When the continent held its premier trade fair in Algiers last September, delegates from Southern Africa reached Algeria the same way they reach most African cities they want to visit: by leaving Africa first. The routing via Dubai or Jeddah is not a quirk specific to Algeria. It is a description of how African air travel works. Only 19% of African city pairs are connected by a direct flight. Cape Town has no direct service to any city in West Africa. Lagos and Algiers, two of the continent's six largest cities, are connected only via Casablanca, a journey that takes a minimum of nine hours and can stretch to seventeen. These are not gaps waiting to be filled. They are the product of a system designed, in several important ways, to keep them empty.
The architecture of African aviation was not built to move Africans between African cities. It was built to move Africans to Europe. When independence came in the 1960s and 1970s, newly sovereign states inherited a route network whose logic ran from capital to colonial metropole: Abidjan to Paris, Nairobi to London, Kinshasa to Brussels.
The bilateral air service agreements that governed who could fly where, and how often, and at what price, were negotiated under this template, country by country, modelled on the Bermuda framework established at the end of the Second World War. Fifty years later, those agreements still govern most African aviation. The framework has barely been renegotiated. The routes have barely changed. Air France, Lufthansa, and British Airways, and their successors in the Gulf, inherited the structural advantage that colonialism built into the network, and African carriers have been competing against it ever since.
A bilateral air service agreement specifies which airlines can fly between two countries, on which routes, at what frequencies, and in some cases at what price. A restrictive agreement means that an airline cannot simply decide that a route makes commercial sense and start flying it. It must first obtain traffic rights, which the other government may refuse, restrict in frequency, or allow only in exchange for reciprocal arrangements that smaller carriers cannot fulfil. The result is a continent where governments have, for decades, been deciding which connections their citizens can make, and choosing, consistently, the connection that protects the national carrier over the one that serves the passenger. A journey from Nigeria to the Central African Republic, two neighbours on the same landmass, routes through Nairobi in East Africa. This is not geography. It is policy.
The continent has twice attempted to dismantle this system. The Yamoussoukro Decision of 1999 committed 44 African governments to liberalising their aviation markets, granting airlines the freedom to fly routes on commercial rather than political terms. It was never implemented. In 2018, the African Union tried again with the Single African Air Transport Market, known as SAATM, a flagship project meant to finally open the skies. Thirty-eight states have signed. More than 110 new intra-African routes have been developed, and 60 bilateral agreements amended. But airlines still face obstruction when trying to secure traffic rights between cities in countries that have formally committed to the framework. The same governments that sign the declarations are the same governments that then use landing fees, documentation requirements, and withheld approvals to discourage the very flights they pledged to support. The recurring gap between African states signing agreements and African states implementing them is not a bureaucratic failure. It is a political preference.
The clearest expression of that preference is the blocking of fifth freedom rights. The fifth freedom of the air allows an airline to carry passengers between two foreign countries as part of a service from its home. It is the mechanism that makes connecting networks possible: Ethiopian Airlines could, under fifth freedom rights, carry a passenger from Harare to Lagos with a stop in Addis Ababa, filling seats in both directions. But as of June 2025, fifth freedom operations accounted for only 22% of intra-African seat capacity, with third and fourth freedom flights, the simple point-to-point connections between a carrier and a foreign city, making up the rest.
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Governments block fifth freedom grants because they would allow foreign airlines to serve routes that national carriers have claimed, however poorly, as their own territory. The continent's connectivity problem is sustained, in large part, by the same governments that declare themselves committed to solving it.
Even where routes exist, the economics punish everyone in the chain. Fuel across Africa averages 17% above global benchmarks. Airport taxes and charges run 12 to 15% higher than international norms. African passengers pay an average of 3,5 separate taxes and charges per ticket, totalling around US$68, more than double what European or Middle Eastern passengers pay. These costs are not incidental. They reflect a deliberate choice by governments to treat aviation as a revenue mechanism rather than as infrastructure.
Thirty-two of 53 African airports charge landing fees above US$50 per passenger. Ten charge above US$100. The consequence is that Gulf and European carriers, operating at scale from their own cost-efficient hubs, can frequently offer a Nairobi-to-Lagos connection via Dubai more cheaply than a direct African carrier can serve the route. The continent funds competitors who have no stake in its integration.
Then there is the problem of revenue that airlines earn but cannot access. When a carrier sells a ticket in a country whose currency cannot be freely converted, the proceeds sit in a local bank account until the government approves repatriation. As of October 2025, US$1,2 billion in airline revenues were held across Africa and the Middle East in this way, with 93% of that total concentrated in the two regions. An airline that cannot recover the money it earns in a market will reduce its exposure to that market, cutting frequencies, dropping routes, or refusing to enter them at all. Blocked funds are, in effect, a tax levied not at departure but at the decision to fly at all. Each restriction quietly contracts the network that African travellers depend on, and every contraction is invisible until the route no longer exists.
The continent is not short of frameworks for change. The AfCFTA promises a single market of 1.4 billion people. SAATM promises the open skies above it. Intra-African trade sits at 16% of the continent's total commerce, against 70% within the European Union and 60% within Asia. The aviation network is both a symptom of that gap and one of its causes. An Airbus study identified more than ten high-potential intra-African routes that remain entirely unserved despite strong commercial fundamentals — Cape Town to Lagos, Abuja to Nairobi, Dakar to Libreville — corridors connecting major economic centres where passengers are already making the journey, just not directly. The demand is not absent. The agreements, the taxes, the blocked funds, and the protected national carriers have simply made it cheaper to serve that demand from Frankfurt or Dubai than from any city on the continent.
Africa does not have a connectivity problem because it lacks airports, or passengers, or airlines willing to fly. It has a connectivity problem because the system that governs its skies was built for a different purpose and has been maintained, by many of the same governments that sign open-skies agreements, in service of that original purpose. The skies above this continent are still, in the ways that matter, someone else's.