❊ Will The MEA Stop Flying To Africa? (updated)

As a Lebanese living in Africa, I read this news item today with a bit of unease:

Middle East Airlines (MEA) continued its drive to reach out to the large Lebanese expatriate community in Africa after reaching an agreement with Brussels Airlines which will fly to a dozen African destinations to pick up the passengers on behalf the Lebanese national carrier.

If I understand this correctly –and the details are still not clear– this means that instead of me Flying an MEA branded plane to Beirut, I will soon be flying on a Brussels Airlines branded plane. This will surprise me because I always assumed that MEA made good money out of African trips, but perhaps the company needs the planes for even more profitable trips like Baghdad and Erbil.

The MEA flights to Africa are tricky business. The Lebanese pay extra money for the MEA ticket (you can buy a business class ticket to go to Beirut via Cairo for the same price of an economy ticket with MEA) because they expect some services that no one talks about. Many Lebanese living in Africa carry waddles of cash with them back to Lebanon, and many expect to carry as much luggage as they want and pay a relatively minimal overweight charge. All this happens with the unspoken complicity of MEA’s staff. Wink wink, nod nod.

This has caught the attention of the Americans who suspected (correctly) that Hezbollah gets a lot of its funding from its diaspora in Africa. If my assumption that MEA will now outsource its trips to Africa to a Beligian company, with all that entails of change in personnel and staff, then I will be surprised if there is no hidden hand that encouraged such a decision.

Will the venture succeed? I’m not too sure. Many Lebanese loved to fly MEA because, despite the crammed seats, free seating, tense flight attendants and sometimes lousy food, it was a small preview of home. That, alas, will be lost if the Belgians take over.

Update: According to Almustaqbal (Arabic), the new flights will be in addition, not instead of, the old ones. This means that we keep our flights while people in Dakar, Luanda, Freetown, Conakry, Cotonou, Lome, Douala, Monrovia, Bangui, Ouagadougou and Yaounde will get new flights. That’s good news for all of us because now our flights will be less crammed, and people in Lome no longer have to drive all the way to Accra to fly to Lebanon.

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Note: Posts marked with an ❊ (asterisk) are my opinion articles. I used this system to separate long posts from quick links and comments.