Uhuru to commission second container terminal at Mombasa port

President Uhuru Kenyatta will on Friday commission the Mombasa port second container terminal (CT2), one of the biggest projects along the East African.

The Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) said the project is part of the Jubilee administration’s flagship projects under Vision 2030.

The project was funded on a government-to-government arrangement with Japan which provides a cheap loan of 0.2 per cent interest with a repayment period of 30 years.

The terminal lies on a 100 acre piece of land which was reclaimed from the sea to create a 900-meter long quay.

The project is set to be done in three phases.

Phase one, which is set to be commissioned, consists of two berths that are numbers 20 with a quay length of 210 meters and a draft of 12 meters to serve medium size vessels.

KPA Corporate Affairs Manager Hajj Masemo, in a statement announcing the commissioning, said berth No 21 has a 350-meter long quay and a depth of 15 meters that is capable of accommodating post-Panamax vessels of 8,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) capacity.

“This first phase was constructed at a cost of Sh30 billion which includes supply of two ship-to-shore (STS) gantry cranes and four rubber tyred gantry (RTG) cranes for yard operations,” said the statement sent to newsrooms on Saturday.

A new six lane access road was also constructed joining the Port Reitz road for ease of entry and exit of cargo traffic from East Africa’s largest port.