Getting across Africa by air is so difficult that passengers often have to detour via Europe. After years of pushing for regulatory change, ex-IATA executive Adefunke Adeyemi has just become secretary general of the African Civil Aviation Commission (AFCAC), the body tasked with making African air transport liberalization a reality. 

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Rush transcript

Victoria Moores:

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us for Window Seat, our Aviation Week Air Transport podcast. I'm Air Transport World Europe and Africa Bureau Chief, Victoria Moores. Welcome on board. Today, I'm joined by Adefunke Adeyemi, who is the new secretary general of AFCAC, which is the African Civil Aviation Commission. Good morning, Funke.

Adefunke Adeyemi:

Good morning, Victoria, and thank you for having me.

Victoria Moores:

You are very welcome. So you're joining us from Dakar this morning in Senegal, after having been newly appointed into your position as secretary general. And I'm wondering if you should just give us a bit of a feel for what AFCAC actually is.

Adefunke Adeyemi:

Thank you, Victoria. Yes. I was appointed on the 15th of July of this year to the role as secretary general of AFCAC, the African Civil Aviation Commission. And I resumed officially on the 1st of September. Now, what does AFCAC do, and who are we? AFCAC is a civil aviation of body equivalent to, say, the FAA that looks after civil aviation all across the African continent. And basically we fulfill our mandate through our objectives, our mission and our vision, which are to secure and to foster a safe and secure cost-effective, sustainable, environmentally friendly, and modern aviation industry across the continent of Africa. And basically what we do is we are the coordinators and facilitators of civil aviation across the continent. Now, let me just put this in perspective for a little while. Africa is a continent, not a country, and the continent has 54 states in it. All of them different, all of them within different cultures, different peoples, and all of them in a land mass that is not truly representative of what we see on the map of the world.

Adefunke Adeyemi:

The true size of Africa is one where you can actually fit the USA, China, Europe, so many countries in one land mass. And the UK can fit into Madagascar, which is the little bit of island just off the main coast of the continent. So that is the size, the sheer size of the continent in which we're talking about. And there's a particular country where you can overfly, meaning you fly over just to get through the air space, is about four hours. That, in many places, is moving from one continent to another. And so that's the size of the continent of Africa we're talking about. And so AFCAC's role is to coordinate cooperation and collaboration and harmonization across all of these 54 countries, to ensure and promote a seamless aviation industry across the ground, meaning the passengers and cargo who are moving through airports, getting on planes and going to other destinations.

Victoria Moores:

And I think that you've hit the nail on the head with your point there, which is that I think that there can be a common misconception that Africa is one place. It's almost an idea that it's like one country, when in actual fact, it's as different as, for example, all of the European countries are from one another. You've got completely different cultures. You've got different languages, you've got different governments for each of these societies. And it's absolutely massive, which makes air transport incredibly important for Africa. And I think one of the challenges that I've seen in the years of looking at African aviation is that it's actually still really quite hard to travel across Africa. So you hear stories when you're going to Africa and events about how people have been trying to fly from one country in Africa to another country in Africa, but they've actually had to detour via Europe to get there. So I'd like to know, why is it that that happens? Why do you have to fly, say via Paris or another European hub to get from A to B?

Adefunke Adeyemi:

That's a great question. And I think it goes back to the point around the size of the continent, but then if you don't have alternative or robust means of transportation. So for example, we don't have a railway that goes from Cape town to Cairo, which is the two tips of the continent. You also don't have a Highway 1, for example, like you have in the US, where you can go from one end of the US to another on one highway. We don't have something like that. And we don't have a very good or robust waterway network, because much of Africa is actually landlocked. Most of the countries around the coast have access to the sea, but we don't necessarily travel by sea from place to place. And so that's why, as you mentioned, aviation is such an important enabler for people to be able to move around the continent.

Adefunke Adeyemi:

One, because it's the safest and the fastest means of transportation. I mean, you can get from one place in the world, anywhere in the world today within a 24 hour period. And of course with the distances that I've mentioned already across the African continent, which covers about 30 million square miles, aviation is really, really critical, and not just as a transportation mode, but also as an accelerator of integrating the continent, and also to ensure that people can move around easily. So case in point, last week, I was at a conference in Rwanda. And from Dakar to Rwanda, it took me 18 hours of travel because I first had to go across the continent, which was all in all about a 12 hour journey. And then I had a layover, and then I had to come back down. And so all of these things are challenges to proper implementation of an initiative called the Single African Air Transport Market.

Adefunke Adeyemi:

And this is why aviation is really at the heart of integrating Africa. So what is the SAATM? It's basically an initiative designed to fast-track the implementation of an agreement that was signed in a place called Yamoussoukro in Ivory Coast in 1999, where African heads of state at the time came together and realized that it was necessary, given all of these demographic that I've described, it was necessary to have a mode of transportation that was really able to traverse the entire continent for the benefit of the African people. And of course, the people all over the world, to support better integration, to support prosperity, unity, trade, investment, and all of the economic enablers that really help to move a continent forward.

Adefunke Adeyemi:

And so the heads of state came up with what I would simply put as the idea of a domestic aviation sector for the entire continent of Africa, if that makes sense. So normally you talk about domestic aviation for a country, but the idea was to have a domestic aviation market, where airlines from different countries within Africa were able to fly without restriction to other parts of the continent, based on a framework agreement and the rights that are given by the countries to each other to fly. So I'll explain what this means again in sort of more practical terms. Europe has a liberalized market. It is more or less a pan-domestic industry within the continent of Europe. And so you could fly from, let's say, Italy to Spain, easily.

Adefunke Adeyemi:

SAATM is designed to prevent what you've described already, Victoria, which is people having to detour through other countries and other continents outside of Africa to get from point A to point B. And these distances are some of the things that we're talking about. So if I was to go from Lagos to Algeria, it should ordinarily be a four and a half hour flight, direct. But because I don't have access, or there's no direct flight between Lagos and Algeria, the shortest route is to go through Paris. Or if I were to find another route, it could take me anything from 10 to 19 hours of travel. So that's why it's so important to really bring to life the liberalized environment within Africa, where airlines and people across different countries in the continent can move freely, or freer, with aviation being the catalyst for that.

Victoria Moores:

Absolutely. And as you say, this idea of probably the kind of freedom that people take for granted, if they're in the US and they're flying across from one side of the continent to the other, if they're in Europe and they're flying across from one country to another country. It's all pretty easy to just buy an airline ticket, jump on an aircraft, the service is there and you fly. But in Africa, it's that much harder because you don't have this structure already in place. And I'm also thinking about the environmental implications of having to fly sort of from Africa up to Europe, back down to Africa. That's an awful lot of emissions that don't need to be there. So as you said, this is quite a complicated regulatory process that kind of had its origins back in 1988 and became formalized in '99, binding in 2002.

Victoria Moores:

But then there's been a period where all of the ambition was there, but the actual delivery, the actual putting this into practice, making it happen, it seems as though something's got tripped up or stalled along the way, where it can really be seen that this could offer incredible benefits for travelers across Africa, for the economy across Africa. And I'm also thinking about pulling in some of your own personal history here, because I know that you started out your career as a lawyer. You worked for Virgin Nigeria in legal counsel there. You've been with IATA for a really long time, most recently. And by recently, I mean over a lot of recent years, really pushing for African liberalization, which I believe led to this reinvigoration of SAATM in 2018. So I'm just curious about the weaving of your personal history with this, bringing us through to, you are now leading this process.

Adefunke Adeyemi:

So interesting. I mean, it's really fascinating, and it's almost like, to have been given the opportunity through being appointed as the secretary general of AFCAC, I think is just almost divine, because it's absolutely the next step in a sense, if you think about it. Where I wasn't consciously thinking that that would be the logical next step for me, in terms of my career, but when you think about it in the grand scheme of things, it just makes so much sense that we are now in a position to really move this needle forward, along with all of our stakeholders in collaboration together with states, with industry partners. And just to say, how can we do it? How can we liberalize our markets? And we have been talking about this for quite some time. And one of the things that I'm glad to be able to bring to this role and to the table is the implementation angle, which is a word that I had mentioned earlier.

Adefunke Adeyemi:

So it's really time to implement. And a lot of work has been done, Victoria, in the background since AFCAC started, and with all of the foundations that have been laid. One of the challenges to implementation of this initiative was that all of the regulatory instruments that needed to ensure that the market ran in a fair way, it was competitive, the consumers were well protected, and so on and so forth, were not quite yet in place over the past few years. That has now all happened. They're now all in place with the last one being the dispute settlement mechanism, which is now being adopted by African heads of state. So that's now in place. And so with that, we're able to now move forward in tangible ways and in practical terms with our African states and airlines to say, "This is now the time to go forward with implementation," and to go even one step further and say, "This is how we implement."

Victoria Moores:

So I imagine that one of the things that's needed to be in place is to have all the structures to make this so that states feel, the African countries feel as though they can safely open up their air transport markets, that they're not going to be at an economic disadvantage. But also there's this question of political will, political desire to get on board. So in terms of the number of countries that are actually concretely implementing this and going ahead, out of the 54, how many African countries are already on board with this reinvigoration of liberalization?

Adefunke Adeyemi:

Well, there's 35 countries that have signed up to it. Since the time that the SAATM was initiated in 2018, I think there were 11 champion states who signed up at the time. And since then, up to now, there are 35 countries that have signed up. And that's really wonderful. Of course, we're advocating for more states to sign up so that we can have the maximum penetration as possible. But those 35 states actually already represent 90% of the aviation air traffic market. And so we can move forward on the basis of the 35. But one of the things we're thinking about also is how can we break it up into just in a manageable way? It could seem a bit daunting to have all 35 states trying to do the same thing at the same time. And so one of the ways to sort of break that up is to start with a pilot phase for the implementation of SAATM out of the 35 countries, to pilot it amongst a few who we call ‘the CREW,’ the countries and carriers that are ready, eligible and willing to participate in the SAATM.

Adefunke Adeyemi:

And we have already identified a few of those and we'll be rolling out an implementation plan very quickly. But to your other point, Victoria, one of the real reasons why we haven't seen breakthrough in the liberalization story of Africa is because largely of fear. And I think fear is couched in the word protectionism, where many states and carriers have felt that their place was going to be displaced. Because if we opened up the market to everyone, then it would be a real challenge for them and for their markets and economic disadvantage, as you had said already. But the reality is that, and there's enough proof of this around the world, is that opening up markets is really a boost for economic development. It is also a great accelerator for integration, and we have examples all over the world. But the potential for Africa, which is the note on which I'll end, is huge. Beyond the fact that it'll help with raising standards to international level, whether it's safety or security and across other standards, it will do amazing things for the continent of Africa and for its people.

Adefunke Adeyemi:

The potential to increase the GDP of Africa by an additional 450 billion US dollars is there, with this liberalization across the entire continent. It will also generate an additional almost 600,000 jobs. It will reduce fares for the African people and for people who are coming into Africa traveling, make it cheaper, more accessible by almost 30%. It will reduce those travel times we've talked about already by tons of time, and create more convenience. And more importantly, from a social perspective, it will also open up so many things.

Adefunke Adeyemi:

Focused on the sustainable development goals, this initiative will really support better wellbeing, greater wellbeing for African people, because of high income jobs and so on. It will support the environmental initiatives. It will also support gender equality and so many aspects of this, because it opens up a whole new world for people. And so just to wrap up, all of the work that we're doing at AFCAC is to facilitate cooperation and collaboration and harmonization of all of aviation across all of the domains, for the purpose of implementing and delivering a robust aviation sector that will help the African people and will help the continent of Africa to deliver on its objectives of a better integrated, prosperous, and united Africa.

Victoria Moores:

I know that you were described by the World Economic Forum as being a catalyst of change and a transformative thought leader. And I know, having heard you speak and seen you act professionally, that you'll be really driving that forwards in your new role, so thank you very much for speaking with us today.

Adefunke Adeyemi:

Thank you very much, Victoria, it was a pleasure.

Victoria Moores:

And thank you to our listeners as well. I hope that you'll be joining us again next week for our next episode. Make sure that you don't miss it by subscribing to the Window Seat Podcast on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Until then, I hope you're looking forwards to your next flight. This is Victoria Moores, disembarking from Window Seat.