Africa Business

The UN’s chief warned Monday that nations must cooperate or face “collective suicide” in the fight against climate change, at a summit where developing countries reeling from global warming demanded more action from rich polluters.

Nearly 100 heads of state and government are meeting for two days in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, facing calls to deepen emissions cuts and financially back developing countries already devastated by the effects of rising temperatures.

“Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish,” Guterres told the UN COP27 summit.

“It is either a Climate Solidarity Pact or a Collective Suicide Pact,” he added.

Guterres urged the world to ramp up the transition to renewable energy, and for richer polluting nations to come to the aid of poorer countries least responsible for heat-trapping emissions.

He said the target should be to provide renewable and affordable energy for all, calling on the United States and China in particular to lead the way.

US-Sino tensions, however, have prompted Beijing to freeze climate cooperation with Washington.

President Xi Jinping is absent from the summit, while President Joe Biden will attend it later this week after US midterm elections.

– ‘Persisting distrust’ –

Nations worldwide are coping with increasingly intense natural disasters that have taken thousands of lives this year and cost billions of dollars.

They range from devastating floods in Nigeria and Pakistan to droughts in the United States and several African nations, as well as unprecedented heatwaves across three continents.

“We have seen one catastrophe after another,” said Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. “Is it not high time to put an end to all this suffering?”

Money has emerged as a major issue at COP27, with wealthy countries scolded for failing to fulfil their pledge to provide $100 billion per year to help developing countries green their economies.

This is a “major cause for persisting distrust, and neither is there any sound reason for the continuing pollution”, said Kenyan President William Ruto, who announced an African climate summit for next year.

A salvo of crises — from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to soaring inflation and the lingering effects of the Covid pandemic — have raised concerns that climate change has dropped down the priority list of governments.

– ‘Highway to climate hell’ –

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said President Vladimir Putin’s “abhorrent war in Ukraine and rising energy prices across the world are not a reason to go slow on climate change.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose gas-dependent economy has been squeezed hard by cuts in Russian supplies, also warned against a “worldwide renaissance of fossil fuels”

Guterres called for a “historic” deal between rich emitters and emerging economies, with countries doubling down on emissions reductions to hold the rise in temperatures to the more ambitions Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial era.

Current trends would see carbon pollution increase 10 percent by the end of the decade and put the world on a path to heat up to 2.8C.

“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator,” Guterres said.

Poorer countries successfully fought to have the issue of “loss and damage” — compensation for the damage caused by climate-enhanced natural disasters — officially put on the COP27 agenda.

“We, the oceanic states that suffer the harsh effects of your activities, have to be assisted in repairing the damage you cause to us,” said Seychelles President Wavel Ramkalawan, whose island nation is threatened by rising waters.

Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley called for a windfall tax on the profits of oil companies, that would be funnelled to a loss and damage fund.

– ‘Living nightmare’ –

The United States and the European Union have dragged their feet for years on compensation for climate impacts, fearing it would create an open-ended reparations framework.

“Loss and damage is not an abstract topic of endless dialogue,” Ruto said. “It is our daily experience and the living nightmare for hundreds of millions of Africans”.

Guterres said that getting “concrete results on loss and damage is a litmus test of the commitment of governments to the success of COP27.”

In a possible blueprint for other developing nations, a group of wealthy nations approved a plan paving the way for South Africa to receive $8.5 billion in loans and grants to move away from coal.

COP27 is scheduled to continue through November 18, with ministers joining the fray during the second week.

Security is tight at the meeting, with Human Rights Watch saying authorities have arrested dozens of people and restricted the right to demonstrate in the days leading up to COP27.

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Britain and France on Monday raised the case of a dissident hunger striker with Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, a day after the jailed activist started refusing water.

Alaa Abdel Fattah, a British-Egyptian, stopped drinking water on Sunday to coincide with the opening of the COP27 climate summit in Egypt.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron both met directly with Sisi and upped the pressure for his release, hours after three Egyptian journalists said they had begun their own hunger strikes over his fate.

Egyptian journalist Mona Selim told AFP during a sit-in at the journalists’ union in Cairo that she and two colleagues had “stopped eating now because Alaa Abdel Fattah is in danger of dying”.

She was speaking alongside Eman Ouf and Racha Azab, the two colleagues who have gone on hunger strike with her.

Selim said that the three are also demanding the “liberation of all prisoners of conscience” in Egypt.

Such prisoners number more than 60,000 in Egypt, according to rights groups — jailed under the rule of Sisi, who deposed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, before being elected the following year.

After a seven-month hunger strike during which he consumed only “100 calories a day”, Abdel Fattah has refused food altogether since last Tuesday.

On Sunday he launched his “water strike”, said his sister Sanaa Seif, who on Monday travelled to Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, where world leaders have gathered for the COP27. 

– ‘Not a lot of time’ –

Sunak has said Abdel Fattah’s plight is “a priority”, and met with the Egyptian president on Monday.

“The Prime Minister said he hoped to see this resolved as soon as possible and would continue to press for progress,” a spokesman for Sunak said, adding he had stressed “the UK Government’s deep concern on this issue”.

Macron said he received an assurance from Sisi that the Egyptian president was “committed to ensuring that (the) health of Alaa Abdel Fattah is preserved”.

Egypt’s Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, the COP27 president, told CNBC television that Abdel Fattah had “all the necessary care in prison”.

Activists at COP27 have posted prolifically on Twitter under the hashtag #FreeAlaa and several speakers have ended their speeches with the words “you have not yet been defeated” — the title of his book, prefaced by Canadian author Naomi Klein. 

“There is not a lot of time — 72 hours at best,” Amnesty International chief Agnes Callamard said in Cairo on Sunday, referring to Alaa Abdel Fattah’s possible remaining lifespan.

She urged Egypt to release him and said that, “if they don’t, that death will be in every single discussion in this COP”. 

Abdel Fattah has since late last year been serving a five-year sentence for “broadcasting false news”, having already spent much of the past decade behind bars.

In Lebanon’s capital Beirut, around 100 people protested against his detention near the British embassy, an AFP photographer reported. 

Abdel Fattah “embodies the Arab world’s fight against repressive authorities in the past 12-13 years,” said journalist Diana Moukalled.

“We are gathering today to raise our voice and demand the release of Alaa and thousands of other political detainees in Egypt and other Arab countries,” she said.

Abdel Fattah’s continued detention comes despite Egypt having granted presidential pardons to a total of 766 political prisoners since the reactivation of a pardon policy in April this year, according to data compiled by Amnesty. 

But over this period 1,540 political dissidents have also been put behind bars, Amnesty says.

The group Reporters Without Borders, in its 2022 World Press Freedom Index, ranked Egypt 168 out of 180 countries.

The crushing impacts of climate change are already a “living nightmare” for people across Africa, Kenyan President William Ruto told world leaders at UN talks on Monday.

The UN climate Conference of the Parties talks in Egypt, billed as the “African COP”, are set to be dominated by calls from developing countries that rich polluters pay for the harm their emissions have already caused, known as “loss and damage”.

“Africa contributes less than three percent of the pollution responsible for climate change, but it’s most severely impacted by the ensuing crisis,” Ruto said.

The worst drought in 40 years is gripping Kenya and the wider Horn of Africa region, threatening millions with starvation — with the UN warning Somalia is on the brink of a famine for the second time in just over a decade.

Some 2.5 million livestock have died in Kenya this year alone, Ruto said, causing economic losses of more than $1.5 billion.

Poorer countries successfully fought to have the issue of loss and damage officially put on the COP27 agenda — despite reluctance over the issue from richer nations, wary of open-ended compensation for the damage caused by climate-induced natural disasters.

But observers caution that this is only a first step towards what developing nations hope will be a specific fund to help with climate impacts.

– ‘Persisting distrust’ –

“Loss and damage is not an abstract topic of endless dialogue,” Ruto said, speaking on behalf of the Africa negotiating group. 

“It is our daily experience and the living nightmare for millions of Kenyans, and hundreds of millions of Africans.”

He said the country had had to reallocate funds budgeted for education and health for an emergency food relief programme for 4.3 million Kenyans, adding that “climate change is directly threatening our people’s lives, health and future”.

Wildlife has not been spared in the country rich with biodiversity. 

“Carcasses of elephants, zebras, wildebeest and many other wild fauna litter our parks,” he said, adding the government has spent $3 million on supplying feed and water to animals in distress in the last three months. 

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in February warned that tens of millions of Africans face a future marked by drought, disease and displacement due to global heating.

Wealthy nations have failed to provide a pledged $100 billion a year from 2020 to developing nations to help them build resilience and green their economies, reaching just $83 billion according to the UN.

This is a “major cause for persisting distrust”, Ruto said.

But he stressed that the continent presented huge economic opportunities and a chance to curb emissions and announced an African summit focusing on climate action next year.

“Africa’s vast tracts of land, deep treasures of diverse natural resources, tremendous untapped renewable energy potential, and a youthful, dynamic, and skilled workforce. constitute the continent’s irresistible credentials,” he said.

The United Nations on Monday unveiled a five-year plan to build a global early warning system for deadly and costly extreme weather events amplified by climate change.

The price tag — a relatively modest $3.1 billion, or less than 50 cents per person — is a small price to pay for proven methods that can save thousands, if not millions, of lives, UN chief Antonio Guterres said at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt.

“I have called for every person on Earth to be protected by early warning systems within five years, with the priority to support the most vulnerable first,” he said as world leaders gathered in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh for the 13-day talks.

Even as climate-enhanced extreme weather is multiplying, half the world’s countries lack advanced early warning systems that can save lives.

Countries with inadequate infrastructure see, on average, eight times greater mortality from disasters than countries with strong measures in place, according to the UN.

Proper early warning systems for floods, droughts, heatwaves, cyclones or other disasters allow for planning that minimises adverse impacts.

And it works: the number of people affected by disasters has nearly doubled over the last two decades, but the number of people killed or missing has fallen by half.

When Cyclone Bhola hit what is present-day Bangladesh in 1970, it claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, prompting the country founded the following year to invest in weather forecasting technology, shelters and a network of volunteers along the coast.

A similarly strong Cyclone Amphan made landfall in 2020 in the same area, but left a death toll of just 26.

“Early warnings save lives and provide vast economic benefits,” World Meteorological Organization chief Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

“Just 24 hours notice of an impending hazardous event can cut the ensuing damage by 30 percent.”

The Global Commission on Adaptation found that spending just $800 million on such systems in developing countries would avoid losses of $3 billion to $16 billion per year.

Starting with science-based observation networks and forecasting technology, a complete early warning infrastructure also requires national and community-based response capabilities, along with ways to rapidly communicate information to a population.

Three Egyptian journalists said Monday they had begun hunger strikes to demand authorities free Alaa Abdel Fattah, a jailed political dissident who has been refusing food and now water too.

British-Egyptian Abdel Fattah, 40, a major figure in the 2011 revolt that toppled longtime president Hosni Mubarak, stopped drinking water on Sunday to coincide with the opening of the COP27 climate summit in Egypt.

“We have stopped eating now because Alaa Abdel Fattah is in danger of dying,” journalist Mona Selim told AFP during a sit-in at the journalists’ union in Cairo.

She was speaking alongside Eman Ouf and Racha Azab, the two colleagues who have gone on hunger strike with her.

Selim said that the three are also demanding the “liberation of all prisoners of conscience” in Egypt. 

They number more than 60,000 in Egypt, according to rights groups — jailed under the rule of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who deposed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, before being elected the following year.

After a seven-month hunger strike during which he consumed only “100 calories a day”, Alaa Abdel Fattah has refused food altogether since last Tuesday.

On Sunday he launched a “water strike”, said his sister Sanaa Seif, who on Monday travelled to Sharm el-Sheikh where world leaders arrived for the COP27. 

– ‘Not a lot of time’ –

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said Abdel Fattah’s plight is “a priority”, and in a letter to the activist’s sister strongly suggested that his case will be discussed at the summit.

Speaking to journalists at the climate summit, Sunak said: “I am hoping to see President Sisi later today.  I will, of course, raise this issue.”

“It’s something that not just the United Kingdom but many countries want to see resolved,” he added.

Activists at COP27 have posted prolifically on Twitter under the hashtag #FreeAlaa and several speakers have ended their speeches with the words “you have not yet been defeated” — the title of his book, prefaced by Canadian author Naomi Klein. 

“There is not a lot of time — 72 hours at best,” Amnesty International chief Agnes Callamard said in Cairo on Sunday, referring to Alaa Abdel Fattah’s possible remaining lifespan.

She urged Egypt to release him and said that, “if they don’t, that death will be in every single discussion in this COP”. 

Abdel Fattah has since late last year been serving a five-year sentence for “broadcasting false news”, having already spent much of the past decade behind bars.

In Lebanon’s capital Beirut, around 100 people protested against his detention near the British embassy, an AFP photographer reported. 

Abdel Fattah “embodies the Arab world’s fight against repressive authorities in the past 12-13 years,” said journalist Diana Moukalled.

“We are gathering today to raise our voice and demand the release of Alaa and thousands of other political detainees in Egypt and other Arab countries,” she said.

Abdel Fattah’s continued detention comes despite Egypt having granted presidential pardons to a total of 766 political prisoners since the reactivation of a pardon policy in April this year, according to data compiled by Amnesty. 

But over this period 1,540 political dissidents have also been put behind bars, Amnesty says.

The group Reporters Without Borders, in its 2022 World Press Freedom Index, ranked Egypt 168 out of 180 countries.

A Nairobi court on Monday summoned officials from the Kenyan pilots’ union behind an ongoing strike that has left thousands of Kenya Airways passengers stranded, as the airline cancelled most of its flights.

The Kenya Airline Pilots Association (KALPA) launched the strike at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on Saturday, defying a court order issued last week against the industrial action.

The walkout has exacerbated the woes facing the troubled national carrier, which has been running losses for years, despite the government pumping in millions of dollars to keep it afloat.

“Due to the ongoing unlawful industrial action by Kenya Airline Pilots Association (KALPA), most of our flights have been cancelled,” Kenya Airways said in a statement.

The airline known as KQ also upped the ante in the dispute by announcing it was ending its recognition of the union and withdrawing from their collective bargaining deal because of KALPA’s “wilful and malicious acts”.

“Due to this unlawful action by KALPA, the customers of KQ both locally and globally have suffered and continue to suffer immeasurable inconvenience and losses,” Kenya Airways said in a statement.

This is “exposing the airline to irreparable damage in respect of its financial position and reputation thus resulting in the wider Kenyan economy taking massive hits”, it said. 

“This amounts to economic sabotage.”

The Nairobi Employment and Labour Relations Court issued a summons to union officials to appear in court on Tuesday “for disobeying Court orders”, Justice Anna Ngibuini Mwaure said in the document seen by AFP.

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

On Sunday, Transport Minister Kipchumba Murkomen urged the pilots to return to work, threatening them with disciplinary action for “defying a court order”.

“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,” the newly-appointed minister said.

KALPA has not responded directly to the government warning but said Monday it had been “working tirelessly to resolve the issues at hand”.

The pilots have accused the airline’s management of making “no concessions” to end the stalemate and have given no indication of how long the strike will last.

– Thousands of passengers disrupted –

On Sunday, the airline said 56 flights had been cancelled due to the strike, disrupting 12,000 passengers’ plans.

The protesting pilots, who make up 10 percent of the workforce, are pressing for the reinstatement of contributions to a provident fund and payment of all salaries stopped during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Last week, the airline won a court injunction stopping the strike, but an official at KALPA, which has 400 members, told AFP at the time that the pilots “were acting within the provisions of the law” and 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.

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.

DR Congo’s military has deployed two war planes against M23 rebels in the conflict-torn east, provoking a rebuke Monday from neighbouring Rwanda after one jet entered the country’s airspace.

Rwanda’s government stated that a Sukhoi-25 aircraft from the Democratic Republic of Congo had violated its airspace on Monday morning, allegedly briefly touching down in the small central African nation. 

“No military action was taken by Rwanda in response, and the jet returned to DRC,” the statement added, explaining that the government had formally protested the move. 

The DRC’s government admitted one of its jets had “unfortunately” entered Rwandan airspace. It added that just as it is committed to its own territorial integrity, Congo has “never harboured the intention of violating that of its neighbour’s”. 

The incident comes as tensions between the DRC and Rwanda are at their highest in years, with Kinshasa accusing Kigali of backing the resurgent M23 rebels. 

A mostly Congolese Tutsi group, the M23 first leapt to prominence in 2012 when it briefly captured the main city in eastern DRC, Goma, before being driven out, and then lying dormant for years.

But the group resumed fighting in late 2021, claiming the DRC had failed to honour a pledge to integrate them into the army, among other grievances. 

The rebels have won a string of victories against the Congolese army in North Kivu province in recent weeks, dramatically increasing the territory under their control. 

The DRC expelled the Rwandan ambassador in response to escalating violence. 

But details about the Congolese government’s deployments of jets — a new twist in the conflict — remain unclear.

AFP journalists saw two fighter jets take off from Goma airport on Monday morning. 

A resident of the settlement of Kiwanja in North Kivu, which recently fell into M23 hands, also told AFP a jet had flown overhead that morning. 

The current frontlines are thought to be situated near the town of Rugari, 30 kilometres (18 miles) from Goma, and an important commercial hub of about one million people.

– Vigilance groups –

A Congolese military spokesman in Goma, Colonel Guillaume Ndjike Kaiko, the DRC will continue to fight so long as rebels occupy a “single centimetre” of its territory. 

“We are being attacked and the DRC has the right to put all means at its disposal,” Kaiko said. 

In a national address on Thursday, DRC President Felix Tshisekedi accused Rwanda of seeking to destabilise eastern Congo to appropriate the region’s mineral wealth.

He also urged youngsters to enlist in the army as well as form “vigilance groups” against the M23.

Kaiko said 3,000 people had already responded to the call in Goma.

-‘Beat the rebels’-

Near a military base in the city on Monday morning, hundreds of recruits lined up in formation, with some holding dummy wooden guns. 

A general told them they would undergo training before the army decides their role.

“Real Congolese must join the army, to beat the rebels,” said Daniel, a 28-year-old recruit, before singing songs advocating national unity with his comrades.

A 25-year-old woman named Solange echoed a similar martial spirit. 

“I want to fight against Rwanda,” she said. “I give my life to the nation”. 

Ethiopian government officials met with representatives of the Tigrayan authorities in Kenya on Monday to discuss plans for disarming the rebels following a peace deal signed last week between the warring sides.

The breakthrough accord inked in South Africa, which has been hailed internationally as a key step towards ending the two-year conflict, includes a timetable for disarming the rebels, according to a copy of the document seen by AFP.

In a statement issued Monday, the African Union (AU), which mediated the Pretoria talks, said it had convened a meeting of senior commanders from both sides to “discuss and work out… disarmament issues, taking into account the security situation on the ground”.

Field Marshal Berhanu Jula, chief of staff of the Ethiopian Armed Forces, and General Tadesse Worede, commander-in-chief of the Tigray rebel forces, will lead the talks, negotiators told reporters in Kenya’s capital Nairobi.

The government’s chief negotiator Redwan Hussein, who is also national security adviser to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, said: “Political leaders have signed the agreement, but our military leaders will pave the way to expedite the implementation.” 

According to the AU statement, “the meeting should also provide a roadmap for immediate humanitarian access and restoration of services in the Tigray region”.

Ethiopia’s northernmost region has been in the grip of a severe humanitarian crisis for over a year due to lack of food and medicine, as well as limited access to basic services including electricity and banking. 

Getachew Reda, chief negotiator for the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), told reporters it was up to the military commanders “to figure out how effectively to carry out the deal and to make sure that we continue to hold our fire and, of course, silence the guns forever”. 

Tigray remains inaccessible to journalists and it is impossible to verify if violence has eased since the agreement was signed.

The war between the TPLF and pro-Abiy forces, which include regional militias and the Eritrean army, has caused an untold number of deaths and sparked reports of horrific abuses by all parties.

Estimates of casualties vary widely, with the United States saying that as many as half a million people have died, while the EU’s foreign envoy Josep Borrell said last week that possibly more than 100,000 people have been killed.

UN investigators have accused Addis Ababa of possible crimes against humanity in Tigray and of using starvation as a weapon of war — claims denied by the Ethiopian authorities.

Abiy — a Nobel Peace Prize laureate — sent troops into Tigray on November 4, 2020 to topple the TPLF, the region’s ruling party, in response to what he said were attacks on federal army camps.

Three Egyptian journalists said Monday they had begun hunger strikes to demand authorities free Alaa Abdel Fattah, a jailed political dissident who has been refusing food and now water too.

British-Egyptian Abdel Fattah, 40, a major figure in the 2011 revolt that toppled longtime president Hosni Mubarak, stopped drinking water on Sunday to coincide with the opening of the COP27 climate summit in Egypt.

“We have stopped eating now because Alaa Abdel Fattah is in danger of dying,” journalist Mona Selim told AFP during a sit-in at the journalists’ union in Cairo.

She was speaking alongside Eman Ouf and Racha Azab, the two colleagues who have gone on hunger strike with her.

Selim said that the three are also demanding the “liberation of all prisoners of conscience” in Egypt. 

They number more than 60,000 in Egypt, according to rights groups — jailed under the rule of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who deposed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, before being elected the following year.

After a seven-month hunger strike during which he consumed only “100 calories a day”, Alaa Abdel Fattah has refused food altogether since last Tuesday.

On Sunday he launched a “water strike” too, said his sister Sanaa Seif, who on Monday travelled to Sharm el-Sheikh where world leaders arrived for the COP27. 

– ‘Not a lot of time’ –

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said Abdel Fattah’s plight is “a priority”, and in a letter to the activist’s sister strongly suggested that his case will be discussed at the summit.

Activists at COP27 have posted prolifically on Twitter under the hashtag #FreeAlaa and several speakers have ended their speeches with the words “you have not yet been defeated” — the title of his book, prefaced by Canadian author Naomi Klein. 

“There is not a lot of time — 72 hours at best,” Amnesty International chief Agnes Callamard said in Cairo on Sunday, referring to Alaa Abdel Fattah’s possible remaining lifespan.

She urged Egypt to release him and said that, “if they don’t, that death will be in every single discussion in this COP”. 

Abdel Fattah has since late last year been serving a five-year sentence for “broadcasting false news”, having already spent much of the past decade behind bars.

In Lebanon’s capital Beirut, around 100 people protested against his detention near the British embassy, an AFP photographer reported. 

Abdel Fattah “embodies the Arab world’s fight against repressive authorities in the past 12-13 years,” said journalist Diana Moukalled.

“We are gathering today to raise our voice and demand the release of Alaa and thousands of other political detainees in Egypt and other Arab countries,” she said.

Abdel Fattah’s continued detention comes despite Egypt having granted presidential pardons to a total of 766 political prisoners since the reactivation of a pardon policy in April this year, according to data compiled by Amnesty. 

But over this period 1,540 political dissidents have also been put behind bars, Amnesty says.

The group Reporters Without Borders, in its 2022 World Press Freedom Index, ranked Egypt 168 out of 180 countries.

A Nairobi court on Monday summoned the Kenyan pilots’ union responsible for a ongoing strike that has left thousands of Kenya Airways passengers stranded, as the airline cancelled most of its flights.

The Kenya Airline Pilots Association (KALPA) launched the strike at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport at six am (0300 GMT) on Saturday, defying a court order issued last week against the industrial action.

The strike has exacerbated the woes facing the troubled national carrier, which has been running losses for years, despite the government pumping in millions of dollars to keep it afloat.

“Due to the ongoing unlawful industrial action by Kenya Airline Pilots Association (KALPA), most of our flights have been cancelled,” the carrier said in a statement.

Hours later, the Nairobi Employment and Labour Relations Court issued a summons to union officials to appear “in court on 8th November 2022… for disobeying Court orders”, Justice Anna Ngibuini Mwaure said in the document seen by AFP.

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

On Sunday, Transport Minister Kipchumba Murkomen urged the pilots to return to work, threatening them with disciplinary action for “defying a court order”.

“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,” the newly-appointed minister said.

KALPA has not responded directly to the government warning but said Monday it had been “working tirelessly to resolve the issues at hand.”

The pilots have accused the airline’s management of making “no concessions” to end the stalemate and have given no indication of how long the strike will last.

– Travel disruptions –

On Sunday, the airline said 56 flights had been cancelled due to the strike, disrupting 12,000 passengers’ plans.

The protesting pilots, who make up 10 percent of the workforce, are pressing for the reinstatement of contributions to a provident fund and payment of all salaries stopped during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Last week, the airline won a court injunction stopping the strike, but an official at KALPA, which has 400 members, told AFP at the time that the pilots “were acting within the provisions of the law” and 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.