Nairobi — The Nairobi Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) system is taking longer to complete due to the National Treasury financing delays.

According to Engineer Francis Gitau, the Director-General of the Nairobi Metropolitan Area Transport Authority (NAMATA), the National Treasury is yet to release the final 3 billion shillings required to complete the 5.6-billion-shilling project, which was supposed to start operating in June 2022.

Speaking to Citizen TV on Friday, Gitau said Kenyans will have to wait until June 2023 for the project to resume.

"If the resources are available, it can be done in 6 months. But the contractor has looked at our resource planning, if only a certain amount of money is available then this is the best he can do and I think we have been in agreement for the worst-case scenario to be nine months," he said, "We hope our people will continue to be patient."

He continued by saying that the first batch of 100 high-capacity BRT buses has not yet been purchased.

"In the city, if you look at the commuter services, going to Embakasi costs about Sh40, if it is a short journey from Ruiru coming to the city of course it is distanced based which should be even cheaper, therefore, our fare policy I believe would be distance based," he said.

Together with the other operators, for instance the Matatu operators, will be developing a plan with the Nairobi Metropolitan Area Transport Authority to make sure the transition process takes into account th

e affected operators.

"Public Transportation is also a business to the public sector which is the government and also it is a service. Therefore, these two ideologies will have to be merged so that then the service given to Kenyans is the kind of a quality that brings about transformation in terms of the quality of life," he added.

Gitau has urged President William Ruto's Kenya Kwanza administration to make greater efforts to put the initiative into action, so as to revolutionize the public transport sector.