Why we all need a kinder, better and, er, smarter KQ

Kenya Airways just made news for the wrong reasons — it posted a year-loss of Kenya Ksh25.7 billion ($257 million), the biggest in the country’s and East Africa’s corporate history.

Kenya Airways needs $600 million — or 63 per cent of Burundi’s 2015 national budget — to recover.

Now had KQ not been battered by competitors, Ebola in West Africa, and a host of its own bad business decisions, it might well have performed just as badly as a result of ill-will.

There is probably no company East Africa’s travelling elite use more than KQ, and there is none they hate as much.

KQ is horrible at timekeeping; and travellers complain that the cost of its tickets to Kampala, Dar es Salaam, and capitals in the region are the highest of any short-distance flight in the world, barring South African Airways insane rates from Johannesburg to the Angola capital, Luanda.

But it would be shortsighted to let anger get the better of us. For all its sins, KQ has ensured that East Africa has one of the best airline connectivities in Africa. RwandAir has entered the fray, true, but it is still growing milk teeth.

You cannot understand why East Africa managed to integrate to the level it has ahead of everyone else, and why East Africa is the most innovative region on the continent, if you don’t account for KQ’s role in it.

So, after we have thrown rotten eggs and tomatoes at it and calmed down, it’s important to note that East Africa needs a successful KQ. So it’s in the region’s enlightened interest for it to be a better, more intelligent company.

What can KQ do, then, to win over East Africans and have money in the bank?

The first thing is to look at ticket prices. On this, KQ the company is not wholly to blame. Its tickets are reasonably priced; what makes them expensive are the government taxes.

If anything, KQ’s situation makes a case for what you might call “integration incentives.” Companies that enable regional movement of people and goods could be taxed at a lower rate than the rest.

KQ and other airlines, and mobile money transfer services, could benefit. In many ways, this is the same logic of as removing mobile roaming charges.

Second, there is really no need why KQ should feed us on any regional flight. The food is bad, and the hostesses annoy people.

Cut out the food — and cost — and allow us to bring our own groundnuts and biscuits to eat on board.

But one of the biggest lost opportunities is that KQ, except when it comes to pilots, is very parochial. It does not employ East African cabin crew, though it does so for the flights to China.

It should try hiring some Ugandan stewards who throw the occasional Luganda greeting on the Entebbe route, and Tanzanians who can speak proper Kiswahili on the trips to Dar es Salaam.

If it wants to get more value out of its lucrative East African routes, then it had better be East African. Or at least pretend to be.
One hopes RwandAir is watching and learning.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa (mgafrica.com). Twitter@cobbo3