- Nigeria has a lot of lessons to learn from the disruptions
Nigeria may have been counting its costs in the multiple billions of naira lost from the downtime caused by the damage to major submarine cables in both the Red Sea and the West African coast, there is something to be said of the disruptions caused by the events that speaks to the fragility of globalisation and its inherent vulnerabilities. Whereas initial reports somewhat presented conflicting reports linking the destruction of the three cables in the Red Sea route that provide global internet and telecommunications services to sabotage by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, (an attempt to politicise the development?), there have since been no independent confirmation of such with the Yemeni rebel leader Abdel Malek al-Houthi putting out a strident disclaimer: “We have no intention of targeting sea cables providing internet to countries in the region”.
Suffice to say that Nigeria’s telecommunications industry regulator – the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC), had while reporting on the incident, spoken of a combination of cable cuts, resulting in equipment faults on the major undersea cables along the West African Coast.
It named the affected undersea cables as the West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT3, which it said had negatively impacted data and fixed telecom services in several countries of West Africa, notably Nigeria, Ghana,
Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire and far beyond to eastern and southern Africa, while equally hinting at the other incident in the Red Sea area – which it equally noted had resulted in degradation of services across the route.
No doubt, the impacts of the cuts have been devastating both in terms of the loss of revenue and also in terms of the degradation and the downtime experienced. From banks to internet service providers as indeed all the spectrum of the telecommunications value chain, the reports were of either outright inability to get transactions through or one of degradation of services. NetBlocks, the watchdog that monitors cybersecurity and the governance of the internet estimates that Nigeria may have lost over N273 billion in the four days between March 14 to March 17.
Of course, the indication is that remediation will take some time to be fully effected. MainOne, one of the companies affected, has since ruled out any quick fix while suggesting that repairs may take up to three weeks although NCC has since put up an updated statement suggesting that services have been restored ‘to approximately 90 per cent of their peak utilisation capacities’.
In all of these, it is heart-warming that Globacom’s Glo 1 International Submarine Cable was not only unaffected but maintained steady services while the chaos reigned.
Read Also: Undersea cable breaches: Operators restore voice, data services
Beyond the quantum material losses estimated in billions, the greatest lesson to take away from the unprecedented disruptions is the need for concerted global efforts to protect these assets by every means necessary. Related is the need for operators themselves to anticipate and develop robust multi-layered responses to such incidents whenever they occur.
Moreover, to the extent that the subsea cables constitute the principal force driving the internet in an increasingly borderless world, perhaps international protocols and conventions, not unlike those drawn to safeguard international trade routes, have become something of an imperative. After all, even if we accept that accidents such as the world experienced on March 14 are sometimes inevitable, what of the ever-present possibilities of anarchists and terrorists turning the assets into soft targets for nefarious objectives?
For us in Nigeria, while the international community needs to have a closer look at the rules governing the deployment of the subsea cables, the disruptions highlight the need for robust policy to minimise potential disruptions should they occur again. It bears stating that the damage occasioned by the cuts in the subsea cables is most regrettable; yet, it is on the whole still somewhat limited. Given that the country might not be as lucky next time around, the time to prepare is now.
