Consider a single trip. Libreville, the capital of Gabon, and Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, sit roughly 1,000 kilometres apart, neighbours by the standards of a large continent. To fly between them takes a minimum of nine hours, requires changing aircraft, and can cost around $1,000. A comparable distance in Europe, Paris to Madrid, is a two-hour flight that costs about a fifth as much.1 The Libreville-Bangui route is not an outlier chosen for effect; it is a representative sample of a continent where, according to the International Air Transport Association, airfares are by far the highest in the world, and where travelling between two African cities frequently takes longer and costs more than flying to the Middle East or Europe.1 This issue closes a month of this publication's work on African mobility by descending to the layer beneath all of it: the physical connectivity that determines whether any of the markets described in the preceding issues can actually be reached.
The Corridor Index framework has been used across August to read a single underlying pattern, the gap between what African states agree to and what they build. In visa policy, the free-movement protocol sat unratified while its trade twin advanced. In domestic tourism, the resilient home market stayed unbuilt because the treasury chased hard currency. Aviation is the same pattern in its most consequential form, because connectivity is the precondition for the rest. A regional tourism market that cannot be flown to at reasonable cost does not exist in practice, however large it is in principle. The Single African Air Transport Market was designed to close exactly this gap. Its history is a study in why the gap persists.
The agreement that was signed but not flown
The Single African Air Transport Market, known as SAATM, was launched in January 2018 as the first flagship project of the African Union's Agenda 2063, built to finally operationalise the 1999 Yamoussoukro Decision, itself the continent's long-unfulfilled commitment to open its skies.2 The design is sound. Eligible African carriers would be free to operate routes between member states on their own commercial judgement, without the bilateral permissions that had fragmented the market, and the African Union estimated the result would create some 300,000 direct jobs and drive tourism and trade. By 2025, 38 states had signed the Solemn Commitment, and the market's supporters could point to real progress: 108 new intra-African routes opened between 2022 and 2025, including 19 operating under fifth-freedom rights, the permissions that let an airline carry passengers between two foreign countries as part of its network.2
But signing is not implementing, and this is where the pattern of the month recurs. Of the 38 signatories, only 26 have gone on to sign the Memoranda of Implementation that actually commit them to liberalise, and the practical texture of African aviation remains, in the words of the African Airlines Association's own assembly, one where connectivity is still elusive nearly eight years on.3 The gap between the 38 who signed the principle and the smaller number who have enacted it is the same gap this publication found in the free-movement protocol: a continental agreement that states endorse in the abstract and resist in the specific, because the specific asks each of them to surrender something they are not ready to lose.
What each state is protecting
The thing they are not ready to lose is the national carrier. Across the continent, governments continue to shield their flag airlines from competition, and the mechanisms are well documented: restrictive bilateral air service agreements that cap or block routes, protectionist charges that make foreign carriers pay more to overfly or operate within a territory, and a general treatment of aviation, in IATA's phrase, as a cash cow to be taxed rather than an enabling sector to be nurtured.4 The taxation is not incidental. In some African countries, passengers pay more in taxes and fees than in base fare, with a $100 ticket carrying $60 to $70 in charges; aviation fuel, largely imported because of limited refining capacity, runs around 17 percent above the global average and reaches up to 40 percent of operating costs, against 25 percent globally.4 Each of these choices is individually rational for the state that makes it. A government protects the national carrier because it carries the flag, employs a workforce, and serves routes a purely commercial airline might drop; it taxes aviation because the revenue is easy to collect. The tragedy is in the aggregation. Fifty-odd states each making the individually rational choice to protect and to tax have jointly produced the most expensive aviation market on earth, thinly served, in which only about 20 percent of Africa's air traffic is intra-continental and only 19 percent of intra-African routes have a direct flight.5
The tax on the market the continent says it wants
This is where connectivity stops being an aviation story and becomes a tourism one, and where this issue joins the argument of the four that preceded it. Every earlier issue this month identified a market the continent claims to want: the free African traveller of the visa issue, the intra-African visitor the metrics cannot see, the domestic tourist who carried the pandemic, the regional integration the Gulf capital is quietly buying into. Every one of those markets depends on the ability to move, and moving, for any distance across Africa, overwhelmingly means flying. The expensive, fragmented sky is therefore a direct tax on all of them. When a flight between two African capitals costs what a flight to Europe costs, the intra-African tourist is priced out before the trip begins, the regional business traveller routes through Dubai or Paris, and the connectivity that would let the domestic and regional markets scale simply is not there. The African Union's own framing recognises this, describing SAATM as intended to stimulate connectivity, reduce airfares, strengthen tourism and accelerate intra-African trade in a single sentence, because these are one system.2 The system is being throttled at its most physical point.
Fifty-odd states each making the individually rational choice to protect and to tax have jointly produced the most expensive sky on earth. The coordination failure is the whole story.
The honest limit of the open-skies case
The argument for liberalisation can be made too cheaply, and the caution deserves a fair statement. Open skies is not costless, and the states that hesitate are not merely protectionist by reflex. Full liberalisation can allow a few large or well-capitalised carriers to dominate the profitable routes and abandon the thin ones, hollowing out smaller national airlines that serve genuine social functions, and the fear that an open market would be captured by outside players is not fanciful, as this publication's previous issue on Gulf aviation investment showed, with a single Gulf carrier now holding stakes in an African flag airline and its main airport. A government weighing the survival of its national carrier and the connectivity of its secondary cities against the theoretical gains of open competition is making a real trade-off, not merely defending a fiefdom. The Corridor's claim is the narrower one that survives this objection: the current equilibrium, in which almost every state protects and almost every state taxes, is demonstrably worse for the continent as a whole than a coordinated opening would be, and the evidence for that is the simple fact that Africans routinely find it cheaper and faster to leave the continent and return than to fly across it. A protective policy that produces that outcome has failed on its own terms.
Three tests over the next year
The first test is implementation depth: whether the number of states signing Memoranda of Implementation, and actually amending their bilateral agreements to match, begins to close the gap with the 38 that have signed the principle, since SAATM's progress is best measured not by signatures but by routes that a passenger can actually book.3 The second is the tax question, the one most within each government's individual control: whether any significant African state moves to reduce the charges that make its tickets among the world's most expensive, testing whether the cash-cow treatment of aviation can give way to the enabling-sector treatment that IATA and the African Union both urge.4 The third is who fills the vacuum, the thread that runs from last week's issue into this one: if African states do not build the connectivity themselves, Gulf carriers and airports increasingly will, and the single African sky may end up integrated less by its own airlines than by foreign ones flying its passengers through their hubs. Africa agreed to one sky in 2018. Whether it flies before the gap is filled by others is the question the next decade of African tourism turns on, because every market this continent says it wants is waiting, on the ground, for a flight it can afford.