In search of Infrastructure

Barney Jopson in the FT writes:

The continent's infrastructure, on the whole, is poor. In Kenya alone the roads are crumbling, the railway is a relic of the colonial era, the port is bunged up, and the electricity supply - where it exists at all - is erratic.
Internet access is little better because east Africa is the only region in the world not connected to the global broadband network. Web users can only connect to the US and Europe, where most of the world's internet sites are hosted, via satellite links that are costly, slow and unreliable.
Brian Herlihy, an executive running Seacom, one of five projects racing to build fibre optic cables down the coast, says: "People think investing and operating a business in Africa will be cheap because it's poor. The reality is it's very expensive because communication and energy costs are high and the infrastructure is bad."