By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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On the surface, Uganda and airlines don’t go well together. The national carrier, Uganda Airlines, folded 20 years ago.

Various private and mixed efforts have been tried, and they have nearly all also floundered. Now the government is trying to revive the airline again.

It is unlikely to succeed, but I will happy to be proved wrong.

It’s not that Ugandans can’t run airlines, or there is no market to keep seats filled. The reasons airlines have failed in Uganda, and indeed most of East Africa, has nothing to do with the airlines.

After recording the biggest loss in East African corporate history, Kenya Airways, once the East African star, is wobbling back to its feet. The Nairobi government is throwing in nearly $750 million to help turn it around and get on top of its debt woes. RwandAir, which has grown in popularity, is still a loss maker.

Ugandan travellers love it because it is slightly cheaper and their staff treat passengers better. After feuding with assertive and difficult West African travellers all day, the Kenya Airways staff tends to go to a dark place that puts off many.

I think Kenya Airways too, again, will end in tears. The biggest complaint people have about travel in East Africa, like in most of Africa, is the cost of the tickets. East Africans think Kenya Airways is a greedy scalper. It is not.

The average price of a ticket around the region on KQ is still about $100. Taxes, airport shakedowns (fees), levies by aviation regulators, are what push them to over $300. A good 60 per cent of the cost of airline tickets goes to fellows who are leeching off air travellers. If I had to pay, say, $60 only to fly to Entebbe, I wouldn’t hear the rude KQ clerk.

In general, Africans hate people who fly and punish them. Unless that stops, forget about thriving airlines.

The other thing is that the airlines themselves are not ruthless enough. The flight from Nairobi to Entebbe is about 50 minutes. It is not clear why airlines have to feed passengers and give them “free” booze on such routes.

Then, until there is greater freedom of travel for Africans in Africa, few airlines will succeed. In recent years, I have been involved a few times in organising meetings for Africans in Africa.

Visas are a nightmare. So you get stuck, and you take it to Rwanda where every African invitee will be let in.

Then you get stuck a second time, and you suggest going back to Rwanda and there is a nationalist revolt and you give up!

And then there is thing of “open skies.” Why should every East African who is coming to Kenya have to land in Nairobi? Or Entebbe in Uganda?

This money that is being splashed on reviving or propping up airlines, if it just built and upgraded many small upcountry airstrips where regional flights can land, would do much more for air travel.

Then it would become like a matatu or bus service. Governments don’t own buses and matatus.

They just do the roads and leave private business people to take care of the rest. Airlines aren’t broken. It’s the “roads” they travel on that are.

The writer is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs.