A traveller moving between two African capitals will face a journey that is longer and more expensive than the distance warrants. Poor connections impose costs on traders, students, families, tourism and diplomacy. Air Afrique was created to change that geography. Its collapse in 2002 deserves scrutiny because the need it addressed has not disappeared. The immediate question is whether existing African airlines can provide those connections at fares more people can afford, before states commit to building another carrier. Founded under the Treaty of Yaoundé in 1961, Air Afrique united eleven states: Benin, then Dahomey; Burkina Faso, then Upper Volta; Cameroon; the Central African Republic; Chad; Côte d’Ivoire; Gabon; Mauritania; Niger; the Republic of the Congo; and Senegal. Togo joined later, while Cameroon and Gabon withdrew; Mali subsequently became a shareholder. Airline partners also held shares. The founding states pooled resources that few could have assembled individually. The airline carried passengers, connected capitals and gave practical expression to political independence. Its emblem stood for an African capacity to move across borders on African terms. Yet an airline cannot survive on symbolic value. It must pay for aircraft, fuel, maintenance, staff and airport services every day. By the time Air Afrique was declared bankrupt on 7 February 2002, the company had been weakened for years. Contemporary accounts describe political interference, tickets and official travel for which payment was not collected, weak controls, excessive staffing relative to the shrinking fleet, and repeated delays that drove away customers. In June 2001, reporting found roughly 4,200 employees and just six aircraft. Contemporary aviation trade reporting put its debt at more than €510 million at the end. These figures describe a failed operating system, not a sudden accident. The governance problem ran deeper than the conduct of any single manager. Multiple governments owned the carrier, but each faced pressure to protect its own routes, appointments and prestige. A collective airline needed shareholders willing to make common decisions, meet financial commitments and let its managers manage. Instead, necessary restructuring was postponed while the company lost aircraft and credibility. The withdrawals of Cameroon and Gabon illustrate the persistent tension between national ambition and the regional project. This history calls for careful examination of how shared responsibilities were enforced. External pressures mattered too. The 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc increased the local currency burden of foreign currency obligations. Aircraft financing, fuel and many aviation inputs depend on international markets. The downturn following the attacks of September 2001 added pressure to an airline already in trouble. Neither event, however, explains away Air Afrique’s earlier financial and institutional weaknesses. Nor does the record justify reducing its fate to a claim that Africans cannot run a multinational enterprise. Such a claim conceals the decisions, incentives and failures of accountability that must actually be addressed. A second error would be to imagine that one new airline could, by itself, solve Africa’s transport problem. Even a well run carrier cannot offer affordable service if governments restrict market access, impose high taxes and charges, delay transfers of ticket revenue or make connections difficult through visa and airport procedures. The African Union launched the Single African Air Transport Market in 2018 to implement the long-standing objective of opening African skies. The test is whether commitments become usable route rights and genuine competition. In April 2026, the International Air Transport Association reported that the burden of aviation taxes and charges in Africa was about 15 per cent above the global average. It also reported that African countries accounted for $774 million in airline revenues blocked from repatriation at the end of March 2026. Those costs and constraints matter to any proposed carrier, whatever its ownership. The available pool is substantial. An initial group of perhaps eight to ten carriers could cover much of the continent, subject to route-level assessment: Ethiopian Airlines in Addis Ababa, Kenya Airways in Nairobi, RwandAir in Kigali, EgyptAir in Cairo, Royal Air Maroc in Casablanca, South African Airways and Airlink in Southern Africa, and ASKY and Air Côte d’Ivoire in West and Central Africa. TAAG in Luanda could extend the reach into Lusophone markets. This is a candidate list, not a certification that each airline currently meets the same standard of punctuality, financial strength or passenger protection. Regulators and independent auditors should assess safety, completion rates, connection performance and the ability to honour refunds before admitting any operator to a guaranteed-connection scheme. Smaller airlines should also be eligible to feed regional services when they meet those standards. This is a workable proposition because some relationships already exist. Ethiopian lists codeshares with RwandAir, ASKY, Air Côte d’Ivoire and EgyptAir, and identifies ASKY in Lomé as a strategic partner serving West and Central Africa. Those arrangements show that African airlines can cooperate; they do not prove that every onward itinerary is currently sold as one protected journey or that its fare is affordable. The remaining task is to turn scattered partnerships into a clear, measurable service for passengers. The most practical next step is to invite existing carriers to make their networks work as one journey for the passenger. A traveller should be able to buy a single ticket across two African airlines, have luggage checked through and know which company will arrange a replacement flight if a connection is missed. Airlines can coordinate arrival and departure times, provide clear transfer windows and sell the combined journey transparently. These improvements require agreements, technology and accountability, but they do not require governments to establish a new airline. Cooperation alone will not guarantee affordability. An alliance can improve a connection while preserving an expensive fare, and an agreement that divides routes among carriers could weaken competition. Regulators should therefore welcome through-ticketing and passenger protection while scrutinising arrangements that limit independent pricing or market entry. Airlines should compete for the traveller even as they make transfers easier. Fair access to routes under the African Union’s air market commitments is essential. Governments also control much of the cost structure. Each participating state should publish the taxes and charges on a sample of regional journeys and review whether each charge funds a necessary service at a reasonable cost. Airports can offer efficient transfers without shifting excessive costs to passengers. Authorities should ensure that airlines can use the revenues they earn to pay for aircraft, maintenance and fuel. Visa procedures and transit rules should facilitate legitimate travel. A promise of cheap flights has little meaning if the fare rises sharply at checkout or a passenger cannot make the connection. Consider a traveller leaving Kigali for a West African city that is served from Lomé. RwandAir could bring the passenger to an agreed connecting point; Ethiopian and ASKY already have a partnership from which an onward West African journey might be built. The test would be practical: can that person buy one reasonably priced ticket, check a bag through, avoid an overnight wait and be rebooked without argument if the first aircraft arrives late? The precise routing would have to be chosen from current timetables and traffic data. The same question can be put to a traveller moving from Nairobi to a Southern African secondary city through Kenya Airways and Airlink, or between Abidjan and North Africa using Air Côte d’Ivoire and Royal Air Maroc. These are proposed trial journeys, not claims that the named airlines already offer protected tickets on each itinerary. This approach can be tested before it is proclaimed a continental success. The African Union, aviation authorities and willing carriers could choose a modest set of city pairs across more than one region. They should record the current total fare, time spent travelling, weekly frequency, cancellations and missed connections. Participating airlines could then introduce coordinated schedules, single tickets, through-checked baggage and a common standard for rebooking and refunds. Participating states would implement the necessary route permissions and publish the relevant charges. Six and twelve months later, independent reviewers should report whether journeys became faster, more reliable and more affordable. The routes should be selected through an open process, with participation available to carriers that meet safety and service standards. If some socially important routes remain too thin to support regular commercial service, governments can procure a specified number of flights through open, time-limited contracts. The subsidy should appear in a public budget and be available to a qualified carrier through competition. It should not be concealed in an airline’s accounts, where it can eventually become another unpayable debt. A new jointly owned carrier might still have a role after that test. It could serve a genuine gap that existing airlines cannot cover efficiently. Before approving it, shareholders would need to fund a credible business plan, protect professional management, publish audited accounts and pay promptly for official travel. Route selection and fleet size must follow demand rather than national prestige. Safety, maintenance, cash reserves and exposure to foreign currency costs must be planned from the start. A new carrier should be judged alongside the results of partnerships among current operators, not granted a privileged monopoly simply because its ownership is regional. The test of this policy is the passenger’s journey. Can someone travel between African cities on a dependable schedule, with one booking, an understandable fare and a remedy when a flight goes wrong? Can a trader move goods without losing a day to unnecessary detours? Those outcomes would give practical meaning to integration and make the continent’s air market useful to more Africans. Air Afrique’s history is a warning, but also evidence of African ambition and institutional imagination. Its founders understood that political independence required physical connections among African countries. Their successors should keep that insight and improve the execution. The first tribute to that insight should be to connect the airlines Africa already has and remove the barriers that make their services costly. If evidence then supports a new carrier, its owners must pay their bills, respect professional management and allow fair competition. The measure of success is whether Africans can actually fly within their continent at a price and level of reliability that serve their lives and work.
