Stranded South Africans booked to take a repatriation flight home from Nairobi on Tuesday are furious that the airline postponed the flight for 24 hours at very short notice and refused to pay for their accommodation overnight.

It was the fourth delay in the CemAir flight this month, according to one angry passenger, Kevin Ellis. He said CemAir had not been clear about why the flight did not take off from Nairobi at 1pm on Tuesday 19 May. But it seemed the problem was in getting approval to land the aircraft in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, on the way back to Johannesburg.

Ellis said that CemAir must have known about the problem since the early hours of Tuesday morning but it had not informed the group of about 20 South Africans who were catching the flight in Nairobi. They had all arrived at the airport about 11am and had checked in for the flight before they were informed it had been postponed for 24 hours. 

“And we were told we had to fend for ourselves and that they were not responsible for our overnight accommodation,” he said. “Some people had travelled four hours from the interior of Kenya and had no other place to go,” he said, adding that some passengers had helped those who could not afford a hotel.

“So the airline basically just left us in the middle, left us in the lurch. This is disgusting,” Ellis said, adding that he believed that once they had checked in, it should have been CemAir’s responsibility to take care of them until they flew. 

What particularly irked him was that CemAir had “painted themselves in glory” in the media a few days ago after its successful repatriation flight of South Africans from several countries in North and West Africa.

Ellis complained that CemAir’s communication had been extremely poor throughout the saga of the Nairobi flight which had originally been scheduled to depart on May 5, and had then been postponed to the 9th, then the 14th, then to the 19th (Tuesday) and now until the 20th. It was still by no means clear that the flight would take off on Wednesday, he said.

Ellis said he understood that circumstances were difficult amid coronavirus travel restrictions and lockdowns. But he said CemAir had communicated poorly, not answering emails or phone calls but just putting out its own general announcements when it saw fit. 

“And we are all fare-paying passengers, “ he added, noting that he had paid R18,600 for the one-way fare from Nairobi to Johannesburg.

According to CemAir’s website, Tuesday’s flight was scheduled to fly from Johannesburg to Nairobi and then to return to Johannesburg via Kigali, Rwanda, and Lubumbashi. 

CemAir has been flying several repatriation flights for South Africans stranded in Africa and still has more to come over the next few weeks. 

Daily Maverick called and WhatsApped CemAir CEO Miles van der Molen for comment on the Nairobi flight but had not received a reply by the time of going to press. DM