The series of submarine cable disruptions off West Africa in March 2024 may have exposed a critical vulnerability in a regional digital economy now worth up to $150 billion yearly, the West African Telecommunications Regulators Assembly (WATRA) warned at the International Submarine Cable Resilience Summit.

WATRA’s Executive Secretary, Aliyu Aboki, who disclosed this, submitted that capacity is not resilient.

Aboki, at the summit held in Porto, Portugal, said that despite multiple international systems serving the region—including WACS, ACE and MainOne, the March outage degraded connectivity for days, slowed banking systems, and disrupted cloud-reliant businesses across several countries.

Internet traffic in affected nations fell by more than 50 per cent in the immediate aftermath. Restoration took several days in some cases, highlighting both physical repair constraints and administrative bottlenecks.

For West Africa, a region with a combined GDP exceeding $800 billion, the economic stakes are direct. More than 95 per cent of global Internet traffic travels via submarine cables, and outages translate into lost transactions, reduced productivity, and weakened investor confidence.

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

he March 2024 event was not unprecedented in cause; most cable faults globally result from fishing, anchoring, or seabed movement, but its scale was different. Multiple cables serving the region were hit simultaneously, overwhelming existing redundancy.

Aboki noted a “structural mismatch” that amplified the damage: cable networks are regional in operation, but governance remains largely national. Permitting, emergency response, and cable protection regimes vary widely across jurisdictions, introducing delays in customs clearance, port access, and coordination that extend repair timelines.

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

Repair costs in the region are already steep. A single cable repair typically runs $1.5 million to N2 million, with vessel mobilisation from distant bases like Cape Town driving expenses. In complex, multi-cable failures, costs can reach $8 million. Limited availability of specialised repair vessels in Africa further slows restoration.

To address this, Aboki called for submarine cable resilience to be treated as a “regional public good,” supported by coordinated policy frameworks through WATRA’s 16 member states.

He said priorities should include streamlined landing and permitting processes; stronger, harmonised cable protection regimes; pre-agreed emergency protocols for repairs, and improved data sharing on outages and restoration timelines.

“These are not technical fixes,” Aboki said. He added: “They are regulatory interventions with economic consequences.”

He also urged investors and governments to embed resilience at the design stage of new projects—prioritising true route diversity and avoiding correlated risk.

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

The WATRA chief framed the issue in human terms: “A Lagos furniture seller on Instagram, a grocery distributor in Surulere using digital payments, banks processing millions of daily transactions—all depend on uninterrupted connectivity. Unlike mature markets with redundancies and buffers, much of West Africa’s digital economy operates in real time, with little margin for interruption.