Long-delayed Qatar repatriation flight finally cleared

Flight QR 1363 is now set to take off from Doha and bring hundreds of stranded South Africans home. The weary travellers, who had been left stranded abroad for even longer by the abrupt cancellation of five Qatar Airways flights from Doha to Johannesburg last week, got their first good news in a long while on Monday. Pretoria approved the airline’s first new flight for landing on Tuesday, May 12.

Natjoints, the National Joint Operations and Intelligence Structure which is managing the day to day implementation of the Covid-19 lockdown measures, approved the May 12 flight only on Monday. That sent many South Africans abroad scurrying to catch connecting flights to Doha.

However, Natjoints did not approve four more flights which Qatar Airways had scheduled to bring South Africans home and repatriate foreigners on their return flights. These flights are scheduled for 16, 20, 24 and 28 May. 

Official sources said Natjoints would consider these flights on Tuesday. 

The constant postponement of these repatriation flights has caused enormous inconvenience and stress to hundreds of South Africans still stranded abroad.

And it has also been disrupting the lives of hundreds of foreigners stranded in South Africa and hoping to catch the return flights from Johannesburg to Doha and from there to connect to flights onward to their home countries. Stranded passengers booked on these flights have almost all pointed at the South African government for causing the cancellations or delays.

These obstructions have caused tensions between the South African and Qatari governments and within South African government departments. They have embarrassed the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco) which has to manage relations with the Qatar government and with Qatar Airways. Dirco was the department that approached the airline to conduct the repatriation flights, bringing in hundreds of South Africans stranded abroad and taking out foreigners stranded here.  

Dirco sources told Daily Maverick that the delays were caused mainly by the Department of Public Works underestimating the number of quarantine beds that would be needed by the returning South Africans. 

All South Africans being repatriated have to go into quarantine for two weeks. The problem with the Qatar Airways flights arose last week when a group of South Africans who had returned on a flight from Washington, were left stranded at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport for about six hours because no quarantine accommodation was available for them.

Accommodation was eventually found. The next day, 5 May, the first of six Qatar Airways flights was scheduled to leave Doha for Johannesburg. But because of the problem around quarantine exposed by the Washington flight, the South African government would not clear the flight for landing in Johannesburg until quarantine accommodation had been found. 

The flight only left early the next morning. Officials said Qatar Airways was furious about the delay and the costs it incurred and cancelled the remaining five flights. It informed the government through the Qatari embassy that the flights would only go ahead if it was given absolute guarantees that Pretoria would not again delay their departures. 

Dirco reprimanded the departments of public works and health, which are responsible for arranging the quarantine accommodation. It told them it had advised them a month ago that they should prepare at least 3,500 beds in the quarantine accommodation.

It told them to sort out the quarantine problem urgently so the Qatar flights could resume. Dirco officials told their colleagues that South Africans had a constitutional right to return home and that the South African government had a duty to help them do so. 

Last week Public Works Minister Patricia de Lille vehemently denied that her department had not prepared enough quarantine accommodation. She said she suspected some sort of scam was behind the quarantine mixup, including the fact that some returning South Africans had been transported to inferior accommodation at a Transnet campus rather than the hotels her department had booked. 

Dirco officials told the public works and health departments that with the cancellation of the Qatar Airways flights, South Africans would be left sleeping in airports. And that is what happened. 

Hundreds of South Africans were left stranded in other airports, such as Frankfurt, as Qatar Airways would not let them board flights to Doha before Pretoria had confirmed their onwards flights to Johannesburg. 

The decision to clear the May 12 flight came as a huge relief to a group of six South Africans who had just spent their fourth night in Frankfurt’s airport on Sunday, sleeping on stretchers provided by the airport chaplain, Bennita Klünemann, who was also feeding them two meals a day, providing them with daily shower vouchers, taking their clothes home to wash and persuading the German authorities to allow them access to their cargo hold luggage. 

The group immediately caught the next flight to Doha on Monday when they heard the May 12 flight was on. 

“The Germans have been fantastic, while the South African government has done nothing for us,” Giancarlo Pucciatti, a Pretoria businessman who got stuck with his wife in Italy by the coronavirus lockdown late in March and then in Frankfurt complained to Daily Maverick before the May 12 flight home was confirmed. 

He reeled off a series of unhelpful responses from various government officials to the plight of the stranded South Africans. He had started a hall of infamy, putting up messages on the walls of their temporary “camp” in Frankfurt airport. 

Pucciatti told Daily Maverick on Sunday he believed that this group would be stuck in the airport for a month. 

He and his wife Louise flew from Rome to Frankfurt last Thursday after being assured by the South African embassy in Rome that the connecting Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Johannesburg would leave on Saturday 9 May, as scheduled. This was the flight that had been postponed from 7 May after the delayed departure of the flight on 5 May. 

 

Meanwhile, hundreds of other South Africans are not so lucky. They remain stranded abroad. And many foreigners – but also South Africans who live and work abroad – remain stranded in South Africa and are also becoming desperate.