So the government of Uganda is really serious about reviving the long-dead Uganda Airlines.

When the idea was first mooted, I couldn’t quite figure out how I should react. Should I rejoice, feel sad, or remain unmoved? I could have rejoiced and done a little jig in the spirit of patriotism.

Isn’t this sort of development the kind that patriots are supposed to celebrate? I could have felt sad as well. Uganda is a country where the norm is for public bodies or institutions of the state to perform below their expected potential and for little or nothing to be done to try and correct the anomaly.

The deliberate trial and error or what experts call “the learning approach” that developmental states use, where mistakes are made, inevitably, taken as lessons learnt, and then used as opportunities for refinement, is alien around here. One therefore cannot help but feel afraid if the government comes up with overly ambitious initiatives whose successful execution demands consistency and more than average capacity for managing complexity.

Or I could have opted to not concern myself with the whole thing. It was clear the government’s mind — if there is such a thing — was made up. It therefore mattered little if at all, what anyone outside decision-making circles thought.

Since then, the issue keeps cropping up in conversations among members of the public who are interested in it for whatever reason. I have met or spoken to a handful of optimists who believe it is a good thing Uganda is going to have an airline of its own, as is the case with her neighbours.

Besides feeling that if “small Rwanda” can have one so should we, which in many ways is a feeling built on simple jingoism and the desire to demonstrate that what our neighbours can do so can we, they justify their stance with arguably plausible arguments. One is that Uganda’s population has grown in number and richer ever since the airline collapsed.

More Ugandans are travelling abroad for business, pleasure, and other reasons. Currently they are flying on foreign airlines and making other countries rich.

Then there is the tourism and foreign visitors argument. Uganda now attracts far larger numbers of tourists and visitors coming for all sorts of reasons than say 20 years ago. All this inevitably leads to the conclusion: “Uganda Airlines can tap into that market.”

Not glittering gold

The trouble with such neat formulations is that those behind them look only on the rosy side of the picture. As is often said, not all that glitters is gold. And, to borrow another well-worn cliché, the devil is always in the details.

And now to demonstrate the seriousness with which it is pursuing its airline dream, the government recently announced that it has placed orders for six aircraft, which will make up the initial fleet. Some hardcore sceptics have been forced to sit up and listen more carefully. Even then, there are huge challenges ahead.

Ugandans may be travelling by air in ever larger numbers, but that says nothing about the enthusiasm they will embrace the national airline. Will it be cheap to fly? Will it be going where they usually go or will it find it easy to strike partnerships and in that way piggyback on more established carriers?

As for the large numbers of tourists and foreign visitors which frequent flyers would have noted given sometimes they arrive by the planeloads, will Uganda Airlines be flying to where they come from in the short- to medium-term so that it can service some of that market?

It is possible the answers to all these questions are in the affirmative just as it is possible our experts are yet to work out how all these good things will happen. But technical nitty-gritties are not all there is in terms of challenges.

If African airlines have found it massively challenging to grow the numbers of passengers they carry, one key reason has been and remains “politics.”

Political reasons have stood in the way of governments reducing taxes on air travel, which would make it so affordable for larger numbers of their citizens, thereby adding to the internal passenger volumes.

And while they are happy to grant all sorts of rights to foreign airlines they are never short of reasons for not granting the same rights to airlines from fellow African. They may be good at starting airlines but they are utterly hopeless at removing barriers to their growth.

Perhaps most crucial is discipline. It is easy to see a thriving airline and assume that the success can be replicated elsewhere, and that all it takes to do so is have aspirations and money to realise them.

When we see the likes of Ethiopian Airlines and RwandAir seeming to go places, we rarely look farther than the ambitions that brought them into existence as explanations for what we see as their success.

What we disregard is this: They run on the money invested and on expertise acquired, but also, equally importantly, on discipline and persistence. In Uganda we have the ambition. And we can find the money too. And we can source the expertise. Can we muster the necessary discipline as well? We shall see; won’t we?

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]