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Sights and Sounds of Zanzibar

About three years ago, we chose to spend part of the December holidays as tourists in Zanzibar. It was still at the time when the travel advisories against Kenya were in full effect following the Westgate terrorist assault. We flew into Zanzibar’s Kisauni airport, where, quite blissfully, there was a separate immigration counter for East African Community(EAC) citizens, contrary to the Dar es Salaam Julius Nyerere International Airport’s legacy of treating all arriving visitors as one heaving block of unwelcome travellers.

It took about an hour to drive to our destination in the northern part of the island, where we were going to stay at a villa belonging to a South African owner. We did however get pulled over twice on the otherwise uneventful journey. The first time was by the Zanzibar tourist police who wanted to check the “papers” of our van. The “papers” were found to be in good order and we were happily waved along.The next incident was not so easy. Two regular policemen wearing the full white Zanzibari police uniform, buttons agonizingly stretched across their corpulent bellies, asked Kiba our driver for his driving license, PSV license and rate card in that order after taking a long, languorous look at the license stickers on the windscreen and finding no fault. Of course, Kiba couldn’t produce a rate card since the van belonged to the villa’s owner, so he was told that the policemen would keep his driving license until he could find it. The cops were quite pragmatic and told Kiba to take down their mobile numbers and give it to any cop who might stop us ahead so that they could explain that they were in possession of the license.

After a few minutes, one cop asked Kiba to step out of the vehicle for a “conversation”. Money changed hands, the driving license was released and we were dispatched on our merry way. Total time taken for the transaction: 15 glorious minutes of our precious holiday. Kiba was visibly embarrassed and bristling with anger at the capricious display of greed in front of his visitors. We chuckled and consoled his morose spirit with the fact that we were coming from a country where our own Kenyan traffic cops would make his Zanzibari traffic cops look like omena at a Nile Perch beauty parade.

View of Stone Town, Zanzibar
Image from http://theseyyida-zanzibar.com/

Zanzibar is a beautiful island with a heritage quite similar to Lamu. Arab, African and Indian influences have melted into a traditional, conservative Islamic culture. Stone Town, which is the main city on the island is a tourist haven with several narrow winding streets dotted by the ubiquitous curio hustlers cajoling you to visit their shops that have the same kikoys, African traditional masks, paintings and batiks. I spoke to one boutique owner, marveling at how they were lucky to still have tourists in Zanzibar, as our villa owner had told us that they enjoyed bookings eleven out of twelve months in a year. She was not as bullish, however.

She told us that most of the tourists to Zanzibar were typically on a Kenya-Tanzania-Zanzibar circuit and the events in Kenya had significantly impacted the numbers coming through to Zanzibar at that time in 2014. This conversation was replicated two months ago when I was on a working visit to Kigali, shortly after the August 8th 2017 elections here in Nairobi. The general manager at the hotel I was staying at was lamenting at the impact the Kenyan elections were having on visitors to a city some 1,200 kilometres south west of Nairobi. He said the exact same thing as the Zanzibari boutique owner. A large number of tourists to Rwanda were usually partaking in a circuit that started in Kenya. Cancellations to Kenya therefore meant that the whole circuit, including Rwanda would be cancelled.


Image from https://www.neverendingfootsteps.com

That our fortunes (and our sticky-fingered traffic cops) are intertwined within the East African Community is an unassailable fact. The intangible but very apparent influence that Kenya has on the region’s economy should give some pause to the proponents of the monetary (and doubtful political) union for the EAC.Our seeming inability to arrive at a mutually agreeable political solution is one that is of our own Kenyan making, and should never be exposed to the wider, unsuspecting regional citizenry. Or perhaps the opposite is true: a regional constituency might require a very different big picture thinking at the political level, making Kenyan tribal issues the non-issues that they need to eventually become.

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka

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Kenya Airways needs another shot in the arm

What do Britam, Kenya Tourism Federation, Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission, Strathmore Business School, MTN Business Kenya, Kenya Commercial Bank and British American Tobacco Kenya Limited all have in common? Absolutely nothing. Except that senior executives from these organizations were present in Kigali last month, more precisely on May 26th for various business reasons that were not only mutually exclusive, but it is quite likely that many of these executives never crossed each other’s paths. But they crossed my path. The serendipitous points of confluence were the Kigali airport and at the Serena Kigali where many of us were staying. Most of the executives had come in using the Pride of Africa, Kenya Airways, which is the lifeblood of business travel in the East, Central and Southern Africa region. A tiny fraction had used Rwandair, the national carrier for that beautiful nation state nestled in the bosom of the East African Community.

There is massive trading of goods and services occurring across the five East African Community members. Pivotal to that business is the travel that the business owners and their managers have to undertake to make that business happen or monitor its performance. Pivotal to that travel is Kenya Airways like the critical aorta in the East African cardiovascular system. It hit me, after saying hello so many times, that I was starting to think I was at a diluted version of the Kenyan Company of the Year Awards. Kenyans are doing business aggressively in the region and any problems facing Kenya Airways are problems that will have far reaching impact on business in the region. Board meetings will be missed, conferences will be delayed, workshops will be remiss without key trainers, performance appraisals postponed just if the airline had one daily hiccup.

So it was with the deepest regret that I told my workshop organizers in April that they had to book me on Rwandair for the May workshop that took me to Kigali. I am proudly Kenyan and fiercely loyal to Kenya Airways, so much so that I take deep umbrage whenever the airline is trashed in any gathering. The golden handcuffs called frequent flyer miles also don’t allow much in the form of adulterous predilections with competitors. You are penalized heavily via ego bruising downgrades by the Flying Blue program, of which Kenya Airways is a member, for not maintaining a rigorous flight schedule annually. I was in the tiny fraction that flew the competition simply because the anecdotal evidence of missed and delayed regional flights by our national pride were starting to take their toll on the brand’s promise of reliability. I ended up being vindicated for my decision as my colleague who chose to fly the airline did indeed have his morning flight to Kigali cancelled. It is also noteworthy that Kenya Airways is the only decently reliable airline flying to Tanzania and Uganda respectively directly from Nairobi. It therefore has a captive market well sewn up in this region.

The airline has monumental goodwill and plays an undeniably enormous role in flying the country’s flag high. As one of only four African national carriers that are of global significance (the other three being South African Airways, Ethiopian Airways and Egypt Air) Kenya Airways’ financial problems are Kenya’s problems. They merit scrutiny and concern in equal measure, if for no other reason than we cannot, as a proud nation, permit this symbol of nationalism to fly into headwinds as my media colleagues like to infer.

In November 2012, I raised an eyebrow in this column regarding the motive for the rights issue that Kenya Airways had undertaken 6 months earlier:

“The timing of the rights issue in April this year was ostensibly to raise the equity for the airline and improve its debt to equity ratios for the further leveraging the airline needs to undertake to grow its fleet for its future expansion. However, looking at the airlines’ statement in changes in equity, if the rights issue had not happened when it did, Kshs 6.2 billion would have been wiped out from the equity arising from the operating losses as well as losses from the cash flow hedges that have caught the airline on the wrong side of the very necessary derivative bet for a few years now.”

Looking at the Half Year 2014 results released by the airline, the total comprehensive loss of Kes 13.2 bn pretty much almost halved their equity to the position of Kes 15 bn from a starting position of Kes 28.2 bn at the beginning of the financial year in April 2014. Cash was down to Kes 4.5 bn at half year as well from Kes 11.2bn at the beginning of the period. The airline is burning through cash at a high rate driven by high loan and interest repayments and basic operational expenses like salaries while grappling with labor relations that are a key cause of the delayed flights across the region.

The recently announced Treasury cash bailout of Kes 4.2 billion will be swallowed within the airline’s operational bowels without the pleasure of a satisfactory burp. That will also be putting an Elastoplast over a gaping wound that needs the kind of suturing provided by a massive capital injection that will be very apparent when they release their full year results for the period ending March 2015. Some feverish calls will have to be made or are probably being made to the key shareholders GoK and KLM to pony up certainly much more than the Kes 4.2 bn that has been put in Treasury budget estimates.

If GoK can consider injecting capital into a moribund, badly mismanaged train smash of a sugar miller like Mumias, it goes without saying that an injection into the national carrier is not only inevitable, but it is imperative. If it doesn’t happen the unimaginable impact will extend beyond Kenya Airways stakeholders: It will impact how business is done in the East African region as a whole.

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka