ETHIOPIA-TRANSPORT: Shake-up in the Skies

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Laeke Mariam Demessie

ADDIS ABABA, Jul 16 1997 (IPS) - The Ethiopian government has announced a major shake-up in the top management at Ethiopian Airlines (EAL), in what is seen by observers here as a move to restore one of Africa’s oldest airlines to its former glory.

According to an announcement on the state radio on Sunday, Ahmed Kellow who was appointed by Meles Zenawi’s government to head the airline three years ago, has been replaced by Bisrat Nigatu, who has been with the national carrier for 24 years.

Some analysts say that the move comes in the wake of declining standards at EAL, which was set up by the Americans five decades ago.

The ousted management team, according to the airline’s staff, was no longer in good books with the pilots, technicians and other EAL senior staff.

Several pilots and technicians had left for other airlines, and according to an EAL source, the new appointment has been welcomed and is seen as the right step to get the airline back on track.

Bisrat’s team, according to sources within EAL, includes four other new appointees, two of whom are women.

Although the Board of Governors, chaired by Seye Abraha, did not give the reasons for the dismissal of Kellow’s team, it has been reported that auditors are going through the accounts for the last three years. But according to another EAL source, the audit is routine.

Abraha was the Minister of Defence during the transitional government and founder of the Tigre People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).

According to a press release from EAL, Bisrat has worked his way up the company’s ladder. His “… nine years as a member of the top management team, included human resources planning and development, fleet planning and aerial evaluation facilities planning, bilateral and commercial agreement negotiations and market research and development”.

EAL, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1996, has always been a barometre of government thinking in Ethiopia. “The changing of Ahmed Kellow’s team for Bisrat Nigatu’s team means less ethnocracy (less politics) and a return to more meritocracy which has always been the tradition of EAL, which was the brainchild of the Trans World Airlines (TWA),” said a political analyst at the Addis Ababa University.

“The team led by Bisrat is expected to introduce a very good security system to EAL, because it has been facing more frequent hijackings during the past four years in its long history,” the analyst added.

EAL’s first highjacking occurred more than three decades ago when an Imperial Air Force officer, Melesse Birara, and his accomplices, diverted a flight from Jimma, Ethiopia’s third largest town, to Somalia.

According to ‘leftist’ political activists here “the most successful highjack happened two and a half decades ago when seven radical students of Haile Selassie University highjacked an airplane to Libya and Algeria”. Among the seven was Berhane Meskel Reda, founder of the Ethiopian Revolutionary Peoples’ Party (EPRP).

The most dramatic highjacking happened last November when an EAL flight, diverted in Kenya, had to make a crash landing near the Comoros Islands when it ran out of fuel. At least 120 passengers and crew aboard Ethiopian Airline Flight 961 died when it crashed in the Indian Ocean.

Among the dead was the internationally known cameraman Mohammed Amin and the editor of ‘Salamta’, EAL’s in-flight magazine, Brian Titley.