On the morning of 14 March 2024, four major cable systems were severed almost simultaneously off the coast of Côte d’Ivoire. Connectivity failed across thirteen countries. Traffic fell by more than half at the height of the disruption, banks closed in Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire itself went close to fully dark. It took days to restore what most of those economies treat as a permanent utility, and the reason it took days is the part of the story that has never been properly governed.
The physical facts are not in dispute. Roughly 500 submarine cables, spanning more than 1.7 million kilometres, carry over 99 percent of international data traffic. Around 200 faults occur globally each year. The important figure is the cause: more than 80 percent of those faults are the result of fishing gear and ships’ anchors. The dominant threat to Africa’s connection to the world is not a hostile state or a saboteur. It is a trawler.
That fact should reorganise the entire conversation. If the principal risk were deliberate attack, the answer would be protection, and protection is a security function that states understand how to fund and command. Because the principal risk is accidental and recurring, the answer is repair, and repair is not a security function at all. It is a logistics and permitting problem distributed across commercial owners, national maritime authorities, customs services, insurers, and a small global fleet of specialist vessels that no African state controls.
The Threat Is Mostly an Anchor. The Exposure Is the Repair Chain.
Follow a single break. A privately owned consortium cable, carrying the traffic of national banks and public hospitals, fails inside another country’s exclusive economic zone. The owner must identify the fault, contract a repair vessel from a fleet that is small and often already committed elsewhere, obtain permits to work in the relevant maritime jurisdiction, clear specialist equipment through customs, and complete a splice at depth. The government whose economy has stopped is a party to almost none of these steps. It cannot compel the vessel, issue the permit in another state’s waters, or accelerate the customs clearance of equipment entering a neighbour.
Each institution in that sequence is performing its function correctly. The owner is protecting an asset, the coastal state is administering its waters, the customs service is applying its schedule, the vessel operator is honouring a prior contract. Nowhere in the chain is any actor responsible for the outcome that matters, which is the number of days a country spends offline. Responsibility has been divided so finely that restoration is nobody’s mandate.
Digital sovereignty will not be measured by how many cables a country announces. It will be measured by how quickly traffic returns when several fail at once.
Redundancy Is a Question About Neighbours
The 2024 outage did not affect all thirteen countries equally, and the differences are instructive. States with multiple landings, functioning internet exchange points, and terrestrial routes into neighbouring networks degraded. States without them stopped. Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Mauritania are each served by a single cable, which makes a national internet outage a foreseeable consequence of one ordinary maritime accident.
Terrestrial redundancy is the cheapest fix available and the least pursued, because it requires cross-border agreement rather than capital. A landlocked country’s connectivity depends on transit through a coastal neighbour it may have no framework with. A coastal country’s resilience depends on being able to reach a second landing in a third state. These are diplomatic instruments dressed as engineering, which is why they are consistently deferred in favour of announcing new cables, an activity that produces a ribbon-cutting and does not require anyone to negotiate with anybody.
Two Declarations, Neither Binding
The diplomacy has begun. Nigeria hosted the first International Submarine Cable Resilience Summit in February 2025, supported by the ITU and the International Cable Protection Committee, producing the Abuja Declaration as a framework for cooperative action on subsea resilience. A second summit followed in Porto in February 2026, and its declaration reaffirmed the Abuja principles, recognised submarine cables as critical infrastructure, and advanced further recommendations.
Both instruments are non-binding, and that is the honest measure of where this sits. An African state hosted the founding summit and set the agenda, which is a genuine and underreported exercise of continental agenda-setting power. What has been produced so far is a shared vocabulary and a set of principles, not an obligation on any government to issue a permit within a fixed period or to admit a foreign repair vessel on pre-cleared terms.
The instrument that would convert principle into capability is regional rather than global: a standing emergency-repair protocol with pre-cleared vessel entry, standardised permits issued against an agreed deadline, reciprocal customs treatment for repair equipment, mandatory outage reporting, and one named coordinating authority per region. A pooled repair or insurance facility is a plausible second stage, but should not be asserted as a solution before its cost and governance have been demonstrated.
The verdict is that Africa’s coastal states hold more leverage in this system than they have chosen to exercise. Landing rights, permits, protection zones, and maritime access are sovereign instruments, and they are exactly what the owners of this privately held infrastructure require in order to operate and to repair. What is missing is not authority but coordination, and the cost of that gap is currently paid by the landlocked and single-cable states that have the least say in the arrangement and the most to lose from an anchor dragged in someone else’s waters.
