It’s tragic to reopen airport with the same managers in charge of safety

When I heard the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) was on fire, my first reaction was that Al-Shabaab or Kamlesh Pattni had struck.

Pattni had just been kicked out of the duty free shops and as such he had a billion and one reasons to bring the towers tumbling down. For Al-Shabaab, there was no greater punishment and humiliation for Kenya than strike its hub of international travel on the 15th anniversary of the first terrorist attack in Nairobi.

But the more I followed the breaking news, the clearer it became I was mistaking a thicket for a forest. This was a stunning case of negligence and inertia. And Pattni, the fall guy in all our airports stories in the last one year, was probably for the first time innocent here. So were the terrorists.

Here’s why. All the narratives between 5am and 6am on Wednesday talked about a small fire that would be contained easily. A security officer casually told a Nation reporter that the blaze would be put out in minutes. But at 7am, he called back saying it was a disaster.

Disasters are never inevitable. More often than not the tragic events that cost lives and property worth billions of shillings are always a consequence of human error, at times deliberate.

Things get worse when individuals and institutions hide behind the loss to gloss over the errors of omission and commission. This is what’s swirling all around us today.

Everybody talks of incompetence at our airports and the fallacy that’s disaster preparedness, but nobody wants to crack the whip. We saw it in the Moi years, Kibaki perfected it and now even the digital Jubilee government seems to be fast receding into the analogue corridors of inertia.

To his credit the President has handled the post-inferno crisis fairly well. The airport has been reopened to international flights and normal service is expected from today. We seem to have moved on swiftly from the embers of humiliation to chart a new course. This is commendable, but not enough.

Resumption of flights will ease the pain of stranded passengers and airlines, but not the anguish of not knowing whether you are safe from fires or any other tragedy every time you are at the airport.

It will take months, even years, for those who lost luggage, money and other personal belongings to recover — not to mention the missed opportunities.

To these people and millions of others who followed the news, the calamitous response to the fire illustrated that Kenya Airports Authority and the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority (KCAA) cannot be trusted with their safety.

Therefore, when flights resume with the same men and women in charge of airport operations it sends a dangerous signal to governments, passengers, airlines and investors that we are either clueless or fatalistic.

In essence, this is rewarding failure with another opportunity for more failure. The net effect would be loss of confidence in the country’s ability to guarantee airport safety and security, resulting in the downgrading of JKIA and even delaying further the much-touted plan to start trans-Atlantic flights.

This translates to loss of revenue, jobs and the status of JKIA as a regional aviation hub. Should the nation sacrifice all this for the comfort of a dozen individuals?

In more civilised societies, leaders of public institutions that fail the nation in times of crises pay for it with their jobs. They do so not because they are guilty but they take the ultimate responsibility for the success and failures of the institutions they lead.

What happened at JKIA was not an act of the gods, it was a breathtaking manifestation of institutional malaise gone wild.

Because the country has no history of leaders stepping down in the public interest, President Uhuru Kenyatta should not only send the KAA and KCAA boards and top managers home, but also haul them to court and have them charged with criminal negligence.

This would end the fatal habit of executives blaming their failures on powers beyond them. Most importantly, it would instil a new ethos in management of public affairs.

The sooner leaders pay for their errors of omission and commission with their jobs, the more responsive they will be to public expectations of their office.

Mr Galava is Managing Editor, Saturday Nation ([email protected])