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Rabat — Africa’s punishing taxes on aviation are “sabotaging” economic growth and fueling youth unrest across the continent, according to a major airline executive who used a World Bank summit this week to demand sweeping reforms.
Esayas Woldemariam Hailu, CEO of pan-African carrier ASKY Airlines, delivered an impassioned call for African governments to slash levies on air tickets and fuel, arguing that the current tax regime is choking off job creation at a time when millions of young Africans are struggling to find work.
“When you are buying a ticket, one-third is going to tax, two-thirds is to the airlines to cover all their costs,” Hailu told the panel on Powering Job Creation in Africa.
He noted that aviation fuel costs 30% more in Africa than in Europe, while taxes per ticket are double European levels.
The stark numbers underscore what Hailu described as an urgent challenge: Africa is “an exotic place” where aviation is taxed more heavily than tobacco and alcohol, despite the sector’s critical role in connecting markets and creating employment across a continent of 1.4 billion people.
The Gen Z factor
Hailu made an explicit connection between job creation and the wave of youth-driven protests and migration that has swept across Africa in recent years.
His remarks come as Generation Z unemployment has become a flashpoint all the way from North Africa to the continent’s southern tip, with young Moroccans among those demanding better economic opportunities and access to quality healthcare.
“When people are employed at job and they earn steady income, there is more peace and less Gen Z movement,” Hailu said, using shorthand for the youth-led demonstrations and mass migration attempts that have destabilized several African nations.
“People who still get employed, have steady business, they eat, they get to know a young partner, they have children, they settle, their mobility is restricted.”
His blunt assessment: “If you need peace, invest in aviation.”
A multi-sector approach
Anna Bjerde, the World Bank’s Managing Director of Operations, outlined a broader strategy for addressing Africa’s jobs crisis, stressing that employment creation must tackle “uncertainty” and the unique “barriers and obstacles” facing the continent’s poor.
Bjerde identified five critical sectors for job growth, with healthcare emerging as a particularly promising area — both for keeping workers healthy and as a source of employment itself.
She mentioned that healthcare is crucial to have healthy people, “but we also believe that care jobs are a great source of job creation,” she said.
The healthcare focus resonates in countries like Morocco, where Gen Z protesters have made access to quality medical services a central demand alongside calls for better employment prospects.
Bjerde argued that healthy populations are essential not just for productivity, but because healthcare and related industries represent “major potential sources for new, quality jobs in Africa.”
Her framework also featured infrastructure (including energy), agriculture, tourism, and value-added manufacturing as key sectors, all supported by what she called the “three pillars” of foundational infrastructure, which would enable business environment and private capital mobilization.
Breaking down barriers
For Hailu, the path forward requires African governments to match rhetoric with action. He pointed to the Yamoussoukro Declaration, a 1999 agreement to liberalize African skies, as an example of unfulfilled promises.
“They finish their AU meeting, they go home, they start forgetting about that, and they have protectionism,” Hailu said, referring to African Union gatherings where continental integration is routinely championed.
He called for genuine liberalization “in the spirit of the Yamoussoukro Declaration, in the spirit of the Continental Free Trade Agreement.”
The numbers make his case stark: the global airline industry generated $1 trillion in revenue last year with just $30 billion in profit — a razor-thin 3% margin, according to the International Air Transport Association.
Meanwhile, secondary industries like hotels, airport operators, and catering companies enjoy double-digit margins while feeding off aviation’s narrow profitability.
“Let’s reduce tax on aviation, and let’s fertilize the economy so that we can be paid through other things,” Hailu urged, arguing that lower taxes would generate broader economic activity and ultimately yield higher government revenues.
He pointed out that liberalization would create scale, moving “people and goods and services” more efficiently while supporting small and medium enterprises — the backbone of job creation across Africa.
Even cross-border traders “with suitcase merchants within Africa,” he noted, could help fertilize economies if aviation became more accessible.
As Africa’s youth population continues to rise (the continent is expected to account for more than half of global population growth through 2050) the pressure to deliver jobs, opportunity, and stability has never been greater.
Whether governments notice calls to reform aviation taxation and embrace genuine liberalization may help determine whether that demographic dividend becomes an asset or a source of deepening crisis.
