The digital economy of Africa remains highly vulnerable to prolonged internet blackouts, despite a boom in internet usage and digital infrastructure across the continent.
According to a new warning from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the entire continent currently relies on a single repair ship to fix its submarine cables, leaving millions of everyday users and businesses at risk of extended disconnections when faults occur.
The alarm was raised in the ITU’s latest global report on submarine cable resilience, a board co-chaired by the Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy of Nigeria, Dr. Bosun Tijani.
The report exposes a logistical bottleneck where the vast network of underwater fibre-optic cables of the continent, which includes major systems like Equiano, WACS, and the 45,000-kilometer 2Africa network, is primarily serviced by the Léon Thévenin, an ageing cable-laying vessel owned by Orange Marine.
While the ship is officially based in Cape Town, South Africa, it is stationed in the south of France. This means the vessel must often voyage thousands of miles just to reach the African coastline when a disaster strikes. If multiple cables break in different regions simultaneously, the repair delays compound quickly.
The economic toll of these delays is severe when underwater rockfalls in the volatile Congo Canyon severed cables in 2020 and 2023, cross-border data flows and financial markets were heavily disrupted.
More recently, in March 2024, a major cable cut disrupted internet access across 12 West African countries, costing the Nigerian economy an estimated $590 million in just four days.
Globally, the underwater network suffers up to 200 faults a year, driven by commercial fishing gear and dragged ship anchors. Yet, Africa, alongside the South Atlantic and Pacific Islands, accounts for only 13% of the world’s active repair vessels. As a result, the global average response time to fix a broken cable has more than doubled over the last decade, jumping from less than 20 days to over 50.
”Despite growth in internet connectivity, Africa remains critically underserved by submarine cable repair infrastructure…Many of this region’s cables traverse vast stretches of unprotected waters, with only one permanently stationed repair vessel based in South Africa to serve the entire region…At over 10,000km, the immense transit distance would be a journey comparable to a transoceanic route, like Shanghai to Los Angeles” – the ITU report
While the telecommunications industry acknowledges the crisis, relief is still years away. Orange Marine has ordered two modern, hybrid-powered cable ships to eventually replace the 43-year-old Léon Thévenin, but those vessels are not slated for delivery until 2028 and 2029.
In the meantime, the ITU is urging African governments to streamline the regulatory bottlenecks, such as complex tax structures, customs duties, and lengthy permitting processes, that often delay repair ships from entering national waters.
Until these hurdles are cleared, the resilience of Africa’s internet will remain precariously dependent on a single vessel navigating an unpredictable ocean.
