By Peter Nalika
In March 2025, much of West Africa internet slowed to a crawl. Subsea cable cuts disrupted banks, mobile money, government portals, and even basic email. For hours, businesses stalled and daily life went digital-dark.
The incident was more than a technical hiccup. It was a stark reminder that Africa digital economy one of the fastest growing in the world still runs on fragile undersea threads. For all the talk of artificial intelligence, 5G, and cloud migration, the reality is blunt: most of our data travels through a handful of submarine cables. And when those cables fail, so does Africa’s connectivity.
The Illusion of Capacity
Kenya, like many of its peers, is riding a digital boom. Mobile banking, e-commerce, and agritech platforms now form the backbone of daily life. This makes subsea cables as vital to the economy as highways, ports, and power grids.
Recent investments have generated excitement. Meta’s 2Africa cable and Google’s Equiano system promise faster speeds, lower latency, and more room for digital growth. But capacity is not the same as resilience.
Too many cables land at the same coastal points, creating chokeholds. When one goes down whether from a fishing trawler, an anchor, or sabotage millions of users feel the shock. East Africa already saw this in early 2024, when damage in the Red Sea disrupted several cables at once. Data had to be rerouted thousands of kilometres, raising costs for providers and slowing services from video calls to financial transactions.
Sovereignty at Stake
The deeper question is who controls these lifelines. Many cables are owned and governed abroad. That means decisions on routing, repairs, and upgrades are made in foreign boardrooms, not African capitals. In a crisis, local needs can become secondary to external priorities.
True resilience requires local ownership. Governments, regional blocs, and domestic companies must hold equity stakes, set security standards for landing stations, and make cable governance a matter of national interest.
Equally important is what happens onshore. Subsea capacity means little if inland fibre and backhaul networks are weak. In too many countries, bottlenecks prevent high-speed coastal connections from reaching rural towns and businesses. Without robust domestic infrastructure, digital inclusion remains an empty promise.
A Continental Strategy
This is not just a national issue it’s a continental one. The African Union’s digital transformation agenda calls for stronger cross-border planning, but implementation lags. Regulators still work in silos, and cooperation is too often reactive.
Africa needs a continental framework: diversified routes, physically separated landings, joint security measures, and shared emergency protocols. Every hour of downtime costs jobs, money, and trust in digital services.
Funding models must evolve too. Subsea projects are capital-intensive, but public–private partnerships, regional infrastructure funds, and development bank financing can spread risk while guaranteeing African oversight. Just as energy and transport attract big-ticket investments, cables must be treated as critical infrastructure with multiplier effects across the economy.
Preparedness matters just as much as investment. Countries run military drills and disaster simulations why not “internet outage exercises”? Governments, banks, and telecoms should rehearse rerouting traffic, activating backups, and communicating during crises. The next cut is inevitable; the damage it causes is not.
The Stakes for Africa’s Future
Resilience is not a luxury. It is insurance for Africa’s digital future. As artificial intelligence, telemedicine, e-commerce, and online education expand, the cost of failure rises. The question is not whether cables will break they will but whether Africa will be ready.
The continent cannot pin its hopes on a single “big” cable or leave redundancy to private operators. What’s needed is diversity of routes, domestic investment in fibre, and regional coordination backed by real political will.
The cables under the sea may be out of sight, but they must never be out of mind. Africa’s digital economy depends on them. The sooner governments treat them as strategic assets and build resilience around them the sooner the continent can surf the digital wave with confidence.
