The National carrier and Pride of Africa Kenya Airways in recent years has been consistently and persistently in the news for the wrong reasons and dismal performance resulting in persistent perennial postings of colossal losses running into billions of shillings.
There has also been persistent adverse issues concerning the corporation’s management and the staffs that have over the years made it tick and climb the skies to become one of the best performing and growing airlines on the African continent.
However, the most critical questions here are its woes reason enough for Kenyan’s to start consigning the airline to the grave? Are we doing enough to interrogate the root causes of the airline’s financial woes? Are we doing enough as Kenyans to find permanent solutions to these woes or are we justified to gloat over them? In the first place is there anything to gloat about?
We must not forget the fact that Kenya Airways is not just a mere corporate entity, but it is indeed an international entity that carries the image of our country Kenya all over the world, just like our sports women and men do when they excel in international events.
All these queries are of great importance that Kenyans must ponder if they have the pride of their country at heart and what belongs to her. That is because it is very disturbing when our own selves run to start audacious thoughtless comments against the airline.
As a Nation we should not allow the airline consigned to oblivion like the Uganda Airlines of our neighbouring country did years ago. It must not be forgotten that to date the Uganda government and other stakeholders in that country are still grappling with major challenges on how to bring it back into the air.
We must not forget the fact that industrial and economic giants from the continent like South Africa, Botswana, Egypt and Libya before the latter too degenerated into civil strife, had not developed national airlines like Kenya – hence The Pride of Africa.
The Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA), which is home for KQ it goes without saying that it is the regional headquarters of air transport with connecting flights not only to all corners of the country, but throughout all the regional destinations in South, Central, West, North, Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa including the rest of the world.
The only other international airport in the region that is struggling to catch up with JKIA is Addis Ababa’s Bole International Airport of Ethiopia, but the rest like Entebbe in Uganda, Dar es Salaam, Kigali, and Kinshasa are all trailing behind.
On all these routes and international destinations Kenya Airways has over the years entrenched its presence and continued to dig its way to new routes and destinations most of which had over the decades remained un-charted.
At this juncture it is necessary to have a brief glimpse of where the airline came from. The birth of KQ can be traced back to the defunct East African Airways (EAA) that was the pride of the then East African Community in the 1970s with its headquarters at the once famous Embakasi International Airport before the construction of JKIA and the old airport handed over to the ministry of defence.
When the old EAC collapsed in 1976 it became an acrimoniously critical matter on the question of sharing the community’s assets. The then EAA was left in limbo with its owner the defunct EAC’s member states government of Kenya Uganda and Tanzania at logger heads.
It is from there that the Kenya government after agreement with her neighbours transformed the East African Airways into the Kenya Airways the Pride of Africa as a government state corporation before it was later privatised and listed at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) in the 1990s.
By the privatization time the corporation had become a sterling performer as her competitors from Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, the DRC tottered and collapsed while KQ thrived on until the current problems bedevilling the airline.
It is from this background that it is paramount for the airline’s board of directors led by the newly appointed chairman Michael Joseph, the government and its law enforcement agencies and stakeholders must mercilessly hound out the individuals who are killing the airline through their individual malpractices. If they are found culpable they must face severe legal consequences and also forced to pay for the losses the airline has incurred.
Indeed it is individuals who are on the wrong and not the brand Kenya Airlines which is absolutely innocent and not as portrayed by those who seem hell bent on sacrificing an innocent corporate entity which has been voted four years in a row as the African’s leading Business class airline.
In recent years we have seen major national corporate entities like the brand name Uchumi Supermarkets the country’s pioneer chain retail outlet brought to its knees through gross mismanagement and even outright looting by individuals entrusted into the organization’s senior management positions.
When these individuals were identified, exposed and facing legal action as new managers were brought in, it was telling that hundreds of thousands of Kenyans rallied behind the retail chain outlet and salvaged it from total collapse where it had been consigned and that is why despite the many challenges it may still be facing, the entity is still fully operational.
The story does not stop there because there is also harrowing experiences of the giant Mumias Sugar Company which for decades since its establishment in 1976 had been the best performing sugar company in the country.
It made history by becoming the first to embrace the ultra-modern diffuser technology in sugar production and the first and the only one to be privatised and listed at the NSE but due to gross mismanagement, outright looting besieged by rampant poaching of sugarcane from its contracted farmers like Kenya Airways the company is in big trouble fighting for its life.
Though the persons behind the Mumias sugar woes have not been brought to book, but as Kenyans it is our constitutional right to pressurise the relevant arms of the government to ensure that action was taken and those involved in the malpractices forced to pay for the losses incurred.
This does not mean that we must give up and let the entity that took decades to build reduced completely to nothing with devastating consequences to the entire economy, with billions of shillings invested into over the years left to go down the drain.
