Of Museveni airline tiff and our E. African dream

I recently flew into JKIA, again. I’ve probably flown more times into and out of this airport than any other, most often on Kenya Airways, or its predecessor, the East African Airways.

One of my latest landings, Flight KQ 411 from Entebbe, impressed me with the exceptional, almost feather-light smoothness with which it touched down, or rather caressed the tarmac at Nairobi.

Then came the welcoming message over the cabin speakers, and I pricked my ears as I heard the co-pilot say, “On behalf of Captain Cathleen Kang’ethe…” Wow! That was a first for me. It was the first time I was being made aware that I had actually been on a flight piloted by a lady captain.

Anyway, KQ, the codename for Kenya Airways, “the Pride of Africa”, has recently been strongly on my mind, as, apparently, on the minds of many other East Africans. The reasons, emanating from the highest places, are a mixture of the mundane and the mysterious.

The mundane was the obvious tit-for-tat decree abruptly cutting KQ flights to Tanzania by 60 per cent, and restricting it to only a few airports in the country. Curiously, what particularly struck me about the developments was that one of the chief negotiators in the flight dispute was the Director of the Tanzania Civil Aviation Authority, a Mr Charles Chacha.

Now, going by our East African naming systems, that gentleman could just as easily have been negotiating for Kenya as for Tanzania!

To me, this is symbolic of the truth which our two Presidents wisely saw and agreed to scrap the decree just before it went into effect.

The truth is that trying to punish KQ, for whatever reason, by curtailing its services to Tanzania would cause Tanzanians, and other East Africans, as much hurt and inconvenience as it would to KQ, if not more.

The mysterious KQ incident was its reported “inability” to meet Ndugu Museveni’s request to pick him up from Western Uganda and fly him to Nairobi for an East African summit meeting. Word went round that the matter threatened to cause a “diplomatic row”, and it even found its way onto the floor of the august House in Nairobi.

Happily, again, no row erupted, and the matter was quietly laid to rest. But how could it have risen at all? Everyone knows that KQ flies to and from only one destination in Uganda, Entebbe International Airport.

I think that many people of my generation, including Ndugu Museveni, still seriously regard KQ as “our” airline. Moreover, articulated or not, our conviction is that KQ is the natural successor of EAA, which flew “everywhere”.

One could fly from Entebbe to Nairobi, Mombasa, Tanga, Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, all within the course of one day. EAA always found a way of getting us around. Miracle workers, indeed!

We still expect KQ to work a few miracles, and they still do. Do you, for example, remember the time a Captain Albert Mureithi safely landed at JKIA despite his plane having lost a wheel on take-off from Harare?

Anyway, the bottom line is that Kenya Airways is the airline of East Africa. Developments like the harshly imposed and hurriedly withdrawn Tanzanian curtailment or the tall and understandably unmet Ugandan order are patent pointers to the fact.

However, we shouldn’t take KQ for granted. As of now, it is a Kenyan national airline, and runs its business according to the laws of its homeland, and when it steps out, it keeps within the limits of international requirements. Although we have high expectations of it, we should not make overstringent demands on it.

But even more importantly, KQ should not take its East African “faithful” for granted. Indeed, demands like the Ugandan one should be wake-up calls for KQ to start thinking boldly outside the box. The EAA days may be long gone, but so also are the post-1977 days ones, when the East African Community went dormant, and we started calling each other “foreigners” in our own homeland.

Now that the Community is alive and well again, KQ should seize the obvious advantage of its being the strongest operator in the region to formalise its status as an East African institution.

I am notoriously ignorant of business matters, but I have a hunch that KQ would significantly boost its East African business if it went regional, maybe absorbing some of the viable but struggling smaller airlines.

Operating all East African destinations as “domestic”, for example, could significantly boost KQ’s profits, as it would encourage more East Africans to travel by air.

As things are today, most East African cross-border travellers are turning to road transport. The one-hour Entebbe-Nairobi flight, for example, which KQ runs some five times in either direction a day, is notorious as one of the most expensive plane “hops” in the world. But then, it is an international flight, and it cannot be charged at domestic rates. But making it domestic, and thus more affordable, would probably more than double the demand, making it unnecessary to charge those frightening fares.

Moreover, going regional, and thus “local”, all over East Africa, would enable KQ to tap into the tremendous air travel potential in the region. From Dar, for example, KQ could fly to more than 20 destinations in Tanzania alone. This, indeed, was mooted for some time through their Precision Air partners.

In Uganda, where the Government is already in the process of upgrading several airfields, not even the sky would be the limit for air travel.

Practically every major town in the country is a potential air destination from Entebbe. In the Western Region, for example, apart from the oil hub of Hoima, obvious candidates are Kasese, Kisoro, Kabale and, of course, Mbarara.

If there had been a domestic KQ flight from Mbarara to Entebbe, that famous request would have been met, and “our” airline would have performed another miracle. 

Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English and literature in East Africa