> I don't know what this article is trying to say. It dances around calling the initial plan a scam, yet it also implies that their backing off is somehow worse.

It kinda is a scam. If it’s not viable today, then it wasn’t viable when the project started. Now Kenya is left with the worst of both worlds. They have all the debt they took on to get the project this far, without any of the economic benefits of having finished it. They’ve also taken on the opportunity cost of not instead working on improving existing infrastructure, which they’ll now have to do anyway.

These loans are basically foreign government subsidies for Chinese construction firms. China still win even if Kenya default, because most of the debt Kenya took on went directly back to Chinese firms anyway.

China is investing in infrastructure all over the world, and really the message here is you should probably not do business with them.