Travelling Across Africa – Reflections on the Current State of Affairs

by Alphonse Akouyu

In March 2024, I was asked to go on a work trip to the beautiful city of Freetown, Sierra Leone aka Sweet Salone. As with all work trips, there is plenty of excitement especially if it is a new country and one with as rich a history as Sierra Leone.

Growing up in Cameroon, I had read a lot about Fourah Bay College and this trip presented an opportunity to finally make a professional pilgrimage to this bastion of African education. However, my joy was cut short when I received the airline ticket. My flight was to take me from Yaoundé, Cameroon with a stop in Abuja, Nigeria, and onto Lome, Togo, for a transit. From there, I would get on another flight which would go through Accra, Ghana, before arriving in Freetown.

A direct flight between Yaoundé and Freetown according to flight calculator should be around 4 hours. However, I left the house at 5:30 am that fateful day and only got to my hotel in Freetown at 5:30 pm the same day. While on the flight to Freetown, I learnt that the aircraft was to continue to Banjul, The Gambia, so imagine the stress of a passenger who left Yaoundé for Banjul. In addition to the stress of the travel, the ticket cost threatened to give me a headache when I compared it with travelling in other regions of the world. According to the BBC, flying within Africa is more expensive than just about anywhere else in the world. Travellers pay higher ticket prices and more tax. Another report by Trademark breaks it down further by saying ticket prices in my dearest Western and Central Africa are amongst the most expensive in the world.

Air travel and economic development go hand in hand, hence regions with affordable, reliable and accessible air travel are the most developed in the World. The trademark article highlighted taxes as a key factor for high flight prices, however other factors such as tight regulations, which reduce competition, and lack of private sector investment in our aviation sector are making the ordinary traveller in Africa think twice before embarking on any journey.

The 1999 Africa Open Skies agreement, which was meant to reduce our travel burden, is still sitting in the drawers of some of our leaders awaiting signature. The 2024 Africa Visa Openness Report 2024 has some very strong words for those managing air travel and movement in general. “One thing is clear – Africa will not meet its development aspirations in the absence of regimes that promote mobility across the continent”. It even goes further to say that “Apart from the fact that you need connectivity, you also need to have freedom for people to move from one place to the other. We cannot say we have borderless trade when we put up barriers for people to travel.” Speaking of visas, who can forget the viral words of Africa’s Richest Man Aliko Dangote when he said “As an investor, as someone who wants to make Africa great, I have to apply for 35 different visas on my passport”.

Visa restrictions constitute a big burden to African travel. Ghana recently became only the fifth African country to allow African passport holders to visit the country without a visa for a maximum of 90 days, following in the footsteps of Rwanda, Seychelles, The Gambia and Benin. A quick comparison with EU and ASEAN member states should tell you where the continent is at the moment. Former Kenyan Foreign Affairs Minister Dr Alfred Mutua summed up our problems when he said “For an African to visit a fellow African, within the African Union, the visa restrictions in many of our nations, among us, between our brothers and sisters, is like trying to brush the teeth of a crocodile”.

There has been some progress made by some African countries with the introduction of visa on arrival and e-visas, but the hope is that many African countries should be able to create special 30-90 day free visa travel like the five countries who are already walking the talk. The Government of Kenya, in trying to reduce the stress of brushing the teeth of this crocodile, recently dropped the Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) for all African countries except Somalia and Libya – due to security concerns, making it possible for nationals of most African countries to visit the country without a visa for two months. ETA was described by experts as an e-visa in another form and given the stress of travelling in this country, an e-visa facility can be considered progress.

Getting to Freetown, I had another major challenge – currency exchange. The currency in Cameroon is XAF meanwhile the currency in Sierra Leone is the Leone. So, in order to pay for my expenses in Sierra Leone, I had to convert my XAF to United States Dollars (USD) and from USD to Leone. Based on my calculations, I lost about 15% of the value of my XAF when converting to USD and another 15% when converting from USD to Leones. So by the time I had Leones, I had lost close to 30% of my XAF. Again, compare that to a traveller using the Euro and travelling across EU countries. Now, while in Sierra Leone, I had to send some money to Cameroon for emergency purposes. This led to another major travel challenge which is the transfer of funds between African countries. I’m sure each reader has his or her story to tell about this issue. 

The current day Pan Africanist dream of an African Union Passport which guarantees free movement of people, a common currency to prevent travellers from losing money they way I did, and a continent with reliable, accessible and affordable air transport – whether this is feasible in our life time is a story for another day.

In 2025, the two main African Institutions in charge of producing the Africa Visa Openness Report — the African Union and the African Development Bank will be having new leadership. The crème de la crème of the continent’s finest minds are vying for the top job and have made African integration a key part of their plans for the continent. African travellers will be hoping that together with our respective Governments, adequate measures will be taken to ameliorate the current state of travel and integration in the continent.