Cable cuts: African leaders tasked on infrastructure security

An intelligence and security expert, Kabiru Adamu and a former presidential aide, Reno Omokri, yesterday urged African leaders to develop strategies to secure critical infrastructure that can prevent the continent from attacks.

They were reacting to Thursday’s cuts to the undersea cable supplying broadband internet connectivity to Nigeria and countries in the West African sub-region.

Adamu, in a chat with Daily Trust on Sunday, said Africa’s security strategies would remain vulnerable as long as cables that are critical infrastructure remained vulnerable to attacks.

“If we are to meet the imperatives of our national security objectives, 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 are still experiencing,” he said.

Adamu also charged the African Union and the African Development Bank to map out strategies on how to mitigate the challenges.

“This brings me to the need for our national security managers to embrace the risk management paradigm. The process of national security strategy development in Nigeria was defective in achieving diversity and inclusion,” he said.

On his part, Omokri, a media aide to former President Goodluck Jonathan, in a statement, asked the federal government to promote the patronage of made-in-Nigeria products.

He said the outage would have portended security risk for

Nigeria if Globacom was also affected.

“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,” he said.