By Yvonne Manzi Makolo, CEO, RwandAir
A few months ago, I priced two tickets out of Kigali. One to a city on another continent. One to a city less than two hours away, on my own continent.
The international ticket was cheaper.
Taxes, fees, and overflight charges on the regional route made up nearly half the fare. I’ve run an airline for years. This still stops me cold every time I see it — because it’s not an anomaly. It’s how African aviation is priced, almost everywhere, almost every day.
Africa’s aviation ambitions aren’t new. What’s new — or should be — is our tolerance for the gap between what we’ve signed and what we’ve built. This piece is about that gap. Not another declaration. The unglamorous work of actually closing it.
That gap was the subject of a pre-Forum working session on open skies and economic integration I joined this month, convened by the African School of Governance ahead of the Africa Mindset Reset Forum in Kigali on 25 and 26 August. The room was practical: ministers, regulators, financiers, and fellow airline leaders working through what has stalled and what would actually unstick it. What follows draws on that conversation, and on what running an airline on this continent teaches me every day.
The numbers behind the frustration
Only 19% of intra-African air routes have a direct flight. Aviation taxes and charges run roughly 15% above the global average — stacked on top of fuel, maintenance, and overflight costs that are already structurally higher here than almost anywhere else in the world. As of March 2026, nearly $774 million in airline revenue sat blocked in African markets. Money airlines had earned and couldn’t repatriate. African carriers are operating on margins of roughly 1.3%.
That arithmetic is behind every expensive ticket African travellers and traders complain about. And it’s what every African airline CEO manages around, every single day.
What we’ve built — and where it stalls
To be fair: 38 African states have signed the Single African Air Transport Market. The African Civil Aviation Commission has helped open more than 100 new intra-African routes in recent years. The frameworks exist.
But signing isn’t implementing. And implementing isn’t the same as it working for the passenger or the trader.
As Prof. TK Pooe put it at our working session, the ambition is a “four-hour continent” — enforceable rights and rationalised costs, not open skies that quietly remain a closed wallet. Rwanda’s Minister of Trade and Industry, Antoine Kajangwe, was direct: Africa needs “affordable, frequent, and reliable air connectivity” — not another commitment on paper.
I agree. And I’d add this: it is often easier for an African airline to build a codeshare with a carrier from outside the continent than with another African airline. That is why a passenger connecting two African cities still routes through Europe or the Gulf to do it. It’s not just the taxes. It’s us.
Three things that would actually change this
First: governments must release blocked airline revenues. This isn’t a technical footnote. It’s money already earned, sitting in accounts it cannot leave, distorting every route-planning and fleet decision African carriers make. Fix this first.
Second: African airlines must cooperate — for real. Not just liberalised rights on paper. Shared routes, interline agreements between African carriers as the default rather than the afterthought, fifth-freedom rights used to make thin routes commercially viable rather than left unused. Raphael Kuuchi from the African Airlines Association (AFRAA) was precise about this at our working session: African aviation doesn’t simply need more aircraft. It needs “the right types and sizes of aircraft” deployed where African carriers, working together, can actually fill them.
Third: open skies and free movement must be treated as one problem, not two. As Gambia Civil Aviation Authority’s Ellen Manga put it, the Single African Air Transport Market and the AU’s Free Movement Protocol are initiatives where “the two must advance together.” Today, only 4 of the AU’s 54 member states have ratified that Protocol. You can liberalise every air route on the continent. If the people those routes are meant to serve can’t cross the border without a visa, it doesn’t matter.
What’s actually at stake
Arnold Kwizera, Regional Lead at the African Union Youth Business Council, said it plainly: every expensive flight and missing connection is “a tax on African businesses.” It falls hardest on young entrepreneurs trying to build companies that operate regionally, not just in a single national market.
Dr. Joy Kategekwa’s proposal for an “Africa Zone” — a coalition of willing states offering visa-free or visa-on-arrival access, presenting the continent as one connected destination — is exactly the kind of practical, sequenced step that doesn’t require waiting for all 54 states to move at once.
ASG has given this discipline a name ahead of the Forum: Meta-Africanism — a shift from Pan-African solidarity as sentiment to Pan-African capability as practice. Aviation is as concrete a test of that as any sector on this continent offers. A passenger either lands on time and on budget, or doesn’t.
What I’m asking for in Kigali
A coalition of the willing. Real timelines. Fares, connectivity, and blocked funds as the metrics we hold ourselves to — not frameworks we sign and set aside.
Africa doesn’t need to be convinced that open skies matter. We’ve spent a decade being convinced. What we need now — and what I am prepared to put RwandAir’s weight behind — is implementation on a clock.
The skies were never the barrier. Our follow-through has been.
