adminover unpaid debts following similar action in Johannesburg recently. The airline was only just starting to regain the trust of some of its passengers, after a series of crippling strikes by staff who simply wanted to be paid what they were owed.
Even emergency Government grants, and the Government does not have much to give away, are totally swallowed in paying off the most pressing debts to just about everyone, leaving the airline still owing a lot.
Plane seizures do not just happen; the airline must have had several warnings before its creditors went to all the trouble of having a plane seized. Air Zimbabwe must have ignored these warnings and just kept flying, knowing that it would inconvenience its passengers and drag the country’s name through the mud.
Everyday that passes makes it ever more clear that Air Zimbabwe, as now set up, is a total business disaster. No tinkering is ever going to fix the airline, and it is extremely dubious that any major carrier will ever feel it worthwhile to take a stake as a “strategic partner” is what is, in global terms, a tiny little regional airline, and one that is bankrupt to boot.
Modern profitable airlines have either grown or merged to become large companies with access to cheap capital flying fleets of modern fuel-efficient planes. There is a minimum size now for an airline.
It must be large enough that it can have a fixed percentage of its planes at any one time undergoing maintenance, with its entire maintenance staff fully employed. An airline with only a handful of planes, and Air Zimbabwe is in this category, cannot hope for the efficiencies demanded by modern airlines.
Simply to remain airborne it needs larger pools of crews and more engineers per plane. It has to keep teams of ground crew at its home airports to serve just two or three international flights a day, or a handful of local routes.
Added to the inherent inefficiencies of smallness are the well-known additional problems that Air Zimbabwe has taken on board, staff levels far in excess of what even it needs, hand-to-mouth financial management, a management structure that results in more managers than planes, and a zero credit rating.
Yet there is business. Emirates, one of the world’s major airlines, has announced daily shuttle services to take Zimbabweans to one of the major portals into Asia, Dubai as from February. There are several flights a
day to and from the Southern African regional hub in Johannesburg; other African airlines find it useful and profitable to have frequent flights to the more northern regional hubs of Nairobi and Addis Ababa.
Zimbabweans continually complain when they are forced to fly to London, the main gateway to Europe and the Americas for our people, via Johannesburg or Nairobi, since the longer journeys and the cumbersome transfers add hours to an already long flight.
And a lot of airlines seem to make very good money flying in and out of Victoria Falls or Livingston, although unfortunately Air Zimbabwe’s share of that traffic is very modest. Our two biggest cities are more than four hours apart by road, a long drive for a brief business visit.
Its either we rescue Air Zimbabwe or begin to think of alternatives. The point is that we need the services of an airline based in Zimbabwe, or at least partly based here. We are not alone in needing these services. Two of our neighbours, Zambia and Malawi, face similar problems. Zambia saw the bankruptcy of its own national airline some years ago and while the private airline that replaced it makes money, it does not make much and has very limited services. Malawi is even worse off.
Even Botswana, which rather usefully has its capital city and main population centre half way between Johannesburg and its main tourist resorts in the north, seems to have problems keeping its airline up to date.
If the four countries had no airline, we would imagine a group of business people would quickly combine and start one, with a base load of business services between the main population centres – Harare, Bulawayo, Lusaka, Ndola, Gaborone, Lilongwe and Blantyre – plus shuttle services between the bigger cities and Johannesburg and Nairobi, plus frequent flights each day in and out of that huge tourist area centred on the Victoria Falls, Zambezi and Chobe.
In this sort of business having a flight, in a modest sized plane, every hour or couple of hours between Johannesburg and Harare and Lusaka would draw traffic from the less frequent services offered by airlines trying to fill a large plane once or twice a day. There would certainly be enough passengers to fill a daily flight from the region to London, perhaps starting Harare four days a week and Lusaka three, with transfers from the other cities designed to take less than 30 minutes.
Such an airline, with a suitable fleet of around a dozen planes, would make good money, being big enough to gain from efficiencies of scale and having a large enough home market to support that size fleet.
We think this is the way to go, rather than trying to keep a group of airlines that are too small, and will remain too small, to compete and which cannot treat the region as a single region. Private ownership by a consortium of regional business people would give the efficiency that comes with no government subsidy, yet would retain ownership within the countries and would allow a large enough base for most capital to come from local sources.
Online Reporter