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{
    "id": 345383,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/345383/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 780,
    "type": "other",
    "speaker_name": "",
    "speaker_title": "",
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    "content": "this country, over the last 10 years, it has been tremendous. In 2004 when we met the Netherlands Airports Authority at the Imperial Hotel in Kisumu when they were giving us the plans for expanding the Kisumu Airport, there were three scenarios for what we were going to do. As Mr. Kimunya will remember, these scenarios were based on projections of the passenger capacity in that airport over the next 10 years. The original presumption was that the passenger capacity or the destination would only grow at about maybe 10,000 passengers per year. The passengers grew exponentially beyond even the conception of specialists in the airline industry. This showed that, if there are proper facilities, travel by air in Kenya can increase exponentially not just to Kisumu but to other destinations like Kitale, Eldoret, Kisii, Moyale and so on. One of the reasons why the Ethiopian Airline grew so fast was because they had products of air travel to very small towns. I lived there in the 1980s and I could not believe that you could go to a number of destinations in Ethiopia using Ethiopian Airline. What I am saying is that we must aim at growing our aviation industry as a popular industry. In other words, air transport should not be confined to the elite or to very expensive tickets. We should have budget prices for example in travelling by train. We should have also various commodities that the airline industry gives people. This must always be spearheaded by a flag carrier. When I lived in Mexico, Mexico and Mexicana Davision were the two airlines that spearheaded various commodities that the airline was giving. For example, there was one called “ticket with all other things paid”. You would go buy a ticket and pay something and travel across Mexico for three weeks. In every airport that you went to, you could get a taxi ready and then they would take you to a hotel and so on. This really increased internal tourism in Mexico. But that cannot happen if you do not have safe airfields and security in those airfields and so on. Therefore, this issue must be looked at holistically. Why do we want security at our airports? It is because we want to improve travel by air. It is because we want to improve internal tourism in Kenya. It is because we want our people to travel by air. When I first went to Nigeria and I was boarding a plane with women carrying big sufurias with food in them and going from one market to another other, I was shocked that even women with big sufurias could sit next to me and bumped their babies on my lap. This was because for them if you sat next to her, you must be a kind human being who had to carry babies, anyway. So, they did not ask you. They just came with a sufuria, and put the baby on your lap. That was because it was what they did in buses, anyway. So, travel by air was demystified. I think, from what my sister Sophia has been saying, the use of air transport by passengers should be Kenyanized and popularized. We should have many more destinations. It should not just be that planes only go to Kisumu, Mombasa, Nairobi, Eldoret and maybe to Qatar occasionally. We should have airfields in Isiolo and Nanyuki so that it becomes a new mode of transport that is popular and that will increase wealth. The last point I want to make is that investment in the air industry, once we have increased air transport in this country,we will also improve the possibility of Kenya being a first rate service destination for airlines to come and be serviced here, which is happening at the moment. We should also do it like Brazil. The way the Umbria plane started in Brazil in the 1980s was very simple. It was connected both to the military and"
}