The never-ending saga of the Astana metro

The mayor of the Kazakh capital has announced the summer opening of the rail transport line that has become a monument to corruption in the country after ten years of inconclusive projects. But the final costs and payment mechanisms remain unknown.

Astana (AsiaNews) - The never-ending story of the construction of the Legko Reilsovyj Transport (Light Rail Transport) in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, seems to be coming to an end, according to theakim (mayor) of the capital. For more than 10 years, the project has been on the president's ambitious dream path, until the corruption scandal that has given everyone in the country a headache, spilling over like a boulder onto the entire state budget.

Founded in 1830 as Akmolinsk, the city located in the centre of Kazakhstan's vast territory, with a very Russian-speaking and sparsely populated north and a very Asian-populated south, in 1961 it took on the Soviet name of Tselinograd, returning in 1992 as Akmola, and renamed Astana in 1997, when it became the capital in place of Almaty, the country's main metropolis. In 2019, it was changed again as Nur-Sultan, in homage to the eternal president Nursultan Nazarbaev, then reverted to Astana with the decline of the presidential star.

Since the beginning of its new post-Soviet life, the city now with a population of more than 1.3 million decided to equip itself with an advanced public transport system, but the Lrt light rail and automobile bypass plan was only announced in 2005, at Nazarbaev's behest.

It was not until 2011 that the special company Astana Lrt was established, which organised the ceremony of the laying of the first capsule in July of that year, but work did not actually begin.

The project was suspended in 2013 due to its excessive costs, and a circular bus line was proposed, but in 2015 the government struck a deal with a Chinese consortium, resuming the plan that formally began in 2017.

Soon the deal turned into the largest corruption pit in the country's history, the waste of which has still not been disposed of. The chronology of the scandals is long and complex, and in January 2022, after the tragic events of the Kantar riots, the new president Kasym-Žomart Tokaev decided to inaugurate Kazakhstan's ‘season of transparency’, starting with exposing the wrongdoings around theLrt.

He stated that ‘this affair is not only worrying, but really upsetting’, but that it was not possible to stop it, because of the great losses that would result. Foreign architects and town planners were therefore hired instead of national ones, to avoid further cheating and machinations.

The Lrt project has since become a national meme, called the ‘monument to corruption’, and comedians, bloggers and stand-up actors regularly use it for their jokes and performances. Journalists, politicians and businessmen regularly intervene on the issue. A Kazakh oligarch, the chairman of the BI Group Ajdyn Rakhimbaev, had said that he would dismantle all the useless structures already set up at his own expense if they would let him, but when he was presented with the bill for the operation, he immediately withdrew the proposal.

The construction company was restructured and in turn renamed as Cts, City Transportation Systems, while retaining the same staff, in a pure rebranding operation. Work resumed with a series of misfortunes and accidents, as if it had a real curse on it, and the opening of the first sections for cars turned into a bumper car track, with an impressive number of deaths and injuries.

Now theakim Ženis Kasymbek sums up these tragic events as ‘unavoidable situations in the construction phase, when the time is too long and too many people are involved’. The final costs and payment mechanisms will be announced in the summer, after the final inauguration of the Lrt, which stretches over 22 kilometres and includes 18 metro stations, passing through the most important places in the metropolis with some 20 trains, which will hopefully not crash into the central mosque, or the government building.