response, Mudavadi revealed that the investors would be working under the Public Private Partnership (PPP) to construct a terminal in the airport.
“JKIA is not on sale. This is a public asset. It is a strategic asset and if it was going to be sold, you can only do it after a full public process that Parliament endorses,” he explained.
“Anybody who is giving the impression that JKIA has been sold is not being factual.”
Mudavadi asked Kenyans to appreciate that the international airport was in dire need of an uplift hence the need to engage investors with a view of modernising it.
“We need a new terminal, there was a green terminal but it never took off, the contractual agreement had its challenges,” he explained.
The PCS noted that efforts to construct a green terminal were faced with litigations making it stall.
He remarked that going forward, the Kenya Airports Authority (KAA) should make public all protracted engagements with private investors to avoid a repeat of the same.
“Kenya Airports Authority must look at its investment program, very carefully, and make sure everything is transparent, so that during the expansion process of the second terminal,” he directed.
Mudavadi asked KAA to make sure the PPP arrangement is done properly and thoroughly through the legal process to ensure that every Kenyan knows what is going on.
“But I want to assure Kenyans that the JKIA is not for sale,” he emphasised.
The new terminal is expected to make JKIA one of the largest and busiest airports in the continent handling 20 million passengers annually.
