Reno Omokri, a former aide to the president, and security specialist Dr. Kabir Adamu are urging African leaders to prioritize the development of comprehensive security strategies aimed at safeguarding crucial infrastructure, following the sabotage of the Red Sea cable that caused internet outages in Nigeria and other African countries.
Service disruptions rippled across Nigeria and several African countries, including Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, and Liberia, as well as select areas in South Africa, following multiple substantial submarine cable cuts in the Red Sea on Thursday.
The resultant damage led to internet service disruptions in the affected countries, affecting a wide range of entities including banks, Payment Service Banks (PSBs), educational institutions, organizations, and agent banking outlets.
Highlighting the need for the Federal Government to endorse Nigerian-made products, Omokri, a media aide to former President Goodluck Jonathan, underscored that only Globacom, a Nigerian-owned telecom giant, remained unaffected by the attack due to its substantial investments.
He suggested that other providers were vulnerable because their infrastructure lacked customization for Nigeria.
“Globacom was the first African telecom company to build an intercontinental submarine cable, the Glo 1 cable, which ran from Bude, a seaside rural town in north Cornwall, England, and traversed seventeen countries, including Ghana, before terminating in Nigeria.
By going from Europe to the West Coast of Africa, it avoids the more turbulent but cheaper to maintain MENA region (Middle-East and North Africa),” he said.
While noting that the outage would have portend security risk for Nigeria if Globacom was also affected, the former presidential aide called on the government and Nigerians to patronize products and services that protect the country.
“And imagine that we were fighting a real war. Can we rely on undersea cables that could be turned off from South Africa and India? What happened in Niger after their quarrel with France? France turned off their satellite communications. This has been the rationale behind my #GrowNairaBuyNaija campaign.”
Read also: Fresh Red Sea Attacks Triggers Surge In Oil Prices
Adamu, the founder of Beacon Consulting Limited, a renowned firm providing enterprise risk and security management solutions, on his part, said that Africa security strategies will remain vulnerable for as long as cables which are critical infrastructure remain vulnerable to attacks.
The expert called on the FG and other African leaders to develop strategies to protect critical infrastructure or put in place contingency measures to prevent outages during attacks.
“African national and continental security strategies will remain vulnerable for as long as the cables which are critical infrastructure in all ramifications remain vulnerable to these attacks.”
“If we are to meet the imperatives of our national security objectives then we have to ensure that the cables are better protected or in the minimum there are contingency measures to prevent outages like the ones we witnessed recently and that we are still experiencing,” he said.
Adamu called on the African Union and the African Development Bank to map out strategies on how to mitigate the challenges and ensure the continent is not vulnerable to similar attacks in the future.
He stated that there is a need for national security managers to embrace the risk management paradigm. He pointed out that the process of national security strategy development (NSSD) in Nigeria had been defective in achieving diversity and inclusion, leading to the oversight of critical elements.
He emphasized that the current National Security Strategy requires a review, and he strongly recommended that inclusion and diversity, including members of the National Assembly, be considered essential in forming the team to carry out the initial work.