Last week saw the emergence of a very
interesting kind of gangster in Kenya. Were it not for the fact that they were
incompetent and quickly got caught, the gang of four could have become
legendary. What happened was that there was a string of robberies in Mombasa, with
the added twist that the thieves decided that their getaway vehicle of choice
was a plane to Nairobi. Like I said, though, the police were hot on their tail,
and by the time the plane landed in Nairobi, they were swiftly put in handcuffs
and hauled off to jail.
The choice of a low-cost airline to get
away, though, is what makes this such an intriguing story. It is unclear from
press reports whether they had pre-purchased their tickets months before, but
the episode illustrated everything we needed to know about budget airlines. You
can turn up at the very last minute, board a flight and be on the other end of
the country in less than an hour. Even better if you do not have the
complication of lots of luggage (in this case, though, there is some lack of
clarity about whether airport security failed and the gangsters managed to get
on the flight armed).
I doubt that Jambo Jet will be using the Flying
Gangsters as their mascots any time soon, but that doesn’t stop the rest of us
from using the incident as a fascinating case study.
Africa is a particularly inefficient place
if you want to get around. The continent is not especially mountainous or flooded,
yet getting from one place to the other requires meticulous planning,
remarkable amounts of paperwork, and ridiculous levels of expense. Even when
the distances involved are not great, the traveller has to decide whether they
want to chance their lives on our murderous roads, or break the bank to fly on
a rickety airline.
If you’re lucky enough to own a personal
car, then it is only useful for running errands around town. The instant you
want to get on the open road, be prepared to get into duels with speeding
lorries and buses, and to engage in encounters with avaricious policemen whose
road safety interest is restricted to how much money they can prise off unlucky
drivers.
All of which makes the continent ripe for a
transport revolution. If you’re in Europe and want to make your way from Birmingham
to Budapest, say, you have options that run the smorgasbord from road, to rail,
to air, to sea, to a combination of all four. The cost-benefit analysis you
would conduct would be to do with the price of a ticket, relative speed, and
whether you would want to conduct the driving yourself, travel in comfort and
luxury, or don’t mind mixing it up with hoi polloi. What is certain, though, is
that you would have no problem whatsoever, and you would probably get there in
less than a day.
If you tried to travel between Addis Ababa
and Abuja, though, you have few options. You’re lucky because you are in one of
the aviation hubs of the continent (the other ones being Nairobi and
Johannesburg), so you can probably hop onto an Ethiopian Airlines flight. If
you chose to drive yourself, though, good luck finding a passable road, and
fighting through at least five border checkpoints. There are no options for
rail travel, or travel by sea (there’s another problem – Africa is so
landlocked that sea travel is only available for the few countries that have
sea access and a serviceable port).
There are valiant efforts, at least on the
air travel front. The aforementioned Ethiopian Airlines is one, and obviously,
so is our own Kenya Airways. The two have so stitched up the continent through
air routes that we no longer have to fly through Europe to get from one African
destination to the other. At least for the most part.
However, even these airlines have a
remarkable difficulty when it comes to cost, on two fronts. First, the model is
still a legacy one. You can take off from Nairobi after breakfast, and land
before lunch (the flight time is just under four hours), so there’s no reason
to serve meals on this flight. Africa would be the perfect location for low
cost carriers, but full-service has typically been the way to go. The second
problem is the cost and complexity of government regulation. There are few open
skies agreements in Africa, so individual destination pairs have to
painstakingly be negotiated between governments.
Look at your ticket cost. I redeemed flight
miles the other day to travel between Nairobi and Johannesburg, but I still
ended up paying almost $300 (KSh 27,000) in taxes. This not only means that
airline margins are low, but that it is almost impossible to keep costs down in
air travel within the continent.
Rail would be an option, but it is
expensive and slow to build, and again needs slow access negotiations between
governments, and now, with landowners for access. Even then, there are too many
badlands where security may not be guaranteed, and thus that Addis-Abuja route
may not be entirely viable.
One hopes that a day is coming soon when
travel can be undertaken from any corner of the continent to any other, at low
cost and at great convenience. We only hope, though, that that doesn’t give our
gangsters continental ambitions.
Also published in the Business Daily on September 30 at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/Budget-airlines-are-transforming-transport-sector/-/539548/2469254/-/gnoed6/-/index.html
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