There’s one ranking Kenya manages to avoid making—even by accident. It’s the list of African airports that actually work. And while Kigali and Addis Ababa settle comfortably into the top ten, Nairobi remains in the waiting room, ticket in hand, as the departure board keeps flashing “delayed.”
Yes, Nairobi used to be the gateway to Africa. Today it’s a creaking door that occasionally jams and often makes you wonder if it wouldn’t be better to go through the back, which in the meantime has had a makeover—and even a reputation makeover.
The verdict comes from Skytrax—the folks who let travelers speak instead of ministers. And when travelers speak, they’re usually not kind. More than 575 airports analyzed, passengers from over a hundred nationalities, and a simple question: what’s it like to pass through here?
The answer, for Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, is an awkward silence. Out of the top ten in Africa, while the continent reorganizes itself without waiting for Nairobi.
Up front, the usual South Africa playing in a different league, with Cape Town, Johannesburg, and even Durban. Then Morocco, Egypt, Mauritius. And finally, the real blow: Kigali eighth and Addis Ababa ninth.
It’s not just a ranking. It’s a snapshot.
And in the shot, Nairobi is blurred.
Not because it doesn’t matter. On the contrary: JKIA remains one of the busiest airports on the continent, with over nine million passengers a year, a key hub for East Africa.
But that’s precisely the point: it matters, but it doesn’t convince.
Anyone who passes through knows it. Lines that feel like exercises in Zen patience, security checks whose mood shifts depending on the time of day, spaces that are never enough for the traffic they’re supposed to handle. It’s not a disaster. It’s worse: it’s the habit of settling for “so-so.”
Meanwhile, others are building.
The Kenyan government has long been talking about expansion, new terminals, and a capacity that should reach 15 million passengers a year. Tenders, twenty-year plans, projects that return cyclically like the long rains.
The problem is that, in Kenya, even projects need a visa. And they often remain on hold.
Yet, this time, something really seems to be moving.
Because the humiliation of the rankings serves this purpose too: to remind you that you are no longer automatically the center of the world. That geography changes, and quickly at that. That Kigali is no longer “that small, tidy place,” but a competitor.
And so perhaps this exclusion, this minor continental embarrassment, can become a blessing in disguise.
Because Kenya, when it wants to, knows how to run. It has already done so.
It just needs to stop fooling itself and figure out which direction is the right one.
JKIA doesn’t need a facelift, but a real transformation: less rhetoric about being a regional hub and more substance as an airport where people want to pass through, not just survive.
The hope—African, and therefore stubborn—is that this time the plans won’t remain on paper, that the bulldozers will arrive before the excuses, and that Nairobi will return to being what it has always been: not perfect, but indispensable.
Because in the end, in Africa, it’s not the one who promises the most who wins.
It’s the one who manages, at least once, to deliver.
