The folly and fables of flight

To fly or not to fly, that is the question...that Africans should be asking themselves, with matters of flight this week being quite the topic in more ways than one.

For starters, anyone familiar with those death-defying kamikaze pilots who occupy the cockpits of South Africa’s infamous minibus taxis will suffer a severe case of slack jaw at the news that they are about to launch a budget airline. Budget? Worn tyres? Oil-spewing engines, doors falling off, seats not bolted to the floor?

For many people the minibus taxi has become synonymous with spectacular crashes, total disregard for traffic laws, overloading, ear-shattering rap and kwaito music, non-roadworthy vehicles, and vicious taxi wars where rivals and passengers are equally at risk of being shot. In fact, it may be prudent for pilots of other budget airlines to immediately invest in bullet-proof vests.

The news came this week in the form of an announcement by the South African National Taxi Council (Santaco) – one of the leading taxi associations – that it would partner with Lanseria-based charter company AirAquarius to launch Santaco Express. The new budget airline will be based in Bhisho, the capital of the Eastern Cape Province, with flights starting in September.

Imagine this: catching a flight from Bhisho to Johannesburg with passengers standing  on the runway and indicating with hand signals where they wish to go. The thundering jet screeches to a halt allowing passengers to pile in, two to a seat. The “gaartjie” or attendant starts going through the motions of a pre-flight briefing for passengers but a blast of thumping Big Nuz kwaito sound drowns out his attempt. The plane takes off at sensational speed, cutting right in front of another plane that slams on its brakes.

Halfway to Jozi the plane goes into a sudden nosedive over Harrismith, lands with screeching tyres on the N3 to pick up some more frantically hand-signalling passengers and takes off again. Over Johannesburg’s airport the Taxi Express decides to jump the queue of planes circling in a holding pattern, causing two planes to collide behind it as it nosedives down to a halt. The attendant says he hopes the flight had been enjoyable and cautions the shaken passengers to drive safely when they leave the airport, telling them more people die in road accidents than in aircraft.

On a serious note though, Santaco business development officer Nkululeko Buthelezi has been quoted giving the assurance that “we won't allow our taxi drivers to drive the planes". The airline will be operated by an experienced charter company with qualified pilots, all subject to the normal stringent international and domestic air transportation regulations and standards.

Incidentally, the infamous, but absolutely essential minibus taxi is not only a South African phenomenon. They have become a familiar sight in most African countries from the Cape to Cairo, where they have replaced the trustworthy camel as the favoured mode of transport.

Meanwhile, in a flight of another kind money has been flying (illegally) out of Africa to the tune of US$160bn (R1,088bn) a year, says Abdouile Janneh, the UN’s deputy secretary-general. Janneh last week told 53 African heads of state at the half-yearly summit of the African Union (AU) in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea that the money that annually leaves Africa illegally was more than was needed to finance Africa’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG).

The eight millennium goals seek among other things to halve poverty in Africa by 2015. However, no African country is yet on course towards achieving these goals. Janneh told the African leaders that according to a conservative estimate between US$854bn (R5,800bn) and US$1.8-trillion (R12.2-trillion) was siphoned illegally out of the continent between 1970 and 2008.

A variety of methods are used to move the money, including inflated invoicing, price manipulation, false investments and more. Janneh called on African governments to close the loopholes and said international companies doing business in Africa must be forced to be more transparent in their practices.

One can only wonder what that pilot of all pilots, Julius Malema, will have to say about such foreign practices on African soil. A good reason to nationalise the lot!

It’s not only the foreigners though who get up to monkey business when it comes to matters of money and flight. A Ghanaian architect with refugee status in South Africa was last week sent to jail for six and a half years after being busted in an internet air ticket scam in Table View, Cape Town. The man, Osman Awadu, and others defrauded unsuspecting would-be air travellers out of some R1.5-million.

Meanwhile Malema’s favourite textbook case-study for success, Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, has suffered another humiliation. Going the opposite route to South Africa’s taxi operators, Air Zimbabwe is reportedly now transporting its passengers by road bus after aviation authorities grounded its aging domestic fleet of aircraft due to being unfit for their purpose.

Other flights were also cancelled because of under booking. The airline is battling massive debts directly attributable to Mugabe’s disastrous policies that wrecked the country’s economy. It is now struggling to find the cash to replace its obsolete fleet of aircraft but appears to have invested in some buses instead.

But not all that flies in Africa is bad news though. It has been reported that air services across Africa and out of Africa continue expanding with ever more flights being added. Just this month, for example, Ethiopian Airlines has added five extra weekly flights between Addis Ababa and Milan, using the Boeing 767 aircraft. And this week Kenya Airways introduced twice-daily flights from Nairobi to the new capital of the new Republic of South Sudan. Africa certainly is flying, but please look out for flying taxis.

Stef Terblanche