Our small, and big sins. How Uganda fails

Last month the Auditor General reported that state-owned Uganda Airlines’ losses grew by over Shs100 billion in 2022 from the previous year to a record Sh266 billion.

It’s not alone in the big club of money-losing African state carriers. In fact, it pales in comparison to Kenya’s national carrier Kenya Airways, which this week reported a KSh38.26 billion (Ushs1.1 trillion) net loss for last year, the worst-ever in its decade-long loss-making run.

Ethiopian Airlines is a class apart, but other than Air Seychelles and, in recent times, Royal Air Maroc, the African national carrier is a giant black hole. This is not to beat them down or rub their faces in shame.

Until about 2012, the sky didn’t seem like the limit for Kenya Airways, and some optimistic projections had it growing into a leading international airline by 2030. Instead, its nightmare came sooner, in 2013.

Uganda Airlines had some good years. Founded in 1976, when East African Airways was killed by the crisis of the first East African Community, it started operations in 1977 under the rule of Field Marshal Idi Amin.

A year later, Amin invaded Tanzania, and by April 1979, he was ousted by a combined force of the Tanzanian Army and Ugandan exile groups. But even with an Amin regime facing sanctions, it turned adversity into some reasonable success. After the fall of Amin, the new Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) government appointed former  Col. Gad Wilson Toko as Uganda Airlines General Manager. He was to hold the position until 1985.

A former Air Force Commander, Toko had fallen out with Amin, and fled to exile, where he became an academic and later joined the anti-Amin resistance.

His time at the helm was a turbulent period in Uganda’s politics, most of it under a Milton Obote/UPC government battling a rebellion by now-President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army.

Still, Uganda Airlines did comparatively well. Many of the problems plaguing Uganda Airlines and its peers – corruption, incompetent government, political instability, adverse global factors, high fuel prices, domestic poverty that doesn’t provide a mass flying market – were all there when these airlines did better. We have to look deeper into the key success factors missing.

Take Ethiopian Airlines. Until recently, when it was flying high as the rest of its African competitors bit the dust, its headquarters building in Addis Ababa was a very modest unremarkable building. The joke went that nearly all the other money-losing African airlines had a few branch offices that were flashier than profitable Ethiopian Airlines’.

The airlines’ ethos is part of a long, proud Ethiopian tradition dating to the country’s imperial era. A part of it is habituated within its technocrat class and is resilient against its often volatile and violent politics.

It’s that “thing”, the motivation and imagination in the professional, technocratic, intellectual, and broader middle class, independent of politics, that is missing. It was most dramatically evident in Japan during the Meiji Restoration reformist wave between 1868 and 1889, which turned into a modern economy and global power.

It was evident in Kenya between 1997 and 2007, which birthed the heydays of Kenya Airways. In Uganda, it exploded in the expansion period after independence, led by men like economist Semei Nyanzi. He became chair of the Uganda Development Corporation, a state development vehicle, and created magic with it after independence. A son of Acholi, he was named after a local priest in his home area. He was part of a wider enlightened – and sometimes “posh” – set of Ugandans, including people like Makerere University Frank Kalimuzo, who was murdered by Amin – who made this country.

They were not perfect. But they found a generational calling that enabled them to reach beyond the limits imposed by the politics of the day. One of the latter-day examples is William Muheirwe and the revolution he carried out at National Water and Sewerage Corporation, turning it into, at one point, the most stand-out water agency on the continent.

You would not have picked William for the role in a queue. Often these changemakers are like that. But he went in there, read the Uganda and the politics he had to contend with, and turned them into his raw material. William is a child of Uganda’s adversity, exile, its struggles. He turned them all into his muse. Richard Byarugaba at NSSF, too, almost pulled it off.

When one looks at Uganda Airlines, Uganda National Roads Authority, and other public agencies, one sees how national politics’ corrupt and dead hand burdens them. But there are the nooks and crannies, which this generation of professionals could have mastered, as people like Nyanzi and Muheirwe did, to get better outcomes. In some moments, their failure to do so pains more than the anger at the knavery of the politicians.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3