EDITORIAL: Last week’s seizure of a Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) Boeing 777 at Kuala Lumpur airport on the orders of a Malaysian court proves once again that the management of the national flag carrier as well as the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is not just inefficient but also very incompetent. Why on earth did authorities feel it was alright to miss payments on the said aircraft’s lease? And surely, the Pakistani foreign mission in Kuala Lumpur must have been asleep at the wheel if it didn’t even know that a case had been filed in the Malaysian high court and a verdict, very embarrassing for Pakistan and PIA, delivered.
The aviation minister’s excuse that the payment was missed because of the fallout of Covid-19 cannot be accepted at all. For if he meant that the financial impact of the pandemic rendered the airline incapable of meeting such financial burdens, then he had just not done his homework because in that case the airline should not have allowed an aircraft that was already part of an international dispute to fly abroad especially since it boasts a fleet of about a dozen Boeing 777s. And it’s not as if the government has not been bailing out PIA, pouring billions of rupees into it to offset losses, for a very long time. Why, then, did it have to take such a risk? Something must also be said about the way the passengers of the impounded aircraft were left to care for themselves at the airport, without being provided any food or accommodation till alternate flights were arranged, even though PIA initially said it would “look after” all their immediate needs.
That PIA has been suffering for decades is no secret yet it is still surprising that authorities continue to just stand aside and do nothing about it. As with other State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs), which continue to hemorrhage hundreds of billions of rupees every year, the government is clearly still without an effective action plan that will do something about these unbearable leakages. The rot started to settle in PIA at the beginning of the 1990s, even before it was stuffed with political appointees in our so-called decade of democracy, with then prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s Open Sky policy. The government granted liberal rights to foreign airlines, especially from Gulf countries, for commercial operations inside Pakistan, but without any manner of reciprocity that is standard market practice to ensure healthy growth for all players in the game. As a result PIA continued to lose passenger traffic and crucial revenue from all the important routes like countries in the Middle East and North America.
Then began all the problems with overstaffing, which successive governments resorted to in order to accommodate political workers central to their success as democratic parties, and over time a once profitable and progressive airline became the very model of inefficiency and corruption. Now, in an age when aviation is one of the most competitive industries as the pandemic puts the question mark on the survival of many airlines across the world, PIA’s employee-to-aircraft ratio continues to be among the worst in the world at around 400. And it really doesn’t seem as if the aviation ministry, at least, is in any sort of control whatsoever. Just last summer the minister made the blunder of stating in the national assembly, without proper confirmation and pending the result of a formal inquiry, that hundreds of licences issued to Pakistani pilots working in local and international airlines were fake. That promptly led to PIA being banned from operating in a number of countries and many Pakistani pilots in foreign airlines were suspended and investigated for legal and safety reasons.
The government has made a number of plans to sort out SOEs, from the idea of a holding company early in the administration to restructuring leading to privatisation more recently, but none of them seems to have properly taken off. Perhaps a nice beginning can still be made by introducing a long-missing element of accountability in this process. When those put in charge to return such enterprises to profitability instead run them further into the ground, surely they must be made to answer for their actions and heads must be made to roll. Sometimes it makes sense to blame previous governments, because a lot of the problems of today are indeed rooted in the past, but it tends to lose its effectiveness when present ministers who were also ministers in past administrations do it. The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government seems to have got into the habit of pointing out all the problems and then blaming others for them. It will now have to show concrete results stemming from its own policies.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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