Covid-19 offers African aviation a chance to reset
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AFDB NEWS
MANY African state-owned airlines were already in trouble pre-Covid-19, but there is a chance for a reset and possible return to profitable years, regional development experts said last week.
You name them – Air Namibia, Kenyan Airways, South African Airways, and more.
According to them, the aviation industry represents a huge market that the continent's airlines need to exploit more fully, with technology and artificial intelligence (AI) offering the way forward for expansion.
“Technology and smart technologies are offering this fantastic opportunity, so let's make use of AI, and capacitate our people to revamp and to rethink our industry, to make sure that both our airports and our airlines cater for the very near future,” said Amani Zeid, African Union Commission for Infrastructure and Energy.
Zeid was speaking at a recently held virtual workshop last week organised by the African Development Bank (ADB) under the theme, 'African Aviation Recovery Conference: coordinating an efficient response to the Covid-19 crisis's effects on the aviation sector in Africa'.
Discussions touched on the urgent need of African airlines for government-supported loans and other financial assistance in the short term, as well as the imperative to ensure that public health is a factor in efforts to build the sector back better and more competitively.
Fang Liu, the secretary general of the International Civil Aviation Organisation, the Nigerian government's minister for aviation, Hadi Sirika, and the ADB's vice president for infrastructure, industrialisation and private sector, Solomon Quaynor, also made statements.
Sirika also called on African governments to embrace full liberalisation of the aviation sector.
“Nigeria today has all its bilateral air service agreements and was also among the first ten countries that signed a commitment to implement the Single African Air Transport Market,” he said.
The agreement is an African Union flagship project, set to create a single unified air transport market in Africa that will advance the continent's economic integration agenda.
The conference took the form of four sessions discussing the priority needs of airlines and airports aviation services companies, as well as needed policy actions and strengthening the sector's access to finance.
In a presentation, ADB's Amadou Oumarou, made clear that the sector had been ailing even prior to the onset of the pandemic, plagued by market restrictions and high prices, as well as a poor record of safety and security.
Of the 200 airlines the EU had blacklisted in 2016, over 50% were African.
The pandemic's aviation effects, while felt worldwide, have been sharpest in Africa, Oumarou said, a claim that was backed up by numerous panellists.
Nearly five million of the continent's seven million aviation and tourism industry-related jobs have been lost in 2020, in addition to as much as US$15 billion in revenue, half of this to African airlines.
The wide-ranging discussions touched on whether African airlines needed to consolidate to be viable, and offered numerous recommendations and solutions.
These included adopting aircraft leasing and other innovative practices to cut costs and build efficiencies, strengthening freight operations, which have been less hard hit than passenger traffic, and seizing direct opportunities presented by the imminent need to distribute Covid-19 vaccines across Africa.
Underpinning much of the discussion was the need to make public health and security a central element of the post Covid-19 recovery, as a path to restoring confidence.
A key takeaway was the urgent need for coordinated action among the sector's actors, including governments, aviation authorities and multilateral stakeholders such as the ADB.
* Afdb News, additional reporting by Lazarus Amukeshe.
