JNIA: We cannot cope with huge number of passengers

Dar es Salaam. The Julius Nyerere International Airport (JNIA) is on the list of Africa’s worst airports.

That is a recent verdict of travellers’ website sleepinginairports.net.

However, the news has not come as a shock to JNIA director Moses Malaki who believes that the ranking reflects how Tanzania’s main international travel gateway is overwhelmed by the number of passengers.

In its 2014 Best Airports in Africa survey, which was widely covered in the media last week, sleepinginairports.net ranked JNIA as the fourth worst airport on the continent.

The survey asks travellers to vote for their best airports based on their overall experience of comfort, convenience, cleanliness and customer service.

“From dirty floors and bathrooms to the regular request for bribes, travellers were seriously unimpressed with the airports that made it onto this year’s Worst Airports in Africa list,” says the report.

Other complaints revolved around a lack of air conditioning in sweltering climates, general navigational chaos, limited yet expensive restaurant options and questionably-effective security processes.

Khartoum International Airport, (Sudan) and Kinshasa N’djili International Airport (DRC) precede JNIA as they are voted the first and second worst African airports respectively.

Libya’s Tripoli International Airport was ranked third while Angola’s Luanda Quatro de Fevereiro International Airport was voted the fifth worst airport on the continent.

“If travelling through these airports, most people prefer to skip the airport sleeping experience altogether and splurge on a nearby airport hotel instead. Should you be stuck in any of these airports due to delays, bring a whole lot of patience, because you’ll need it,” says the October released report.

But Mr Malaki told BusinessWeek last week that the airport’s designed capacity is to handle only 1.2 million passengers annually but currently it handles more than 2.5 million passengers.

“You can see the mismatch between the designed capacity and the actual number of passengers we handle; so it is obvious that toilets and other facilities are too limited to accommodate 2.5 million passengers,” said Mr Malaki in an interview.

He is, however, optimistic that the rankings will be different after terminal III starts operations probably in October next year. “Currently work is going on well at terminal III and we hope that it will start operations in October next year. This will see passengers get enough accommodation and probably the rankings will improve,” he said.

After completing terminal III domestic arrivals and departures will still be using terminal II while international passengers will use the new terminal.

According to Mr Malaki, seeing new airlines initiate routes to Dar es Salaam “means that the airport is doing well”.

“Apart from passenger terminals other infrastructure like the runway and taxiway are good enough to accommodate as many airlines as possible.”

He said JNIA has enough space to allow 30 airplanes to land in one hour despite the fact that now only 10 planes land in that period.

“However, we consider the survey to be a challenge and will work on the named issues to identify our problems with the view of rectifying them and make our airport better.”

Meanwhile, Tanzania Airports Authority director general Suleiman Suleiman said the completion of terminal III would create more than 7,000 jobs.

He said the construction would be carried out in two phases. The completion of the first phase would enable the new terminal to handle 3.5 million passengers annually.

“The second phase will involve the construction and installation of a security system and after its completion the whole new terminal would be able to handle 6.5 million passengers annually. We expect the first phase of this terminal to be over by October 2015.”

The total cost for constructing terminal III will be Sh518 billion (euro 235 million).

Eighty-five per cent of the project cost is financed by HSBC Bank of England under the government of the Netherlands guarantee and the remaining 15 per cent would be provided by CRDB Bank.

“The contractor is BAM International Bv of the Netherlands and the consultant is Arab Consulting Engineers Moharram Bakhoum (ACE) of Egypt,” said Mr Suleiman