African "Hubs",- Visions, Realities and the real way forward.

Kigali , Rwanda is the latest African airport to declare itself to be in the hub business, a little optimistic maybe for a place with just twelve destinations, half of which are served less than daily. Hardly a great proposition if there is a chance of a misconnection but more a worthy declaration of aspiration or long term intent. A huge amount of additional investment will be required to make the dream come anything like true. The intent is though encouraging and helped by Brussels Airlines and KLM operating nonstop to Europe and Kenya Airways and Air Rwanda providing 42 flights a week between the city and Nairobi.At least those provide an alternative onward routing to anyone who does misconnect. They don't though at this very early stage encourage customers to make Kigali the focal point of their African travels.

The term "hub" is often misunderstood by aspirants to the title. By dint of longevity and huge investment, Dubai has become almost a rolling hub for Emirates though with clear main banks of arrivals and departures. Even without the foreign operators' contributions, the seven daily departures to London (Heathrow and Gatwick combined)for example make this spoke virtually a shuttle and of course those at Heathrow plug into Europe's best hub for onward connections to places not served by Emirates direct. This one could call "double hubbing" when the carrier's main hub is supported and strengthened by someone else's. Even major carriers can ride on the back of each other's hubs although interestingly the grouping of many large and medium sized airlines into inward looking alliances has hindered rather than helped this process. More of this in a separate article soon.

On the eastern side of the African continent Cairo,Addis Ababa, Nairobi and Johannesburg have built up dominant and difficult to challenge hubs over an even longer period of time. On a lesser scale "double hubbing" linkage is what smaller airlines everywhere can achieve,- and thereby strengthen rather than undermine,-their own mini hub. It can be done gradually as and when resources become available rather than as a potentially disastrous "big bang".

For years protectionist African governments fought hard via restrictive bilaterals to avoid such linkages. They saw anyone travelling short haul to a nearby African state to catch someone else's long haul onward flight as a loss to their own actual or ultimately intended services and as result choked off the development of their own position, not to mention tourist and other businesses. The realisation that expensively protecting struggling national carriers almost invariably produced a minus on the national balance sheet has been slow in coming. Uganda's President Museveni was one of the first to understand this and said "We don't have a national shipping line or need one." Writing the inevitable fate of Uganda Airlines on the wall, he continued " We don't need to have a national airline and if it doesn't make a profit it can close down",- and so it did.

The message for the smaller states and legacy national airlines in Africa and elsewhere is clear. The establishment of a major airline hub in the accepted sense of the word probably isn't worth the effort and money it will require and divert from other national priotities for decades to come. To make your base city more accessible and successful in terms of movements and passenger numbers and boost employment and revenue in the tourism and other business related industries forget about very expensive long haul dreams which will leave you without roads,schools, hospitals and much more important things you need, but link into someone else's already thriving hub. We will look again at the train wreck that is most of West African aviation on another occasion, but on the eastern side of the continent that means Cairo, Addis Ababa, Nairobi or Johannesburg and at a stretch Dubai. That in no way prevents the gradual build up of more and more spokes (daily please) until a regional hub is almost imperceptably born. This should be the short/medium term aspiration coupled with and aided by a declaration of open skies.Hopefully AFRAA, which under its new Director General, Elijah Chingosho, says it is working on a new dynamism in African aviation, will be able to provide some of the understanding and impetus for this and get away from the fearful, pride driven and highly costly protectionism and conservatism which has blighted the past sixty plus years. It got in the way even during the colonial era and has been an albatross around the continent's neck ever since.

(Peter Woodrow and John Williams)