Telecoms infrastructure should be classified as strategic security assets. Imagine just 4 cables & 10 countries shutoff?

One would expect that this should be a topic of serious considerations whenever some of the highly paid African experts at the African Union and ECOWAS sit to sip Coffee, Tea and Wine. The vulnerability of Africa, and our overdependence of external structures is a major cause for concern.

Classification is more than acknowledging such in textbooks of strategic studies, international relations and diplomacy. Classifications without backing and protection is of no meaning.

Did we not classify our airports as national strategic security assets, yet people walk through our airports airsides to steal runway lights.

Back to the issue at hand.

While the managers of the said cables are yet to determine what caused the damages, to have four major cables --The West Africa Cable System (Wacs), MainOne, Sat-3 and Ace sea cables — arteries for telecommunications data — all affected at the same time calls for not just reflections at the continental levels, but at sub-regional levels too.

Imagine eight West African, and two Southern African countries, and Portugal, severely affected, disrupting services from banking to aviation, e-commerce to education, communications, governance etc etc.

Cloudflare said yesterday that the repairs can take weeks to months, depending on where the damage is, what needs to be repaired, and local weather conditions.

MTN Group said that Ace and Wacs have jointly initiated the repair process, and that they would send a vessel to fix the damaged cables.

Microsoft reported disruptions to its cloud services and Microsoft 365 applications across Africa. Telkom’s Openserve fibre unit and Standard Bank were also affected, with Openserve adding it had rerouted traffic.

Microsoft services were hard hit by the cable problems causing many companies to lose access to e-mail systems and other cloud-based services such as the Teams video-conferencing tool for several hours.

This has also highlighted the need for diversification of access points so service providers would have alternatives when such emergencies occur.

The intervention of the Angola Cables has been quite commendable and reason most of us can still make posts and communicate at present because they are using their newly built Sacs Cable to redirecting international data and traffic to the Sacs cable, which connects Angola directly to Brazil and from there to the US and Europe.

Also, the newly commissioned Google’s Equiano cable, which came into commercial service last year, has been unaffected by the outages. This means the system can be used to reroute traffic to Europe that had been carried on the affected cables.

© Kelechi Decca