Why it’s nice to be called Smuts

If your name is Smuts, the airline industry has great respect for you. That’s probably because the biggest airport in the country was called Jan Smuts once. So even in Durban, if you’re Smuts and you’re late for a flight, they’ll kick someone off the plane for you.

That’s what SA Express Airways, which operates flights between smaller regional airports for its parent company, South African Airways, reportedly did. It told the already checked-in and seated Sharmalee Maistry to leave the plane and collect her stuff from the hold, while her “double-booked” replacement was waiting on the apron in a car.

Either that, or Smuts Ngonyama got special treatment from the state-owned carrier because he happens to be a senior ANC official.

Surely nobody is going to believe that it was just coincidence. That Ngonyama’s case, of booking online, receiving a double-booked seating assignment, and arriving after the other passenger with the same seat assignment, is somehow a normal exception to the airline’s rule that the first person to check in gets to keep a double-booked seat? Considering how many bookings are made online by busy business people, kicking people off planes rather than stopping them at the check-in desk seems an awfully inefficient way to handle the inevitable double-bookings. Last time I heard, airlines got livid with passengers who check in but fail to board on time, because removing just one suitcase from the hold is a major operation that causes delays and annoys the airline’s other paying passengers.

If you’re going to swagger around with your civil service badge like you own the place, at least have the decency to be honest about it. And if you’re a business that kowtows to influential government officials, at least have the courtesy to grin sheepishly at the people you treat like dirt and say, “You know how it is…”