Jet set criminals proof budget airlines are transforming transport

Last week saw the emergence of a very interesting kind of gangster in Kenya. Were it not for the fact that they were incompetent and quickly got caught, the gang of four could have become legendary.

What happened was that there was a string of robberies in Mombasa, with the added twist that the suspected thieves decided that their getaway vehicle of choice was a plane to Nairobi. Like I said, though, the police were hot on their tail, and by the time the plane landed in Nairobi, they were swiftly put in handcuffs and hauled off to jail.

The choice of a low-cost airline to get away, though, is what makes this such an intriguing story. It is unclear from press reports whether they had pre-purchased their tickets months before, but the episode illustrated everything we needed to know about budget airlines.

You can turn up at the very last minute, board a flight and be on the other end of the country in less than an hour. Even better if you do not have the complication of lots of luggage (in this case, though, there is some lack of clarity about whether airport security failed and the gangsters managed to get on the flight armed).

I doubt that the airline will be using the Flying Gangsters as their mascots any time soon, but that doesn’t stop the rest of us from using the incident as a fascinating case study.

Africa is a particularly inefficient place if you want to get around. The continent is not especially mountainous or flooded, yet getting from one place to the other requires meticulous planning, remarkable amounts of paperwork, and ridiculous levels of expense.

Even when the distances involved are not great, the traveller has to decide whether they want to chance their lives on our murderous roads, or break the bank to fly on a rickety airline. If you’re lucky enough to own a personal car, then it is only useful for running errands around town.

The instant you want to get on the open road, be prepared to get into duels with speeding lorries and buses, and to engage in encounters with avaricious policemen whose road safety interest is restricted to how much money they can prise off unlucky drivers.

All of which makes the continent ripe for a transport revolution. If you’re in Europe and want to make your way from Birmingham to Budapest, say, you have options that run the smorgasbord from road, to rail, to air, to sea, to a combination of all four. The cost-benefit analysis you would conduct would be to do with the price of a ticket, relative speed, and whether you would want to conduct the driving yourself, travel in comfort and luxury, or don’t mind mixing it up with the hoi polloi.

What is certain, though, is that you would have no problem whatsoever, and you would probably get there in less than a day.

If you tried to travel between Addis Ababa and Abuja, though, you have few options. You’re lucky because you are in one of the aviation hubs of the continent (the other ones being Nairobi and Johannesburg), so you can probably hop onto a flight. If you chose to drive yourself, though, good luck finding a passable road, and fighting through at least five border checkpoints.

There are no options for rail travel, or travel by sea (there’s another problem – Africa is so landlocked that sea travel is only available for the few countries that have sea access and a serviceable port).

There are valiant efforts, at least on the air travel front. The aforementioned Ethiopian Airlines is one, and obviously, so is our own Kenya Airways. The two have so stitched up the continent through air routes that we no longer have to fly through Europe to get from one African destination to the other. At least for the most part.

However, even these airlines have a remarkable difficulty when it comes to cost, on two fronts. First, the model is still a legacy one.

You can take off from Nairobi after breakfast, and land before lunch (the flight time is just under four hours), so there’s no reason to serve meals on this flight. Africa would be the perfect location for low cost carriers, but full-service has typically been the way to go.

The second problem is the cost and complexity of government regulation. There are few open skies agreements in Africa, so individual destination pairs have to painstakingly be negotiated between governments.

Look at your ticket cost. I redeemed flight miles the other day to travel between Nairobi and Johannesburg, but I still ended up paying almost $300 (Sh27,000) in taxes. This not only means that airline margins are low, but that it is almost impossible to keep costs down in air travel within the continent.

Rail would be an option, but it is expensive and slow to build, and again needs slow access negotiations between governments, and now, with landowners for access. Even then, there are too many badlands where security may not be guaranteed, and thus that Addis-Abuja route may not be entirely viable.

One hopes that a day is coming soon when travel can be undertaken from any corner of the continent to another, at low cost and at great convenience. We only hope, though, that that doesn’t give our gangsters continental ambitions.

@wgkantai