This week, Kenya Airways made another important announcement about their loss-making streak, and for once the news anchor encouraged viewers to look for the remote and change channel if they so wished.
The rate of unemployment in this country might have blasted the roof, but Kenyans are declining to take up offers of delivering the bad news – it is no wonder Kenya Airways had to outsource this job to a foreigner, who also seems to have misplaced his bag of believable excuses.
You could blame his ground-handling crew for the baggage mishap, as there wouldn’t be KQ without frequent complaints of missing luggage. Would there?
It took time to register, but Kenyans can now see why the government had to jump in to suspend the licences of major betting companies.
In a dark room somewhere in downtown Nairobi, you could bet that some punter might have seen an easy way of making quick cash by carrying odds on which Kenyan company would announce their pre-tax losses next, and there are no guesses on the identity of the culprits.
The people saying that Kenya Airways is being run like a village cattle-dip have kicked a national storm back in the villages, and now the Kenya Union of Grazing Animals has demanded an apology over the disrespect caused to its centres of cleanliness.
Kenyans are asking if the Kenya Airways management still believes they’re the Pride of Africa.
If the answer is yes – and you can bet your left kidney that it is – then it goes without saying that the sloths presiding over the running (or is it flying) of our national airline are proud to be associated with bad management decisions, lack of administrative foresight, pouring taxpayers’ money into a sinkhole, and booking stranded passengers in cholera-endemic hotels.
Information leaking in from the Kenya Airways sieve has it that KQ has cancelled more than 52 flights in the first 18 days of August alone.
The Kenya Airways top management might lie about the stench in their boardroom, but numbers don’t.
Fifty-two flight cancellations in 18 days equates to approximately three flight cancellations per day.
I am yet to find an adult Kenyan of sound mind who will wake up at ungodly hours to argue with her bathroom mirror while hurriedly wearing makeup, just to go spend the whole day chasing after flight announcers and cursing the flight information board.
Kenya Airways should have asked Kenyans for cheaper and less painful ways of killing passengers with anxiety, than cancelling their flights and taking them round in circles.
If passengers were to be asked to choose where they’d love to play games, the airport would be the last choice, as no one would want to play ball where there is none.
For a long time, we have been blaming cholesterol for being bad to our health, forgetting that Kenya Airways flight cancellations has been silently competing for the top spot in the major causes of heart attacks in Kenya.
Flight cancellations are not only bad for your heart, they’re detrimental to your mental health too.
If sleeping on the cold airport floor won’t get your body trembling, chest wheezing and back gymnastic, then the hotel KQ will send you to spend the night in will sure welcome you with a cholera warning and a demolition notice hanging on your door.
You’d be advised to sleep with one eye wide open, constantly checking for sightings of any bulldozers limbering up and down Lang’ata Road.
In this handshake era, many people have gone to bed in designer pajamas and woken up in prison wear.
If you’re going to spend the night in an accommodation facility more controversial than the Building Bridges Initiative, then you’re doing so at owners’ risk.
The management will be proud to comfort you with hustler’s porridge brewed from crocodile tears.
Every Kenyan is proud to see their national flag across an iron bird on foreign soil.
There are many countrymen who cannot relate to this feeling – for they only see their flags fly on government installations and in music videos.
However, no Kenyan would want to get stuck in a foreign airport waiting for a stuttering jalopy that cannot take off because pilots are still looking for the KQ official who moved their cheese.
You’d rather travel in that time-keeping airline owned by that abusive uncle than wait for your father’s sickly contraption which gets frequently stalled each time it lets out a mild cough.
If patriotism was food, Kenyans would all have died from food poisoning for sticking by KQ.
If you’re going to clip the wings of our national airline, at least have the decency not to sneak out even with the oil filter, because the only glue Kenyan parents have budgeted for is for covering their kids’ exercise books, and not for your sticky fingers.
There’s a reason the government has a prison tailor on their payroll, and it isn’t for making graduation gowns for those playing around with taxpayer’s money.
