Redundancy Is the New Sovereignty

Digital sovereignty in Africa is currently a hostage to physical vulnerability. When a single cable fails, entire economies—from fintech to enterprise operations—slow down, proving that connectivity is only as strong as its most fragile link.

A new subsea cable project, Via Africa, is moving to address this structural weakness. Backed by Orange, the project will span more than 20,000 kilometres across the Atlantic, linking Nigeria and nearly 20 other countries in Africa and Europe. While Meta’s 2Africa remains the world’s longest submarine cable at 45,000 kilometres, the Via Africa project introduces a critical layer of diversification.

The necessity for this project is driven by the reality of infrastructure fragility. As Michaël Trabbia, CEO of Orange Wholesale, noted, cable cuts or failures occur somewhere in the world every two days. For a nation like Nigeria, which hosts eight submarine cables—the highest in West Africa—the issue is not a lack of connection, but the lack of resilient routing. Persistent fibre cuts, vandalism, and network congestion continue to threaten the stability of one of Africa's largest internet and data markets.

The strategic logic here is simple: redundancy. Trabbia argues that the goal is to introduce new and more diverse routes to avoid single points of failure. This is particularly urgent given that the bulk of the continent’s international bandwidth remains concentrated in a handful of markets. As of 2025, while Africa has 77 active or planned subsea cable systems, more than half of the continent's international bandwidth flows through just five countries: Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Algeria, and Kenya.

This concentration creates a systemic risk. When multiple cable faults occur along the West African coast, the disruption ripples through banking platforms and fintech services across several countries. The Via Africa project seeks to break this pattern by providing alternative pathways.

Furthermore, the project addresses the inevitable decay of legacy infrastructure. With a cable lifetime of around 20 to 25 years, older systems become less efficient over time. Beyond 10 years old, cables become much more minor contributors to the network. By deploying newer systems that can carry significantly more traffic, the consortium is preparing for a future of surging data traffic.

As the project remains open to additional partners and the final landing points and participating countries are expected to evolve, the focus remains on building a more distributed and resilient digital architecture.

The question for the continent's tech leaders is no longer how much bandwidth we can acquire, but how many independent routes we can secure to ensure that a single failure does not become a continental outage.