For Love and Money
Sometime last year, Safaricom, Kenya's largest wireless phone operator sought to recruit Kenyans in living in the UK and US to work for the company in Kenya. This move was widely welcomed and a lot of Kenyans showed interest in the jobs. As it turned out to be, the exercise was a holiday trip abroad for the Safaricon recruiters and not a recruitment exercise as it was meant to be. Even for a successful company like Safaricom which won the 2004 and 2005 'Company of the Year Award', recruitment is not such a straight forward exercise.
Anyone who has ever sought a job in Kenya can attest to the fact that nepotism, sexual favours and to a large extent tribalism, determine one's chances of getting a job. While recruitment discrimination was started in the civil service and parastatals (quasi-government agencies) as a political tool by the KANU government, it has now spread into various sectors of the Kenyan economy. Not even Kenya's largest and most successful companies, including Kenya Airways, have been spared of these woes and cannot claim that they carry out recruitment on merit.
Despite advertising for jobs in the media, one's success in being recruited by KQ depends on who forwards your job application to the airline. As it is with recruitment in government offices, high government officials, well connected politicians and senior Kenya Airways managers are known to forward their lists of preferred applicants who end up getting the advertised jobs. While many of the successful applicants may be qualified for these positions, the fact remains that there is no integrity when it comes to recruitment in Kenya Airways. The same can be said of staff training opportunities carried out abroad. The more connected the employee, the higher their chances of being selected to attend training overseas.
With reports indicating that the 2 major plane crashes to have hit KQ were a result of pilot error, one is left wondering whether these crashes have anything to do with the way the airline recruits and trains its employees. If anything, the loud silence by the airline and it's accomplices, the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority and the Ministry of Transport, goes to shows that they are all in bed together. The fact that KQ has not been held accountable by the government or the aviation regulators is worrisome considering that travellers are beginning to question the safety record of the airline in light of these fatal crashes.
Though Shareholders may be satisfied with the performance of the airline, the company needs to address the root cause of these plane crashes because at this rate air travellers will shun the airline especially now that their are a number of airlines flying to and through Nairobi. Shareholders can only hope that the CEO, Titus Naikuni, and the airline's board of directors are doing something behind the scenes to straighten up the corporate culture of the airline.