The poverty of ambition. Limited aspiration for economic growth. As a nation, these are the two main maladies we are suffering from.
The other day, we were all on rooftops cheering after the government yielded to public pressure and cancelled the airport concession agreement it had been negotiating with the Adani Group of India.
We did not ask: What next after the collapse of the Adani deal? When you follow the issue; you will find that nothing concrete is on the cards.
It is because of the low ambition of the incumbent elites. But what are our regional neighbours doing? The other day, the Ethiopians signed a letter of intent with lenders to build the largest airport in the region, which has been named Bishoftu International Airport.
The Ethiopians say the current Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa is nearing its maximum capacity and that the expansion is not just necessary but imperative for the future of their economy.
Sample the ambition: increase the capacity of the airport from 17 million passengers to 60 million passengers by 2040.
Strategic importance: enhance Ethiopia’s position as the most advanced aviation hub in the region.
Economic justification: drive economic growth and improve regional and global connectivity.
The new airport will not only accommodate a significantly larger number of passengers but will also enhance a variety of essential services, including cargo transport, flight catering, and aircraft maintenance.
What is my point? It is that for us to achieve our objective of being an aviation hub in the region, we must start thinking more strategically with all our aviation assets. We must figure out how to sweat the two critical assets—the national airline and the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA)—to the maximum.
The starting point is having a world-class airline, and world-class airports, starting with investment in JKIA as the main gateway into the country. Our ambition should be to have a world-class hub to complement a competitive national carrier.
Our problem is that we have lowered our ambitions in terms of what we can achieve with our national aviation assets.
We have accepted that poverty, inefficiency and corruption will always exist and that the aim of policy is merely to mitigate these maladies.
Until recently, we were the aviation powerhouse of the region with a resilient national airline and a strategic hub. We lost mainly because we failed to adapt to a dramatically changed international and regional aviation landscape in an agile manner.
The reason our regional partners have progressed is because of deliberate policy decisions to view the aviation sector in a wholesome manner as a strategic growth instrument. Ethiopia and Rwanda have pursued an aviation strategy centred on consolidating all strategic aviation assets.
In 2018, the administration of former President Uhuru Kenyatta conceived what they dubbed Project Simba whose centrepiece was a proposal to consolidate the national carrier and JKIA.
The idea did not see the light of day. When you want to succeed in introducing fundament change in the aviation sector in Kenya, you must be ambitious enough to muster enough political muscle and wherewithal to fight off the might of politically powerful vested interests.
On paper, Adani collapsed because of public pressure and the indictment by a US court.
However, it is also true that resistance by existing businesses at the airport, especially the businesses with long leases on airport land and private parties holding licences to operate businesses within the airport was also a major factor.
The scramble by the well-connected and corrupt elites for business and land leases within the airport land is one of the most vicious struggles.
Only players enjoying the patronage of powerful godfathers succeed in getting leases there.
And individuals with powerful patrons get leases with better terms and longer tenures. There are cases where private businesses hold leases with tenures running up to 45 years on airport land.
Limited aspiration by policy elites is a big factor. Since 2017, Kenya Airways has been going through a financial restructuring process that started with the government issuing sovereign guarantees of $750 million to a syndicate of creditors.
That process is yet to be completed because the National Treasury continues to dither and procrastinate over the sensible idea of cleaning the company’s balance sheet by taking over some of the loans from its books.
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