“My friends have suggested that I need to get my mattress in the evening and sleep next to generator until the next morning,” Kipchumba Murkomen began off when asked what the real issue was at JKIA because of the frequent blackouts, that left travelers stranded.
In an interview on Thursday with Spice FM, the Transport and Roads CS however said that JKIA is facing systemic issues.
According to him, the government, for many years, has invested poorly on the international airport.
Murkomen said that during the Jubilee administration, a lot of focus was put on the part of the airport that was burnt after 2013 while neglecting other operational functions, such as the human resources, procurement as well as the engineering department
He also noted that there was inadequate staff in the engineering department, which definitely deals with generators.
Murkomen further claimed that there are individuals who are trying to sabotage the government’s efforts to ensure that JKIA is efficient
“The airport management team procured two generators in August and they failed to work efficiently when a power outage occurred days later due to “unsuccessful synchronisation.
“The same technical obstacle failed to activate the same generators during the second national blackout in November. I was assured that they had been synchronised for automatic switching when the power went off. A month ago there was a blackout and the generator did not start, the explanation I got was that the synchronisation was not successful,” he explained.
He however promised that such will never be experienced while taking credit for reducing blackout time at the airport.
“People say I promised the country it would never happen again, but you have to give me credit for reducing the madness from two hours to 20 or 30 minutes. It should take a minute at the most, a good one should take about 5 seconds,” said Murkomen.
“I did not get to zero the way I wanted to and we underestimated the depth of the problem. Having got down to this level, I can now say that we are going to get this problem down to zero and we will not have the same problem again,” he said.
