News that the SADC Aviation Safety Organisation
(SASO), which is responsible for overseeing all safety precautions in the
aviation industry, is
moving its operations to Swaziland should raise eyebrows
because the kingdom itself has no safety plan in operation should a plane crash
at the King Mswati III Airport.
This lack of a plan was first disclosed publicly as
long ago as November 2010, more than three years before the airport, dubbed
King Mswati’s ‘vanity
project’, officially opened.
But nothing has been done to ensure passengers have
a chance of surviving a crash on take-off or landing.
Musa Hlophe, coordinator of the Swaziland Coalition
of Concerned Civic Organisations, writing
in his regular column in the Times Sunday, an independent newspaper in the kingdom, on 28
November 2010, asked what would happen if an aircraft with (say) 400 passengers
on board crashed at the airport?
He wrote, ‘Assuming that we expanded our country’s
ambulance fleet to 200 and each one was able to get to Sikhuphe [the original
name of the airport]within one hour, how could our hospitals manage with
hundreds of extra patients in one day? The closest hospital will be Good
Shepherd at Siteki which is not exactly state of the art and the nearest major
hospitals are in Manzini and Mbabane. They are already all on their knees,
struggling to cope with our current crises of TB, HIV&AIDS.
‘Do our hospitals have a plan to cope with maybe 400
foreign people all needing bed spaces urgently? Do we have enough doctors and
nurses trained in accident and emergency and most importantly do we have the
necessary medicines, equipment and blood for this level of disaster? In a
country that cannot even supply its own citizens with the proper drugs to
prevent a child dying from rabies because of the bite of one dog - I doubt it.
I doubt they could cope with fifty people never mind four hundred.
‘Sikhuphe’s business model to attract major foreign
passenger carriers is already
flawed because of the competition from four other regional
airports within half a day’s drive - Kruger National in Mbombela (Nelspruit),
Maputo in Mozambique, King Shaka in Durban and, of course, OR Tambo in
Johannesburg. But what really stands out for me, as someone who has worked for
businesses for a long time, is what little proper risk analysis has gone on
here. Can you imagine an airline that wanted to carry rich western investors
and tourists that would risk the lives of hundreds of its passengers? Can you imagine
them ignoring the lack of medical systems, equipment, personnel or facilities
to cope with even a relatively minor crash that required treatment of only a
quarter of their passengers and staff?
‘If we adapt our medical systems to meet this need,
will we take resources away from our families who are living with and dying
from HIV&AIDS? So I ask a question that does not seem to have been
considered in public before. How will the disaster plan for Sikhuphe affect the
provision of health care for the rest of us? Will the health budget be diverted
from the families of our sick and dying to allow for the imagined needs of
strangers who will only stay a few hours in our country? Has Minister Xaba and
his team even considered it - have they thought it through? What do they say to
the foreign investors?’
The answers to Holphe’s rhetorical questions were,
and remain, No. There is no plan in operation, nor is there any indication that
anyone connected with the organisation of the airport or the Swazi Government is
trying to create one.
Despite this obvious lack of a safety plan,
Swaziland Civil Aviation Authority (SWACAA) Director General Solomon Dube told
the Swazi Observer,
a newspaper in effect owned by King Mswati III, the kingdom’s absolute monarch,
that SASO was moving its operations from Botswana to Swaziland because, among
other reasons, ‘there was continuous surveillance to make sure that safety precautions
were always observed in the aviation industry’.
He also said SASO wanted to ensure ‘that there was
severe punishment on any person or organisation that violated the safety
standards in the aviation industry’.
On closer inspection it turns out that Swaziland’s
civil aviation record was last audited in 2007 by the International Civil
Aviation Organisation (ICAO) - seven years before the new airport opened. ICAO
found that Swaziland was only 16 percent compliant to the ICAO safety standards.
SASO based its decision to move to Swaziland on the
results of this audit.
See also
U-TURN
ON SUCCESS OF KING’S AIRPORT
DISASTER
AT SIKHUPHE AIRPORT
PROOF:
KING’S AIRPORT POINTLESS
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