TRANSPORT-AFRICA: Too Many New Airports Fighting for the Same Customers

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

MAPUTO, Mar 18 2002 (IPS) - A kind of airport fever has taken hold of the neighbouring nations of South Africa, Swaziland and Mozambique, with major new international airports opening, under construction or planned within close proximity of each other.

Critics of the projects say they are too numerous, and will be fighting for the same customers: flyers into and out of a relatively small area.

“The planners of the proposed new airports have to carefully consider whether their projects are viable,” says Charles Magongo, the manager of an airfreight business at the Matsapha Industrial Estate in Swaziland. “Otherwise, there will be a big shakeout, as in any business situation when competition heats up. Some will fail. But by that time millions of taxpayer dollars will have already been spent.”

The regional hub airport, Johannesburg International (formerly Jan Smuts International, named after the British colonial ruler who jailed Mahatma Gandhi), is about to finish a complete rehabilitation of its terminal building, where passages of unsightly tile and copper murals from the 1960s have been replaced with a sleek shopping mall. Parking facilities ringing a new airport hotel are being expanded.

Twenty minutes away by air is the site of the new Kruger Mpumalanga International Airport (KMI), scheduled to open this September.

Twenty minutes south of KMI is the site of Swaziland’s proposed Millennium International Airport, the most expensive public works project ever undertaken in that country, in the semi-arid eastern lowveld area of Mpaka.

Ten minutes east of Mpaka by air is Maputo’s international airport, which will be either rehabilitated or replaced with a new facility befitting the capital city of Mozambique.

Meanwhile, as these air depots go on line or start construction, regional air travel and tourism have dropped drastically.

Business travel is also off in a region-girding recession made worse by a drought this year that has struck hard the agriculture sector, a worldwide decline in commodity prices that has negatively impacted the mining industry, and the deleterious economic fallout from the Zimbabwe political crisis.

Conditions are unlikely to change much in six months, when the Kruger Mpumalanga International airport opens. The “state of the art” international airport will have a 60-metre wide runway three kilometres in length, which will allow for the landing of Boeing 737, 747, 767 jets and the Airbus series of jets.

An Africa-theme terminal will cover 7,800 square metres. Come September, the Nelspruit International Airport and the Skukuza airport, which now serve South Africa’s Mpumalanga province, will close down, and traffic will be diverted to the large new facility.

These will initially be regional flights. KMI will start receiving direct international flights in December.

According to John Massing, managing director of Primkop Airport Management, the company that will manage the KMI Airport, “The KMI Airport is being built to enhance tourism, export and economic growth in our region.”

“The airport is positioned in the heart of the tourism and freight industries of Mpumalanga, only 22 kilometres from Nelspruit and 40 kilometres by road from the Kruger National Park,” says the airport’s promotion brochure.

Tourists headed for South Africa’s Kruger Park, a regional attraction that rivals Victoria Falls, will be able to fly directly to KMI on chartered aircraft, bypassing Johannesburg. This is bad news for the Swaziland government, which was selling its Millennium Airport as a facility that visitors to Kruger Park would find more convenient than Johannesburg International.

Mpaka, the airport’s location, is also close to Swaziland’s largest game park, Hlane, and Mkhaya, a protected facility where endangered animals are kept secure. Mlawula Nature Reserve is also nearby.

Conservationists are angered that no environmental impact assessment for the new airport has been made. Government may fear to do so, because the Big Game Parks of Swaziland, which manages Hlane and Mkhaya, concedes that all the game birds, including some rare and endangered species of eagles and vultures, will have to be exterminated to clear flight paths for arriving and departing aircraft.

“We would not propose this airport if we did not think it would earn a profit,” said Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini two years ago when the project was announced. But tourism is down in the kingdom.

Total tourism revenues, which reached a high of R188.7 million (around 17 million U.S. dollars) in 2000, plunged to R60.2 million (5.2 million U.S. dollars) last year. In 2001, 253,085 visitors entered the kingdom, down from 421,407 the year before.

“The local currency depreciated 40 percent last year, which made Swaziland a real bargain for tourists, but they did not come,” says an official at the tourism ministry who blames a lack of attractions in Swaziland for failing to lure visitors, and the post-Sep 11 worldwide freeze in airline travel.

SA Airlink, the feeder airline for South African Airways that serves regional airports, this month announced the retirement of three jets and the retrenchment of 20 pilots. The airline is cutting back on the number of flights on its routes throughout Southern Africa. This will impact on the new airports.

The regional airports hope to earn revenue from airfreight, but prospects are not assured.

Gideon Mahlalela, president of the Southern African Railway Association, says, “Some commodities like cut flowers that must get to European and Asian markets immediately will rely on air. But most of Southern Africa’s exports are bulk items, minerals and commodities that are best transported in containers by rail and sea.”

Airport planners are pegging the viability of their projects on an economic upturn and a revival of tourism. “These are both hopeful prospects, but they carry no guarantees,” says airfreight manager Magongo.