Focus on Entebbe Airport, not Uganda Airlines mess

Aviation

Trashing  Ms Jenifer Bamuturaki, the chief executive officer of Uganda Airlines, won’t solve any problem. There is no person with the qualifications to turn around this loss making airline. This is because the aviation industry is very sick and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

As a landlocked country, we are better off focusing on the inadequacies at Entebbe Airport. Let me explain why I say so. Twenty-three years ago when I was a business reporter at The New Vision, I was sent to interview a man from Malaysia who had jetted into the country to talk about the economic buzzwords of the day – the “big push”.

The appointment was at Sheraton Hotel. I arrived at 10am, the time we had agreed to meet. He was already waiting, reading The Monitor.

I knew his name was Mr Dato Jegathesan from Malaysia and that he was a well-known developmental expert. I also knew he had gained international repute by successfully starting the acclaimed Malaysian Industrial Development Authority in 1967.

He was in Uganda in 1999 in his capacity as a consultant for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Mr Jegathesan’s mission to Uganda was to meet and brief key players in our private sector, as well as in Uganda Investment Authority and other government departments on a new economic development strategy known all over the world as the “big push to achieve a quantum leap.”

The business editor had told me to ask him how we could use the big push idea to turn around Uganda Airlines, which was then on the verge of death. But before I could say anything to start the interview, the man surprised me with a quick question: “Why do you need an airline?”

Essentially, he was referring to our status as a landlocked, least developed country. I came to understand then – as I do now – that a national airline would not and could not contribute much to our economic development.

He went on to make me understand how we could go around the problem of being a poor landlocked and low income country. That’s the story I want to share.

The starting point is to correctly define the problem at the heart of our landlocked situation. It is called a “wicked” problem. This is the kind of problem you can’t solve with straightforward solutions. So, in respect of Uganda Airlines, Parliament’s Committee on Commissions, Statutory Authorities and State Enterprises (Cosase) was wrong to focus on staff qualifications. Similarly, the government was wrong to buy a few planes and send them to fly here and over there.

Both were thinking of solutions to a “simple” problem. What do we need to build a new bridge across the River Nile? Simple. We need a plan, money, engineers, etc. But when we are competing with coastal states we are facing a wicked problem. We need all these things and much more.

We need to pay more attention to what Mr Jegathesan called “competitive strength” than to comparative advantage. We need to make a “quantum leap” into a knowledge-based and skill-based economy.

How? He singled out Entebbe Airport as pivotal to this entire big push thing. He said the government urgently needed to make the facility a major air transport cargo logistics centre.

This requires appropriate investment in upgrading airport facilities such that turnaround time is so fast Entebbe becomes a First World airport in a Third World economy.

High transport costs undermine the competitiveness of landlocked countries in regional and global markets. It also impedes their ability to produce at lower costs. Therefore, turning Entebbe into a world-class transit hub is what the government should have prioritised, using our own resources. But by trying to get the Chinese to do it (igniting rumours of a give-away) and by haphazardly restarting a dead airline, we missed the big push thing.

Let’s stop talking about small things. Let’s talk about how Entebbe can become a global cargo transit hub or how it can get a “category one” status to allow direct flights to American airports.

Akwap (PhD) is an associate consultant at Uganda Management Institute. [email protected]