‘…. you guys, munaweza mkahatarisha uchumi wenu bila kujua…

This thing needs a cautious approach…you need a Maryhill Consensus …an airline is more than a business…. you recall Air Zaïre…it had been labelled ‘Air Peut-être …Air Perhaps’… in marketing, perception is reality… and this has implications to the health of an economy…more so in such a sensitive sector as aviation…’

Mzaai BSN let off a barrage of reactions against no one in particular but he was visibly irritated. He had hardly settled in the car as we picked him from Entebbe, when he read the press story about Works and Transport Minister, Gen. Katumba Wamala telling Parliament of his next action in the current Uganda Airlines probe. The story reports the minister is instituting a team to audit the qualifications of the staff at Uganda Airlines. The team will be from the Ministry of Public Service and National Planning Authority. Mzaai says an audit is in order, but proposes a different approach.

The primary success factor, he counsels, is a national consensus about such a front-line sector as aviation. He holds that as a country, we need a Maryhill Consensus about Uganda Airlines. Maryhill High School is a Catholic Church founded girls’ school in Mbarara. Mzaai tells us the story of his sister, who studied from this school in the early 1970s, the heydays of the old East African Community.

At this school, the unwritten rule among the students was … ‘whatever grievances we may have against the school administration, even if this leads to a strike…we should never destroy our beautiful buildings…our aeroplane’. The ‘aeroplane’ referred to the main building on the campus, whose design and slab roofing then, made it look like an aeroplane taking off. And Uganda needs this same national spirit towards Uganda Airlines.  With actual aeroplanes!

The effective approach, according to Mzaai, is re-interviewing the current staff, instead of ‘auditing’ their qualifications. Using a simplified method of auto-evaluation: asking each employee to rank in descending order what she/he believes to be the key result area (KRA) of their job and the tasks to achieve this.  Qualifications are academic, skills and knowledge are acquired and attitude is reorientable. A delicate balance of these variables is what determines organisational success.

By its nature, aviation requires qualifications in such areas as piloting, aeronautic engineering (flight engineers), thus these cannot be debated. But these will not succeed without the supporting services, including such mundane ones as loading. ‘Precision, accuracy and attention to detail are not only key for pilots and engineers, but even for loaders and cleaners’, Mzaai says.

Human error in most air crashes is on such small things. He tells us a case of an air-crash  that resulted from the wrong colour of masking tape. What happened was that the supervisor of cleaners masked signal vents with white masking tape, and after cleaning, one vent remained masked. This affected the communication between the pilots and air traffic control towers, leading to the crash. Since then, he says, masking tapes have been standardised to be red in colour, and the captain makes a spot-inspection before boarding, to ensure all masks have been removed. This tells you the degree of precision essential in aviation. And this has more to do with attitude than academic qualifications.

‘What Gen Katumba needs to do, concludes Mzaai as we enter Kampala jam, is to contract a mixed team of independent aviation experts, to re-interview the current staff and make recommendations based on the findings vis-à-vis the best corporate practices in the aviation industry.

MZAAI SHARES MEMORIES OF AIRLINE TURN-AROUND

Kahunga Ben Matsiko’s writing

SCIENCES can only have Meaning in a Given CONTEXT

A WEEK ACROSS AFRICA

and more….and more…