Cable failures expose weak links in west Africa’s $150 billion digital economy

The warning comes from the West African Telecommunications Regulators Assembly (WATRA), which says the disruption revealed how fragile connectivity remains across one of the world’s fastest-growing digital markets.

Speaking at an international summit in Porto, WATRA’s Executive Secretary, Aliyu Aboki, described the March 2024 outage as a turning point.

Several major cable systems, including the West Africa Cable System (WACS), Africa Coast to Europe cable, MainOne and SAT-3, were damaged almost simultaneously off the coast near Côte d’Ivoire.

The incident triggered widespread service disruptions across Nigeria, Ghana and other markets.

Internet traffic in affected countries fell by more than 50% at the peak of the outage, according to WATRA, with some services taking days to fully recover.

The impact went beyond inconvenience. Banks struggled to process transactions, fintech platforms stalled, and cloud-based operations across sectors were interrupted, highlighting how dependent the region has become on uninterrupted connectivity.

“Submarine cables are not simply telecommunications infrastructure. They are foundational to economic activity,” Aboki said.

Globally, more than 95% of internet traffic runs through submarine cables, making them critical to everything from financial markets to global supply chains.

But unlike more mature regions such as Europe or North America, West Africa operates with limited redundancy, meaning fewer alternative routes when failures occur.

What made the March incident unusually severe was the clustering of faults. While most cable damage worldwide is linked to fishing activity, ship anchors or natural seabed movement, multiple simultaneous breaks are rare and can overwhelm backup systems.

The episode also exposed a deeper governance problem. While cable networks span multiple countries, regulation remains fragmented.

Differences in permitting rules, emergency response procedures and cable protection policies slowed repair efforts, particularly where cross-border coordination was required.

“For investors, these uncertainties translate directly into a higher cost of capital,” Aboki said.

Repairing submarine cables in the region is both expensive and slow.

A single fault can cost between $1.5 million and $2 million to fix, largely because specialised repair vessels are stationed far from West Africa, often in places like Cape Town. In more complex multi-cable failures, costs can rise to as much as $8 million.

That delay has real economic consequences. Africa’s digital economy is expanding rapidly, driven by fintech, mobile services and cloud adoption, yet it still relies heavily on a small number of international cable systems concentrated along similar routes.

In Nigeria, Africa’s largest internet market, the March 2024 disruption forced telecom operators and banks into emergency mode, underscoring the risks to a country pushing aggressively toward a cashless, digitally enabled economy.

WATRA is now calling for submarine cable resilience to be treated as a regional priority rather than a national issue.

Proposed reforms include harmonised regulations, faster permitting processes, pre-arranged emergency repair frameworks and better data sharing across its 16 member states.

Aboki also stressed that future investments must go beyond expanding capacity to improving durability, including route diversification to reduce the risk of simultaneous failures.

“The challenge is not simply to build more cables, but to build systems that are financeable, durable, and regionally coherent,” he said.

The stakes are rising. As global tech companies increase investment in African connectivity and cloud infrastructure, the reliability of the region’s digital backbone is becoming a critical factor in attracting long-term capital.