Outside the two main continental gateways, Cairo and Johannesburg, and the small number of regional hubs like Nairobi, Addis Ababa and Accra, very few African destinations are served by the big international carriers, while the footprint of African national carriers remains a fraction of what it was in the colonial era.
There are nearly 3,000 airports between Cairo and the Cape, but fewer than 280 currently host regular scheduled flights, and significantly less if only long-haul flights to and from international destinations are included.
In the second decade of the 21st century, Africa still throws up some truly bizarre anomalies.
A passenger wishing to make the short flight from Freetown in Liberia to Banjul in the Gambia, for example, still needs to take a flight from Freetown to Accra in Ghana, book a connecting flight to London, then fly on to Brussels, before finally reaching their West African destination – travelling more than 15 times the short-hop distance between Freetown and Banjul.
Over the past two decades, dozens of airlines like Ivory Coast’s Air Afrique have disappeared, and hundreds of routes served in colonial times have been withdrawn, as one after another African national carrier went bankrupt because of decades of breath-taking inefficiency, stunning incompetence and corruption on a grand scale.
Few travellers today remember any of these excesses – but some of them were epic. Ghana Airways under independence leader Kuwame Nukruma, for example, used to schedule a regular flight from Accra to Moscow. The aircraft invariably had only a handful – and often no passengers, and haemorrhaged money. But impoverished Ghana was happy to fly empty aircraft to the Russian capital to let the world know that it had close ties with the former USSR during the Cold War era.
President Robert Mugabe regularly commandeered Air Zimbabwe’s schedule aircraft to take him and his wife and family on diplomatic and shopping trips to Europe and the Far East – enraging thousands of passengers – myself included – who had paid hard cash for their tickets, and who were left stranded by his imperial antics. So it’s hardly surprising that Air Zimbabwe doesn’t fly anymore.
That kind of attitude to commercial realities helped eventually to drive scores of African flag carriers into the ground. Running an airline is a difficult and complex operation. You need to have sophisticated ticketing systems, dedicated staff, aircraft that are regularly maintained, adequate ground infrastructure – no carrier is going to allow its sparkling new Airbus to land in a country where the runway at the international airport has potholes and no landing lights – and a reasonably cooperative political environment to succeed. Africa falls down on every one of those criteria.
But the tide is now beginning to turn. Loss-making Air Botswana was turned around by new management which introduced the novel idea that everyone who flew on the airline had to buy a ticket. Most African national flag carriers were government-run affairs, and staff from pilots to baggage handlers (and their extended families), felt that it was their birth right to fly for nothing as a perk of the job. Little wonder that most of them went bankrupt.
Moreover, with continental Africa hosting six of the world’s ten fastest growing economies in 2011, the demand for business travel in Africa has been growing exponentially. The number of regional carriers – which help feed business travellers to the handful of hubs that operate long-haul destinations, are starting to multiply. While the traditional carriers in Europe and America have been slow to recognise this growth, carriers from the new emerging markets in China, India and Brazil have not – and the number of South-South air routes is growing fast.
Stelios Ioannou is currently embarking on a new venture in West Africa.
In an African version of EasyJet called FastJet, Sir Stelios wants to acquire 15 aircraft to link Accra with six regional capitals. Africa-focused conglomerate Lonrho has already launched its Fly 540 low-cost airline in East Africa, and domestically in Ghana and Angola, and it has ambitions to expand. It may still be hard to reach most African destinations – but perhaps not for much longer.
Michael Dynes is a business and lifestyle journalist, specialising in subjects related to African culture and economics
