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Could you live without the Internet?
I would say no, a very big, big, big norm.
Well, when you don't have internet, you could actually fall into depression.
We can survive without it. Back to life whenever did the same again, difficult.
To imagine a life without it. And yet this year, several African countries have been affected by Internet outages, leaving people without access to the web, messaging services, or social media for hours and sometimes even days on end. The Internet has become such an important part of our life that these cuts not only affect the way we communicate,
but also the economy of many of our countries. I'm Jennifer Zabasaja and this is the Next Africa Podcast, bringing you one story each week from the continent driving the future of global growth, but the context only Bloomberg can provide. This week on the podcast, Bloomberg reporters Rama and Nyang in Nairobi and Loney, Prinzlou and Johannesburg are joining me to discuss why Africa from west to east has been
hit by these recurrent cuts. Later in the program, you'll hear from Loney about the solutions to improve internet access on the continent, but first let's head to Kenya and get a better understanding of the scale of the problem. So hi, Rama, thanks so much for joining us today and given the topic, I am glad you were able to connect. Has the connection been okay so far today?
So far so good. We're back up and running.
That's great. Let's cross our fingers. It sounds like things are better. Rama, you're in Nairob. We talk us through how these disruptions have affected your region.
So essentially what happened, in very basic terms, is that the region as a whole, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, they're all affected by internet cuts in the middle of May. And essentially what had happened is that two of the cables that bring a big chunk of the data traffic along that region had been affected. There was a cable break right off a small coastal town called Tinzuni of kaZulu Natal and this one little cable break had ripple effects
thousands and thousands of kilometers away. In some instances, the usmbssine Tanzania to actually stop operating for a couple of days. Here in Kenya, you could instantly realize, oh wait, hang on a minute, something is really not right here because your browsing speed just went all the way down. How you try to do your mobile banking services and you'd be like, hang on, why am I watching this in three sixty P or two forty P rather than the
HD or the four K that I'm used to. But thankfully now a couple of weeks later, the cable break has been fixed.
We have to put this into perspective too for people. You said, the cable break happened in Quasi lu Natal, which is here in South Africa where I am, and as you mentioned, had an effect all the way where you are. How significant was this damage? Have they figured out what exactly happened and why it happened.
Not in much detail, not yet. Usually it's two causes that you tend to have when some of these cables eventually do break. I'm going to take you back a little bit towards around the middle of March. The cable breaks that we had on the western side of the continent, big chunk of that was essentially due to seytemic activity on the ocean floor. So you've got you know, the ocean floor goes around, rocks fall on these cables, break them off. Then you've got some people out to fix them.
In other instances, it's usually you know active map, right, So troller comes in in a location where they're not supposed to be. Either they drop the anchor incorrectly or they essentially have these massive trolling nets to come in
and they cause damage. If you look at the Red Sea, there's at least ten different cables that are running in there, and you've got a lot of maritime traffic moving up and now now combine that with what's happening with the who the's attacks on vessels in that area, and he just complicates a mass even further. So usually it's one of those two things. A man acts of God acts.
Of God, which you know, when we're talking about solutions, is a bit hard to prevent the next time, right, I mean, what are some of the repairs that have gone into these undersea cables right now?
So they sent out a vessel, one of these fairly specialized vessels up from the coast of South Africa. He's thankfully the voiding that instance was relatively short. So they go into that location figure out whether the break is depending on the equipment that they have, or rather the sort of damage that has been done than obviously they've got a lay new cable and then connect that into the original cable and repay it in the sections where
the break had taken place. In some instances, part of the problem is that the number of vessels available to actually do this sort of work is pretty limited. There's a handful of them, most of them based in South Africa. So the journey to s you get from point A, you know, you get a vessel out of South Africa. Say, for example, it does move up to the eastern coastline around Mombasa, or it has to go all away west into around Abijean. That's a voyage that will take some time.
Get there, do the survey, figure out where the cable break is, what sort of repairs and needed do we need extra cabling? So in some cases it can take weeks and millions of dollars just to fix a cable break.
I wonder how you think this sort of speaks to the vulnerabilities of internet access across the continent, because we talk so much about how expanding internet access is important for development, but clearly there are some vulnerabilities that need to be addressed.
Yeah they are, and you know, to put this into context, at least Kenya was somewhat fortunate in the sense that at least in this part of the world, we've got at least six different fib op to cables that are terminating in the country, so we don't have the same sort of concentration risk that some other economies would have,
which unfortunately is what happened back in Mane. For some countries out in West Africa that have only one cable connecting them to the wider Internet, is an argument to be made for expanding investments in having mophi bop to
cables coming into the continent. Arguably yes, and we are seeing some entities already doing that, But by and large, it also comes back down to whether or not governments actually see this as a tool that they need to invest in as a public utility, or if that's something that they contentually slet the private sector take the lead on.
Thanks so much, Rama, After the break, Lonely, Prinzlu and Johannesburg will be joining us to discuss the economic impact of these Internet disruptions and the solutions possible for the future. Welcome back. Before the break, Rama and Young was explaining what happened in East Africa, but there are other regions on the continent that have also been affected by similar internet cuts. Lonely Princely is with us, Lonely, thanks so much for joining us. So how do you explain this.
There's very limited cables coming to the continent. In our sort of context in Africa, we had three four cables in March break cutting off most of the waste Africa and it's quite difficult to then reroot it because there aren't many cables to reroot this. So the disruption is quite significant, but it still took us to almost n May so a few weeks ago for those cables to be repaired.
Of course, there was my internet clients calling assess their information on their investment.
So it affects your credibility.
Bunking is technology driven and technology is based mostly on the availability of the internet they get. So Internet outage means that there is very little the bands can't do.
So one, you don't have access to your clients that impertinent.
On poond right, so you lose lots of money, lots of money, especially when it's happening for.
Like twenty to forty eight hours.
It becomes so frustrated. You can loose one.
Hundreds and millions of said this all dollars.
Yeah, and onnly we just heard there from business owners in Ghana specifically. Are we able to quantify the impact that these disruptions are having on businesses and maybe the economy?
Sure? So the instruments is that the internet industry to Africa, it's about one hundred and fifty two and twenty billion dollars to the overall GDP every year. So when the internet cuts daily, you are millions of dollars sort of being cut out of that GDP number. There's an old estimate that SAIDs with the banking sector, each hour you lose about two million dollars if the internet is cut, So that's each hour, and it's quite an old estimate, so you can see that sort of racks up. The
overall impact on the economy is quite significant. And it also takes longer to get the undersea cables repaired compared to other regions because it is quite secluded and there's not a lot of ships servicing the continent.
And loni in Europe or America and other developed parts of the world, we don't hear about internet cuts of this scale, maybe for a few minutes, but even that is pretty seldom heard. What's the difference here and why are African countries so vulnerable when it comes to access to the internet.
When it comes to undersea cables, there's about five hundred seventy four so active under sea cables and only nine of those are active in Africa to try and connect Africa with data to Europe, data to Asia, data to the years. So you can just imagine every cut that we have is very significant in terms of the problem
that arises. It's just really the limited amount of infrastructure that we have that's connecting Africa, which is the largest continent, the fastest growing continent in the world, but we still have the most limited infrastructure when it comes to the Internet, and we're the least connected.
So then lonely, what's the long term solution here? Are we going to continue to see more private investment or will we potentially see more government stepping in and putting some of the public finances towards improving the infrastructure.
So you have your big empty ends, you have CCOM that's also an African company investing in these cables, Talcom, but you are competing with the rest of the world when it comes to a Google or whoever, even content providers that or social media providers like a Facebook wanting to bring the cables to Africa. Mostly we have lower income users or customers, and we have fewer companies on the continent, so the economics don't always make sense for
them to come here, but they still do come. The reason for that mainly is because of sort of geopolitical reasons. Wanting to have influence in the fastest growing sort of population, as we said, in the world, and you know in time you need that footprint, whether it's from the US or Asia. We saw Google most recently a week or two ago and they said they are laying another cable to connect Africa to Australia. Governments really do need to
sort of push for this as well. We've seen a reason which was interesting for me Kenyan government.
For the first time in more than sixteen years, and African leader is attending the White House for a state visit.
The cherry on top of the cake is President William Ruter's visit to the White House, and from his joint press conference with President Joe Biden, you could get a sense that the US has committed to partnering and working with Kenya, particularly in expanding its digital ecosystem. President William Rutter raiter rated.
That commitment, saying that the country will expanding their investment in things like digital technology to expand access to all kenyons and tap into that digital economy.
There was also a big promise of a one gigawe data center, which is you know, almost unfancible for the region. So governments do need to be active and also invest from the east side, but just be active to you know, approach these sort of more tack giants in the US in Asia and see what sort of relationships can be built and what can be sort of agreed upon to try and connect our continent. The toaster.
Thanks so much to Rama and Loni for joining us today on the podcast, as they were mentioning we have seen internet penetration across the continent improve dramatically over the past few years, but there is still much more investment that needs to come in order to expand the connectivity and to ensure that these disruptions don't completely set back economies and businesses as they have done in some parts of the continent. So still slightly a ways to go there.
This program was produced by Leone Uadrago with the help of tiwa Adebayo, Moses mozart Zaou and Echo Donto. The Next Africa podcast is available every week wherever you usually get your podcast. I'm Jennifer's Abasaga. Thank you so much, as always for listening.