If you’ve ever tried to book a flight from Nairobi to Lagos, or Accra to Addis Ababa, you already know the painful truth: flying within Africa is absurdly expensive, and in many cases, it forces you to transit through London or Dubai just to reach a neighbouring continent. This is not an accident. It is policy failure — and industry leaders are finally saying so out loud.
The Aviation Africa Summit and Exhibition 2026, held in Nairobi, became a rare space where the people who run African aviation stopped speaking in polished corporate language and started naming the actual problem: African governments are maintaining barriers that keep air travel unaffordable for the very people who need it most.
748 Air Services Managing Director Moses Mwangi put it plainly. “Africa cannot have a truly integrated economy if it remains difficult or expensive to fly from one African city to another,” he said. He pointed to a web of interconnected cost drivers — punishing airport charges, crumbling or absent infrastructure, unpredictable regulation, and the sheer expense of launching and sustaining a route in markets that governments haven’t opened up. Every one of those costs, he made clear, lands directly on your ticket price.
The summit also heard from Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi, who acknowledged what frequent African travellers have complained about for decades: that flying between neighbouring countries often means routing through a hub outside the continent entirely, burning extra hours and extra money for a journey that should be direct. Mudavadi reaffirmed Kenya’s commitment to the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM), the continental framework designed to liberalise African skies and give eligible airlines access to routes across member states.
SAATM has existed long enough to have delivered results. It hasn’t — not at scale. The framework is there. The political will is not.
What’s at stake goes beyond the inconvenience of a long layover. Small business owners, cross-border traders, professionals and entrepreneurs across the continent depend on the ability to move quickly and affordably between markets. When a flight from Nairobi to Kinshasa costs more than a flight from Nairobi to Amsterdam, the message sent to intra-African commerce is devastating. Connectivity isn’t a luxury. It is the infrastructure of economic integration.
The summit called for harmonised regulations, mutual recognition of safety standards, stronger oversight frameworks and serious investment in aviation infrastructure — all reasonable demands that African governments have been slow to act on. The private sector is ready to move. The question, as it has been for years, is whether the governments holding the keys to these markets will finally open the gates.
For young Kenyans and Africans watching the continent’s economic ambitions play out in real time, this is personal. A truly integrated Africa isn’t built on summits and speeches. It’s built on the ability to book a direct, affordable flight to another African city without a second mortgage. That future is possible. But it requires governments to stop treating open skies as a threat and start treating them as the opportunity they clearly are.
