Africa-Press – Mauritius. In an editorial comment we carried in this paper last year, we had echoed the sentiment felt by most stakeholders in the airline industry locally, including the small shareholders of Air Mauritius, that the appointment in December last of the Croatian national Kesimir Kucko as CEO of our national airline, a professional with more than 30 years of experience in international aviation, would hopefully help turn the company around after the colossal losses it registered for a number of years.
The hope that things would change for the better has come crashing down with the announcement, last Friday, by the Board of Air Mauritius of the immediate suspension of Kesimir Kucko after less than one year in office as well as that of MK’s Chief Finance Officer, Jean Laval Ah-Chip – both for reasons of alleged ethical misconduct/managerial wrongdoings.
national airlines do sometimes fail for different reasons, and Air Mauritius has also been through several storms in the course of its existence. Open skies policy and the resulting competition forced it to take the cue not to take things for granted.
But it was the quality of service for most of its existence which helped sustain the business. It overcame poor mismanagement decisions on occasion, such as when it landed into catastrophic hedging contracts for its fuel oil.
It had to watch out for inexperienced political busybodies and/or their advisors dragging it to service various airports with little traffic or even change its Singapore hub to Kuala Lumpur at great costs with little benefits.
But things changed for the worse with a succession of scandals, financial or managerial, hitting the company and costing many of its past CEOs their jobs and in some cases their credibility.
It came crashing down in the wake of the Covid pandemic, but the conditions for its failure had been set much earlier, through a host of ill-advised decisions, including the ill-timed purchase of brand new Airbus airliners the company could not afford and had to lease out at considerable losses.
All this has been happening under different governments with their appointees on the board of Air Mauritius and in different management capacities – much like what obtains in other State Owned Enterprises.
The poor performance of these erstwhile profitable State enterprises might send the signal that public enterprises eventually are bound to fail, thereby demolishing the strategic political decision taken in earlier decades which sought to free them from bureaucratic shackles in a business environment or to break the hold of monopolies on the local economy through the setting up of state enterprises in certain strategic areas of activity. The state enterprise, it was thought at the time of their inception, would serve the ‘public interest’.
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