The Nigerian Government has announced plans to engage with neighbouring countries, including Cote D’Ivoire and Ghana, to expedite the protection of undersea cables critical to internet communications and digital transactions.
The call for action comes after a disruption caused by a sub-sea cable cut in the Atlantic Ocean, leaving many telecommunications subscribers and bank users in a lurch since last Thursday.
The outage, affecting a vast expanse from Nigeria to Senegal, and even East African nations, has been linked to a severed cable managed by MainOne, a leading submarine cable company.
Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Bosun Tijani, took to social media to express the government’s stance.
“The recent submarine cable cuts present an opportunity to build antifragility into Nigeria’s digital economy,” Tijani stated in a post on Sunday. He praised the efforts of MainOne and various telecommunications companies for their swift response to mitigate the impact of the outage.
MainOne,an Equinix company with presence in Nigeria, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire has said the repair of the damaged cable could take up to two weeks, attributing the cause to a combination of human activities, such as fishing, and natural occurrences like seismic events.
“Our preliminary analysis would suggest some form of seismic activity on the seabed resulted in a break to the cable,” a representative from MainOne explained. The company expects to gather more conclusive data during the upcoming repair operation.
In the statement, Minister Tijani highlighted the necessity of revising international and regional laws to provide better safeguards for such critical infrastructure.
“I will be engaging regional and global bodies to accelerate efforts on this crucial agenda,” he noted.
