Africa Business

Pilots on strike at Kenya Airways will face disciplinary action if they don’t return to work immediately, the government said Sunday, with thousands of passengers stranded for a second day after dozens of fresh flight cancellations.

 The Kenya Airline Pilots Association (KALPA) launched the strike at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport at 06:00 am (0300 GMT) on Saturday — defying a court order against industrial action and deepening the woes of the troubled national carrier.

“Considering the defiance of KALPA and their total disregard for the existing court order –- which is at the heart of the rule of law — the Ministry of Labour now has to activate the procedures governing industrial relations,” Kenya’s Transport Minister Kipchumba Murkomen said in a statement.

“I urge the pilots to be mindful of the consequences of defying a court order and to urgently return to work because impunity cannot be an option,” the newly-appointed minister added.

The airline, part owned by the government and Air France-KLM, is one of the biggest in Africa, connecting multiple countries to Europe and Asia. 

But it has been facing turbulent times, including years of losses.

Murkomen said the government, which has pumped millions of dollars into the airline, had made “relentless efforts” to resolve the dispute but to no avail.

“The sour and chronic industrial action is an impediment to ongoing efforts to raise capital for Kenya Airways,” he said.

There was no immediate response to the minister’s statement from KALPA, which earlier on Sunday said that its members would remain on strike “until their voice is heard.” 

“The public should expect major flight disruptions to continue,” it said on Twitter, blaming the airline’s management for failing to resolve the stalemate.

The airline’s managing director and CEO, Allan Kilavuka, in turn accused the protesting pilots — who make up 10 percent of the workforce — of “holding passengers, other employees, management and the economy at ransom.”

He said Sunday that 56 flights had been cancelled due to the strike, which has thrown around 12,000 passengers’ plans into disarray.

– ‘Inconveniencing’ –

Many travellers turned up to the Nairobi airport on Sunday, only to find out that their flights would not take off.

“I came here at around 5:25 in the morning… but I have been informed that the flight has been cancelled,” passenger Erick Muhanda, who was due to travel to South Africa’s port city of Cape Town, told broadcaster Citizen TV.

“It’s quite inconveniencing,” he said.

The pilots are pressing for the reinstatement of contributions to a provident fund and payment of all salaries stopped during the Covid-19 pandemic.

On Monday, the airline won a court injunction stopping the strike, but an official at KALPA, which has 400 members, told AFP the pilots “were acting within the provisions of the law” and that they were yet to be served with a court order.

The carrier has warned that the strike would jeopardise its recovery, estimating losses at $2.5 million per day if the pilots went ahead with their plans.

The airline was founded in 1977 following the demise of East African Airways, and flies more than four million passengers to 42 destinations annually.

It has been operating in large part thanks to state bailouts following years of losses.

The carrier saw its revenue nosedive after the pandemic grounded planes worldwide because of stringent travel restrictions, devastating the aerospace and tourism industries.

In August, the airline reported a $81.5 million half-year loss citing high fuel costs, despite the government injecting some $520 million to keep it afloat.

On Wednesday, the airline’s management said it was on the path to recovery, flying at least 250,000 passengers each month, and aiming to cut its overall operating costs by 10 percent before the end of next year.

The death toll from Sunday’s plane crash in Lake Victoria in Tanzania has jumped to 19, Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa said, after the Precision Air flight with dozens of passengers aboard plunged into water while approaching the northwestern city of Bukoba.

“All Tanzanians are with you in mourning the 19 people who lost lives during this accident,” Majaliwa told a crowd after arriving at Bukoba airport, where the flight had been scheduled to land from financial capital Dar es Salaam.

Regional authorities and the airline earlier said that 26 survivors out of the 43 people on board flight PW 494 had been pulled to safety and taken to hospital in the lakeside city in Kagera region.

It was not immediately clear if the 19 victims included rescuers who drowned or whether the 48-seater aircraft had more people on board than previously disclosed, a regional official said.

“We are continuing to investigate, there is a possibility that two people were not onboard but died during the rescue effort,” said Kagera regional commissioner Albert Chalamila.

Precision Air, a publicly-listed company which is Tanzania’s largest private airline, said it had dispatched rescuers to the scene.

“An investigation team consisting of Precision Air technical staff and TAA (Tanzania Airports Authority) has also departed to join the rescue team on the ground,” the airline said in a statement.

“Precision Air sincerely understands the anxiety for confirmed information and will therefore do its best to issue more details,” the company said. 

It said the aircraft was an ATR 42-500, manufactured by Toulouse-based Franco-Italian firm ATR.

Video footage broadcast on local media showed the plane largely submerged as rescuers, including fishermen, waded through water to bring people to safety.

Emergency workers attempted to lift the aircraft out of the water using ropes, assisted by cranes as residents also sought to help.

President Samia Suluhu Hassan expressed her condolences to those affected by the accident.

“Let’s continue to be calm while the rescue operation continues as we pray to God to help us,” she said on Twitter.

– ‘Hearts and prayers’ –

The African Union Commission chair Moussa Faki Mahamat also shared his condolences, as did the secretary general of the regional East African Community bloc, Peter Mathuki.

“Our hearts and prayers go to the families of passengers on-board a plane that crashed into Lake Victoria, with our full solidarity to the Government & people of #Tanzania,” Faki wrote on Twitter.

“The East African Community joins and sends our condolences to Mama Samia Suluhu Hassan, families and friends of all those who were affected by the Precision Air plane accident,” Mathuki said, also on Twitter.

Precision Air, which is partly owned by Kenya Airways, was founded in 1993 and operates domestic and regional flights as well as private charters to popular tourist destinations such as the Serengeti National Park and the Zanzibar archipelago.

The accident comes five years after 11 people died when a plane belonging to safari company Coastal Aviation crashed in northern Tanzania.

In March 2019, an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi plunged six minutes after take-off into a field southeast of the Ethiopian capital, killing all 157 people on board.

In 2007, a Kenya Airways flight from the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan to Kenya’s capital Nairobi crashed into a swamp after take-off, killing all 114 passengers.

In 2000, another Kenya Airways flight from Abidjan to Nairobi crashed into the Atlantic Ocean minutes after take-off, killing 169 people while 10 survived.

The UN’s COP27 climate summit kicked off Sunday in Egypt with warnings against backsliding on efforts to cut emissions and calls for rich nations to compensate poor countries after a year of extreme weather disasters.  

An alarming UN report said the past eight years are on track to be the eight warmest on record, with an acceleration in sea level rise, glacier melt, heatwaves and other climate indicators.

“As COP27 gets underway, our planet is sending a distress signal,” UN chief Antonio Guterres said in a statement, calling the report a “chronicle of climate chaos”.

Just in the past few months, floods devastated Pakistan and Nigeria, droughts worsened in Africa and the United States, cyclones whipped the Caribbean, and unprecedented heatwaves seared three continents.

The conference in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh also comes against the backdrop of Russia’s war on Ukraine, an energy crunch, soaring inflation and the lingering effects from the Covid-19 pandemic.

But Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate change executive secretary, said he would not be a “custodian of backsliding” on the goal of slashing greenhouse emissions 45 percent by 2030 to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above late 19th-century levels.

“We will be holding people to account, be they presidents, prime ministers, CEOs,” Stiell said as the 13-day summit opened.

“The heart of implementation is everybody everywhere in the world every single day doing everything they possibly can to address the climate crisis,” he said, noting that only 29 of 194 nations have presented improved plans as called for at COP26 in Glasgow last year.

Current trends would see carbon pollution increase 10 percent by the end of the decade and the Earth’s surface heat up 2.8C, according to findings unveiled last week.

Promises made under the 2015 Paris Agreement would, if kept, only shave off a few tenths of a degree.

Britain’s Alok Sharma, who handed the COP presidency to Egypt, said that while world leaders have faced “competing priorities” this year, “inaction is myopic and can only defer climate catastrophe.” 

“How many more wake-up calls does the world — and world leaders — actually need?” he said.

– ‘Loss and damage’ –

The COP27 summit will focus like never before on money — a major sticking point that has soured relations between countries that got rich burning fossil fuels and the poorer ones suffering from the worst consequences of climate change.

The United States and the European Union — fearful of creating an open-ended reparations framework — have dragged their feet and challenged the need for a separate funding stream.

After two days of intense pre-summit negotiations, delegates agreed on Sunday to put the “loss and damage” issue on the COP27 agenda, a first step towards what are sure to be difficult discussions.

Stiell said inclusion of loss and damage on the agenda after three decades of debate on the issue showed progress.

“The fact that it is there as a substantive agenda item I believe bodes well,” he told reporters. 

COP27 president Sameh Shoukry of Egypt said it would be unproductive to speculate on what outcome the negotiations will lead to, “but certainly everybody is hopeful.”

“Anything that we do effectively has to be on the basis of our common efforts and that we leave no one behind,” he said.

Shoukry also noted that rich nations have not fulfilled a separate pledge to deliver $100 billion per year to help developing countries green their economies and build resilience against future climate change.

He lamented that most climate financing is based on loans.

“We do not have the luxury to continue this way. We have to change our approaches to this existential threat,” he said.

– US-China tensions –

After the first day of talks, some 110 world leaders will join the summit on Monday and Tuesday.

The most conspicuous no-show will be China’s Xi Jinping, whose leadership was renewed last month at a Communist Party Congress.

US President Joe Biden has said he will come, but only after legislative elections on Tuesday that could see either or both houses of Congress fall into the hands of Republicans hostile to international action on climate change.

Cooperation between the United States and China — the world’s two largest economies and carbon polluters — has been crucial to rare breakthroughs in the nearly 30-year saga of UN climate talks, including the 2015 Paris Agreement.

But Sino-US relations have sunk to a 40-year low after a visit to Taiwan by House leader Nancy Pelosi and a US ban on the sale of high-level chip technology to China, leaving the outcome of COP27 in doubt.

A meeting between Xi and Biden at the G20 summit in Bali days before the UN climate meeting ends, if it happens, could be decisive.

One bright spot at COP27 will be the arrival of Brazilian president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose campaign vowed to protect the Amazon and reverse the extractive policies of outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro.

Equatorial Guinea on Sunday accused Spain, France and the United States of “interference” in its presidential and legislative elections scheduled for November 20.

President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who has ruled his country with an iron fist for 43 years, launched his bid for a sixth term this week in a first campaign event.

Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony, reproached the three countries after their diplomats attended a campaign event this week by one of the two opposition movements authorised to present candidates in the polls.

The foreign ministry described it as “interference in the country’s internal affairs” in a statement.

Obiang’s dominant Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea (PDGE) holds 99 of the 100 seats in the outgoing lower house of parliament and all the senate seats.

It was the country’s single legal political movement until 1991, when multi-party politics were introduced.

Running against Obiang are Andres Esono Ondo of the Convergence for Social Democracy party (CPDS) and Buenaventura Monsuy Asumu, who represents the Party of the Democratic Social Coalition.

In a tweet on Thursday, US State Department spokesman Ned Price said Washington was “concerned by reports of arrests and harassment of opposition members and civil society” and called on the government to hold “free and fair” elections.

“Equatorial Guinea can cultivate a more inclusive, peaceful, and democratic society by ensuring the expression of diverse political perspectives, a free and fair voting process, and the protection of the human rights of all individuals,” Price said. 

Security forces have waged a ruthless campaign over several weeks including arresting opponents.

But the government says the detentions are part of a crackdown on a “plot” by the opposition to plan “attacks” on “gas stations, Western embassies and ministers’ homes”.

Obiang, 80, came to power in a 1979 coup and is the longest-ruling head of state in the world excluding monarchs. 

He has never officially been re-elected with less than 93 percent of the vote.

More than 425,000 voters are registered for the polls out of a population of around 1.4 million.

The country possesses major oil and gas resources, but a majority of its 1.3 million people live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank.

Rescuers searched for survivors after a plane carrying 43 people plunged into Lake Victoria in Tanzania on Sunday due to bad weather as it approached the northwestern city of Bukoba, police said.

“There was an accident involving a Precision Air plane which… crashed into water about 100 metres from the airport,” regional police commander William Mwampaghale told reporters at Bukoba airport.

Regional commissioner Albert Chalamila said 43 people, including 39 passengers, two pilots and two cabin crew, were aboard flight PW 494 from financial capital Dar es Salaam to the lakeside city in Kagera region.

“As we speak, we have managed to rescue 26 people who were taken to our referral hospital,” Chalamila said.

“The rescue operation is still ongoing and we are communicating with the pilots,” he said, adding that the aircraft was an ATR-42, manufactured by Toulouse-based Franco-Italian firm ATR.

Precision Air, a publicly-listed company which is Tanzania’s largest private airline, said it had dispatched rescuers to the scene.

“An investigation team consisting of Precision Air technical staff and TAA (Tanzania Airports Authority) has also departed to join the rescue team on the ground,” the airline said in a statement.

“No death has been confirmed at the moment,” it said.

Video footage broadcast on local media showed the plane largely submerged as rescuers, including fishermen, waded through water to bring people to safety.

Emergency workers attempted to lift the aircraft out of the water using ropes, assisted by cranes as local residents also sought to help in the effort.

President Samia Suluhu Hassan expressed her condolences to those affected by the accident.

“Let’s continue to be calm while the rescue operation continues as we pray to God to help us,” she said on Twitter.

– ‘Hearts and prayers’ –

The African Union Commission chair Moussa Faki Mahamat also shared his condolences, as did the secretary general of the regional East African Community bloc, Peter Mathuki.

“Our hearts and prayers go to the families of passengers on-board a plane that crashed into Lake Victoria, with our full solidarity to the Government & people of #Tanzania,” he said on Twitter.

“The East African Community joins and sends our condolences to Mama Samia Suluhu Hassan, families and friends of all those who were affected by the Precision Air plane accident,” Mathuki said on Twitter.

Precision Air, which is partly owned by Kenya Airways, was founded in 1993 and operates domestic and regional flights as well as private charters to popular tourist destinations such as the Serengeti National Park and the Zanzibar archipelago.

The accident comes five years after 11 people died when a plane belonging to safari company Coastal Aviation crashed in northern Tanzania.

In March 2019, an Ethiopian Airlines flight from from Addis Ababa to Nairobi plunged six minutes after take-off into a field southeast of the Ethiopian capital, killing all 157 people on board.

In 2007, a Kenya Airways flight from the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan to Kenya’s capital Nairobi crashed into a swamp after take-off, killing all 114 passengers.

In 2000, another Kenya Airways flight from Abidjan to Nairobi crashed into the Atlantic Ocean minutes after take-off, killing 169 people while 10 survived.

The UN’s COP27 climate summit kicked off Sunday in Egypt with warnings against backsliding on efforts to cut emissions and calls for rich nations to compensate poor countries after a year of extreme weather disasters.  

Just in the past few months, climate-induced catastrophes have killed thousands, displaced millions and cost billions in damages across the world.

Massive floods devastated swaths of Pakistan and Nigeria, droughts worsened in Africa and the western United States, cyclones whipped the Caribbean, and unprecedented heatwaves seared three continents.

The conference in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh comes in a fraught year marked by Russia’s war on Ukraine, an energy crunch, soaring inflation and the lingering effects from the Covid pandemic.

But Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate change executive secretary, said he would not be a “custodian of backsliding” on the goal of slashing greenhouse emissions 45 percent by 2030 to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above late-19th-century levels.

“We will be holding people to account, be they presidents, prime ministers, CEOs,” Stiell said as the 13-day summit opened.

“The heart of implementation is everybody everywhere in the world every single day doing everything they possibly can to address the climate crisis,” he said.

Current trends would see carbon pollution increase 10 percent by the end of the decade and Earth’s surface heat up 2.8C, according to findings unveiled last week.

Promises made under the 2015 Paris Agreement would, if kept, only shave off a few tenths of a degree.

“Whilst I do understand that leaders around the world have faced competing priorities this year, we must be clear: as challenging as our current moment is, inaction is myopic and can only defer climate catastrophe,” said Alok Sharma, British president of the previous COP26 as he handed over the chairmanship to Egypt. 

“How many more wake-up calls does the world — and world leaders — actually need?”, he said.

In a dire warning, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization said the past eight years are on track to be the eight warmest on record, with an acceleration in sea level rise, glacier melt and heatwaves.

“As COP27 gets underway, our planet is sending a distress signal,” UN chief Antonio Guterres said in a statement.

– ‘Loss and damage’ –

The COP27 summit will focus like never before on money — a major sticking point that has soured relations between countries that got rich burning fossil fuels and the poorer ones suffering from the worst consequences of climate change.

The United States and the European Union — fearful of creating an open-ended reparations framework — have dragged their feet and challenged the need for a separate funding stream.

Delegates agreed on Sunday to put the “loss and damage” issue on the COP27 agenda, a first step toward what are sure to be fraught discussions.

Inclusion of the agenda item “reflects a sense of solidarity and empathy for the suffering of the victims of climate induced disasters,” said COP27 president Sameh Shoukry of Egypt.

“We all owe a debt of gratitude to activists and civil society organisations who have persistently demanded the space to discuss funding for loss and damage,” he said to applause.

Shoukry also noted that rich nations have not fulfilled a separate pledge to deliver $100 billion per year to help developing countries green their economies and build resilience against future climate change.

He also lamented that most climate financing is based on loans.

“We do not have the luxury to continue this way. We have to change our approaches to this existential threat,” he said, calling for solutions that “prove we are serious about not leaving anyone behind”.

– US-China tensions –

After the first day of talks, more than 120 world leaders will join the summit on Monday and Tuesday.

The most conspicuous no-show will be China’s Xi Jinping, whose leadership was renewed last month at a Communist Party Congress.

US President Joe Biden has said he will come, but only after legislative elections on Tuesday that could see either or both houses of Congress fall into the hands of Republicans hostile to international action on climate change.

Cooperation between the United States and China — the world’s two largest economies and carbon polluters — has been crucial to rare breakthroughs in the nearly 30-year saga of UN climate talks, including the 2015 Paris Agreement.

But Sino-US relations have sunk to a 40-year low after a visit to Taiwan by House leader Nancy Pelosi and a US ban on the sale of high-level chip technology to China, leaving the outcome of COP27 in doubt.

A meeting between Xi and Biden at the G20 summit in Bali days before the UN climate meeting ends, if it happens, could be decisive.

One bright spot at COP27 will be the arrival of Brazilian president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose campaign vowed to protect the Amazon and reverse the extractive policies of outgoing President Jair Bolsonaro.

Each of the last eight years, if projections for 2022 hold, will be hotter than any year prior to 2015, the UN said Sunday, detailing a dramatic increase in the rate of global warming.

Sea level rise, glacier melt, torrential rains, heat waves — and the deadly disasters they cause — have all accelerated, the World Meteorological Organization said in a report as the COP27 UN Climate Summit opened in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

“As COP27 gets underway, our planet is sending a distress signal,” said UN chief Antonio Guterres, describing the report as “a chronicle of climate chaos”.

Earth has warmed more than 1.1 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century, with roughly half of that increase occurring in the past 30 years, the report shows.

Nearly 200 nations gathered in Egypt have set their sights on holding the rise in temperatures to 1.5C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), a goal some scientists believe is now beyond reach.

This year is on track to be the fifth or sixth warmest ever recorded despite the impact since 2020 of La Nina — a periodic and naturally occurring phenomenon in the Pacific that cools the atmosphere.

“The greater the warming, the worse the impacts,” said WMO head Petteri Taalas.

Surface water in the ocean — which soaks up more than 90 percent of accumulated heat from human carbon emissions — hit record high temperatures in 2021, warming especially fast during the past 20 years.

Marine heat waves were also on the rise, with devastating consequences for coral reefs and the half-billion people who depend on them for food and livelihoods.

Overall, 55 percent of the ocean surface experienced at least one marine heatwave in 2022, the report said.

Driven by melting ice sheets and glaciers, the pace of sea level rise has doubled in the past 30 years, threatening tens of millions in low-lying coastal areas.

“The messages in this report could barely be bleaker,” said Mike Meredith, science leader at the British Antarctic Survey. 

– Records shattered –

“All over our planet, records are being shattered as different parts of the climate system begin to break down.” 

Greenhouse gases accounting for more than 95 percent of warming are all at record levels, with methane showing the largest one-year jump ever recorded, the WMO’s annual State of the Global Climate found.

The increase in methane emissions has been traced to leaks in natural gas production and a rise in beef consumption. 

In 2022, a cascade of extreme weather exacerbated by climate change devastated communities across the globe.

A two-month heatwave in South Asia in March and April bearing the unmistakable fingerprint of man-made warming was followed by floods in Pakistan that left a third of the country under water. At least 1,700 people died, and eight million were displaced. 

In East Africa, rainfall has been below average in four consecutive wet seasons, the longest in 40 years, with 2022 set to deepen the drought.

China saw the longest and most intense heatwave on record and the second-driest summer.

Falling water levels disrupted or threatened commercial river traffic along China’s Yangtze, the Mississippi in the US and several major inland waterways in Europe, which also suffered repeated bouts of sweltering heat.

Poorer nations least responsible for climate change but most vulnerable to its dire impacts suffered the most. 

“But even well-prepared societies this year have been ravaged by extremes -– as seen by the protracted heatwaves and drought in large parts of Europe and southern China,” Taalas said. 

In the European Alps, glacier melt records have been shattered in 2022, with average thickness losses of between three and over four metres (between 9.8 and over 13 feet), the most ever recorded.

Switzerland has lost more than a third of its glacier volume since 2001. 

“If there was ever a year to swamp, shred and burn off the blinkers of global climate inaction then 2022 should be it,” said Dave Reay, head of the University of Edinburgh’s Climate Change Institute. 

“The world now has a monumental job of damage limitation.”

Kenya Airways pilots on Sunday extended their strike and warned of “major flight disruptions”, forcing fresh cancellations as the carrier’s deadline for disciplinary action against those participating lapsed.

Thousands of passengers were stranded as a result of the strike by the Kenya Airline Pilots Association (KALPA), which earlier said that no Kenya Airways flight flown by its members had departed Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport from 6:00 am (0300 GMT) onwards on Saturday.

The pilots announced the strike in defiance of a court order against industrial action and have given no indication of how long it would last.

On Saturday, the airline’s managing director and CEO, Allan Kilavuka, had urged the protesting pilots, who make up 10 percent of the workforce, to return to work by 10:30 am on Sunday.

“Failure to do so will lead to immediate disciplinary action,” he warned.

But KALPA said on Sunday that its members would remain on strike “until their voice is heard.” 

“The public should expect major flight disruptions to continue,” it said on Twitter, blaming the airline’s management for failing to resolve the stalemate.

The airline, part owned by the government and Air France-KLM, is one of the biggest in Africa, connecting multiple countries to Europe and Asia, but it is facing turbulent times, including years of losses.

The pilots’ strike has thrown over 9,000 passengers’ plans into disarray, according to the airline, with travellers turning up to the Nairobi airport on Sunday, only to find out that their flights were cancelled.

“I came here at around 5:25 in the morning… but I have been informed that the flight has been cancelled,” passenger Erick Muhanda, who was due to travel to South Africa’s port city of Cape Town, told broadcaster Citizen TV.

“It’s quite inconveniencing,” he said.

– Ground staff strike called off –

But in a measure offering some relief to the travel sector, the Kenya Aviation Workers Union (KAWU) announced Sunday that it would withdraw a planned strike by ground staff over a separate, long-running dispute with the Kenya Airports Authority (KAA) over salary increases.

“We backtracked on our decision because it was being construed as KAWU joining KALPA in their strike action,” the union’s secretary general Moss Ndiema told reporters at the Nairobi airport.

KAWU had earlier said that ground staff would strike from 2:00 pm onwards on Saturday.

The pilots are pressing for the reinstatement of contributions to a provident fund and payment of all salaries stopped during the Covid-19 pandemic.

On Monday, the airline won a court injunction stopping the strike, but an official at KALPA, which has 400 members, told AFP the pilots “were acting within the provisions of the law” and that they were yet to be served with a court order.

The carrier has warned that the strike would jeopardise its recovery, estimating losses at $2.5 million per day if the pilots went ahead with their plans.

The airline was founded in 1977 following the demise of East African Airways and flies more than four million passengers to 42 destinations annually.

It has been operating in large part thanks to state bailouts following years of losses.

Tanzanian film “Tug of War”, about love and politics during the final years of British colonial Zanzibar, has won the Tanit d’Or at Tunisia’s prestigious Carthage Film Festival.

Africa’s oldest film festival, held in the capital Tunis, presented a total of 170 films from around 40 countries, and ended with the prizes on Saturday night.

The winning film whose title in Swahili is “Vuta N’Kuvute” was directed by Amil Shivji.

Two other feature-length films also received awards at the 33rd edition of the festival devoted to Arab and African filmmakers.

“Under the Fig Trees”, directed by Tunisia’s Erige Sehiri, won the Tanit d’Argent. It looks at romantic relations during harvest in a Tunisian village.

The Tanit de Bronze went to “Sharaf” by German-Egyptian director Samir Nasr, which presents a sombre portrait of Egyptian society through the confines of a prison.

The festival also included a focus on Palestinian cinema and featured Saudi Arabia — with four films — as guest of honour.

A plane carrying 43 people plunged into Lake Victoria in Tanzania early on Sunday due to bad weather shortly before it was due to land in the northwestern city of Bukoba, police said, with efforts under way to rescue those onboard.

“There was an accident involving a Precision Air plane which… crashed into water about 100 metres from the airport,” regional police commander William Mwampaghale told reporters at Bukoba airport.

Regional commissioner Albert Chalamila said 43 people, including 39 passengers, two pilots and two cabin crew, were aboard the flight from financial capital Dar es Salaam to the lakeside city in Kagera region.

“As we speak, we have managed to rescue 26 people who were taken to our referral hospital,” Chalamila said.

“The rescue operation is still ongoing and we are communicating with the pilots,” he said, adding that more details would be shared later.

Precision Air, which is Tanzania’s largest private airline, released a brief statement confirming the accident.

“The rescue team has been dispatched to the scene and more information will be released in 2 hours’ time,” the airline said.

Video footage broadcast on local media showed the plane largely submerged as rescuers waded through water to bring people to safety.

Emergency workers attempted to lift the aircraft out of the water using ropes, assisted by cranes.

President Samia Suluhu Hassan expressed her condolences to those affected by the accident.

“Let’s continue to be calm while the rescue operation continues as we pray to God to help us,” she said on Twitter.

Precision Air, which is partly owned by Kenya Airways, was founded in 1993 and operates domestic and regional flights as well as private charters to popular tourist destinations such as the Serengeti National Park and the Zanzibar archipelago.

The accident comes five years after 11 people died when a plane belonging to safari company Coastal Aviation crashed in northern Tanzania.

In March 2019, an Ethiopian Airlines flight from from Addis Ababa to Nairobi plunged six minutes after take-off into a field southeast of the Ethiopian capital, killing all 157 people on board.

In 2007, a Kenya Airways flight from the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan to Kenya’s capital Nairobi crashed into a swamp after take-off, killing all 114 passengers.

In 2000 another Kenya Airways flight from Abidjan to Nairobi crashed into the Atlantic Ocean minutes after take-off, killing 169 people while 10 survived.