‘Leaking’ infrastructure! Malawi airport KIA flooded with rainwater

Rainwater gushed through the ceiling inside the Kamuzu International Airport (KIA) building on Friday following heavy showers  but no flight operations were affected.

Passengers claimed they were drenched by the rain water and many of them had to move away with their luggage.

An eye witness, a passenger who  was departing from the airport, said the development occurred at about 1:20pm after heavy rain, accompanied by an hour-long windstorm, saw the roof of the airport building to leak like sieve.

The airport was being flooded at the time passengers headed for South African were boarding, while others travelling to Kenya and Ethiopia were checking in.

Photos of flooding in the  airport circulated on social media platforms which showed  passengers going through a flooded walkway to their flights.

It took airport staff nearly an hour to  take out the rainwater and mop the affected areas in the building dry.

Commenting on the matter, Idris Ali Nasser wrote on Facebook: “The problem of having a ‘ I know-it all’ .. ‘Only-I-can-fix-it-all’ individual running a country, as it is in Malawi, is that it takes the agency away from institutions and accounting officers that should otherwise be getting praise for a job well done and held accountable for any shoddy work.

“For example, when an airport gets new paint, a president brags that its all because of him, and songs of praise and worship are composed by his legion of praise singers. The national broadcaster will run a special program with analysts pontificating how nobody else had the wherewithal to get paint. ‘Thanks to the wise and dynamic leadership of the president, the airport now has a fresh coat of paint’.

“Yet when the roof of the same airport collapses the same paint praise singers are quick to say: ‘did you expect the president to fix the roof? That is the duty of the Airports Development Limited’ – Ah. OK.”