What management of Uganda Airlines needs to do

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OPINION

By Gerald Obbo Wandera

Uganda Airlines was founded in May 1976 as a subsidiary of the government-owned Uganda Development Corporation by way of a replacement of the services previously rendered by East African Airways, operating routes across Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

This airline is the flag carrier of Uganda, the flagship of the national passenger and cargo carrier, providing scheduled air transportation in East Africa and near international markets, with its vision of being the airline of choice for business and leisure travellers.

These focus zones, as stated, continue to get challenges, requiring agility and strategic planning to redirect the airline to operational efficiency and customer service positive experience.

The airline has been through different phases of twisters and hitherto, the weakness is yet far from being over to allow the operations of this sensitive institution to be aligned. The institution has continued on its poor performance trajectory, leading to losses of billions of shillings reported by the Auditor General in dealings that conspicuously show a conflict of interest.

The citizens have been asked to be devoted, serve the interests of the country and hold constancy to the virtue. Ostensibly, the human resources hired in this age, some have strewn minds and are hell-bent on chasing unaligned interests to the common goals. The incoming management of the airline ought to set their tones high, live by illustrations, testing their strategies for continuous alignment, if any lasting positive impact will be realised.

High tone requires management to set ground rules of operations where breaches are not entertained. Uganda Airlines and their risk management culture such as operations risk incidences portrayed by the institution did not have a risk dashboard and or a register for monitoring, assessment and modification. The process of salvaging Uganda Airlines in this phase will require a hard posture to allow a pattern shift. Measuring the human resources is crucial in transformation of any organisation. This requires extra prudence at the time of assembling them to give space for internal controls and enable objectives to be attained, and more so for a sensitive institution like Uganda Airlines.

The challenges that most government institutions face, much as jobs are advertised, are that some staff get their way in a peculiar means. Such staff are prevalently normative. Nominative staff are those individuals who do not take their jobs seriously because of the protection they have with powerful people in the Government, and tend to trade in conflicts for their decent and make supervision rather thorny.

Agency theory seeks to explicate and resolve disputes between principals and their agents by asking the agents to do the right things. In this context, the management of Uganda Airlines is the agent and should avoid anything that cannot improve the bottom line of the institution and get involved in strategic initiatives that are seen to be plausible for the sustainable performance of the national carrier.

The airline, in this phase, should heighten its operations, manage all risks, liquidity and avoid unprecedented operational errors such as fuel running out, scheduled flight failures and procurement slip-ups wearing off the brand.

As I conclude, Uganda Airlines requires management with a shared vision and paragon to key successive factors to propel it to long-term growth of earnings, share price appreciation and this will require a strong governance practice.

The writer is a risk management specialist and lecturer at Victoria University