Of wildfires and clean toilets at JKIA

By Kipkoech Tanui

With regard to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) fire debacle, they say if you can’t keep your toilet clean, then you certainly can’t be trusted to keep pretty much else spotless. But first let’s go back a few months ago; we went to JKIA with some office colleagues, and after getting past the security barrier we were hit by an acrid stench.

There were mounds of red soil on each side of the beautiful road, lined by lovely trees, mostly of the shiny-leafed Viker variety.

Livestock dung

It turned out that the source of the awful stench (which must have put off first-time visitors because they probably thought the rest of the country stunk that way) was dung used as fertliser in the ongoing beautification project, which, given Kenya Airports Authority’s (KAA’s) history, will probably cost millions!

But for a moment, I liked this contribution to the global effort to go green. As I admired the ingenuity of KAA’s management, some thoughts ran through my mind. I recalled visiting JKIA before some cleaning company planted guys who routinely mop up the toilets right inside the sanitary utility.

It was dirty and congested and the cubicles were so small, I wondered if a Chicago burger-lover could get past their doors. In fact, it was easier to enter the toilets in reverse, not only because they are tiny, but the door is so close to the toilet seat there is no room to turn once you are inside. Worse still in this era of terrorism and drug trafficking, unless you are with a trusted friend, it is inevitable that you will have to get into these mini-toilets with your suitcases. Woe unto if you are running against time because your brakes are almost failing; it requires time and scientific accuracy to get the bags in but out of the way, fast enough to do your thing. I thought I was the only one worried about the state of JKIA just from looking at the toilets, until I read Sunday Nation columnist Sunny Bindra’s piece: One of the secrets of national success — clean toilets published last year. In case you missed it, someone has laminated a copy and hang them inside the toilet cubicles in Nakuru’s Westside Mall.

Here, the toilets are clean, spacious and suffer no congestion. So you can comfortably read Bindra’s piece to the end.

He started by quoting a professor published in the Havard Business Review, on what he thought brought about Singapore’s economic success.

“Have you seen our (spotless clean) toilets at Changi Airport? ...That’s our competitive advantage,” is how he answered.

Bindra aptly summed up the lesson from Berkeley’s Prof Vinod Aggarwal: “On the other hand, if you can’t get toilets to be clean, you are very unlikely to be able to have standards, processes and cultures that allow you to do anything very well. Hygiene is a basic human necessity. Not getting that right does not set a correct foundation. It also sends a very bad signal to a visitor, and is suggestive of further bad experiences to come.” Now let us leave the toilets in Nakuru and go back to JKIA. How often are the water hydrants tested? Obviously they have fire drills, but when was the last time the hydrants were deployed? Then why have they not moved over to automatic water sprinklers?

Do we have to wait for someone to see the smoke to act? Where are the fire detectors, which airport staff use to threaten smokers who dare go puff in the toilets?

Then on Monday night, KAA used goons to go and throw out the duty free shop owners. They ripped everything apart, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if some live wires were left hanging and came into contact with an inflammable substance, or even pieces of paper or wood, and burnt slowly until they gained enough momentum to explode on Wednesday morning.

Frightening

Now if these guys at the airport — who allowed the haughty Artur brothers to stage-manage their arrival before cameras, own all-access airport passes, and even used the VIP room to address journalists — have to wait until they see huge smoke to fight fires, what else have they neglected or not got right? How dangerous is that to you and your visitors? I was frightened by the fire for the simple reason that the airport is the biggest single concentration of one of the world’s most inflammable fuels known as Jet 1A. The tanks are probably underground, and so you can guess what could have happened if the fire burned on undetected and got close enough to the planes.

Also, what if the fire was on a plane in the taxi area of the runway? Would we have waited for the Kenya Air Force and City Council fire engines to fight through thick traffic to come and help passengers? Was there a link in the failure of fuel hydrants on Monday that led to cancellation of flights, including that of our Olympic team to Moscow, and the raid on Kamlesh Pattni’s controversial duty free chain, to the fire on Wednesday? I don’t know, but if I were an investigator, I would know where to start. And if I were a President like Uhuru Kenyatta, after whose father the airport was named, I would revoke the short and questionable contract extension KAA MD Stephen Gichuki (62) got the other day. But would he? For reasons you know, I doubt.

The head of security at KAA is former Police Spokesman Eric Kiraithe. Apart from training in policing and degrees in criminology, does he really have the specialised training —anchored on the latest detection techniques and technology — to oversee safety at our airports?

We must ask these hard questions because our lives are at stake, and in the international arena, we have set another record in how nations soil their images! We started off with the mismanaged toilets, but we should be going back there to flush down the appointment letters of some guys in KAA! I know some Jubilee hardliners would miss the point and write back to say it is my column, which should be trashed. But in KAA’s failure, we should see how often we mismanage public affairs and later pay a high price for it.

The writer is Managing Editor of The Counties at The Standard Group [email protected]