The silent fragmentation: The internet is quietly breaking apart, and Africa must choose its side

By Paulette Watson MBE

The internet was built on the promise of borderless connection: an open system where information, talent, commerce, and innovation could move freely across borders. For Africa, that promise carried transformational potential. A connected continent could leapfrog industrial limitations and participate directly in the global digital economy.

But that promise is beginning to fracture.

Not through one dramatic rupture, but gradually, regulation by regulation, cable by cable, cloud region by cloud region. What we still call “the internet” is increasingly becoming multiple internets shaped by geopolitics, cybersecurity concerns, national sovereignty, and technological control.

The “Splinternet” is no longer theoretical. It is becoming the operating logic of global power.

For Africa, the greatest risk is not simply digital exclusion. It is digital dependence. In a fragmenting digital world, countries with the least infrastructure ownership and weakest governance leverage will pay the highest price in economic sovereignty, opportunity, and influence.

The infrastructure beneath the internet

The physical architecture of the internet is deeply political.

More than 600 active and planned submarine cables carry around 99 per cent of global internet traffic. These cables support finance, healthcare, education, government services, and commerce. Yet recent disruptions exposed how fragile this infrastructure remains.

In 2024, undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea and West Africa disrupted connectivity across Africa, Europe, and Asia, costing Nigeria alone an estimated $590 million in economic losses. When cables are cut, it is not just the internet that fails, it is banking systems, public services, businesses, and entire economies.

Africa’s connectivity still depends heavily on infrastructure routes that the continent does not control.

Ownership patterns are equally revealing. Tech giants such as Meta and Google are increasingly owning and managing global connectivity infrastructure through projects like 2Africa, Equiano, and Project Waterworth. At the same time, China’s Digital Silk Road continues to expand its influence through fibre-optic and telecommunications investments.

This is more than infrastructure development.

It is infrastructure geopolitics.

The splinternet is already here

Internet fragmentation is now visible across every layer of the digital economy.

China has developed a largely self-contained digital ecosystem spanning AI, cloud infrastructure, telecommunications, and payments. The European Union is pursuing regulatory sovereignty through GDPR, the AI Act, and the Digital Markets Act. The United States continues to dominate through hyperscale cloud infrastructure, semiconductors, and frontier AI research while restricting advanced semiconductor exports to geopolitical rivals.

These are not isolated technology policies. They are competing geopolitical strategies.

Africa now faces a defining strategic question: will it remain primarily a consumer within other nations’ digital ecosystems, or become an architect of its own sovereign digital future?

According to GSMA’s Mobile Economy Africa 2025 report, 416 million Africans now use mobile internet, yet nearly 75 per cent of the continent remains unconnected. Mobile technologies generated $220 billion for Africa’s economy in 2024, but that growth is built on infrastructure largely owned elsewhere.

Consumption is scaling faster than ownership.

That imbalance is not temporary. It is structural.

Together, these shifts reveal a deeper truth: the future of digital power will belong not simply to nations that consume technology, but to those that control the infrastructure, governance, compute power, and talent pipelines behind it.

Cybersecurity and digital vulnerability

The Splinternet is also creating a more dangerous cybersecurity environment.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025 highlights rising state-sponsored attacks, AI-powered cybercrime, and widening cybersecurity capability gaps between developed and emerging economies. Africa faces these risks while lacking sufficient technical talent, institutional capacity, and regulatory preparedness.

At the same time, authoritarian AI systems are increasingly being exported into African states. Facial recognition tools, predictive policing systems, and digital surveillance platforms have been deployed with limited oversight or public accountability.

This creates an AI ethics deficit embedded directly into governance structures, one that can weaken democratic accountability, erode public trust, and deepen long-term digital dependency.

The consequences are already reshaping five critical areas:

• AI Development: Restrictions on access to advanced semiconductors threaten Africa’s ability to build competitive AI ecosystems.
• Digital Trade: Fragmented regulations risk undermining the AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol and the vision of a unified African digital market.
• Information Sovereignty: Internet shutdowns, election-related restrictions, and platform moderation decisions increasingly shape political discourse.
• Education: AI learning systems are often built using data and languages that fail to reflect African realities.
• Financial Systems: Global payment systems are fragmenting while African fintech ecosystems remain dependent on external infrastructure.

Ghana’s digital ambition, and its contradiction

Ghana has positioned itself as one of West Africa’s most ambitious digital economies.

Its National AI Strategy 2025–2035, One Million Coders Programme, and Cabinet-approved $250 million AI computing centre signal serious intent to build sovereign digital capability.

President Mahama recently stated that Ghana must not simply consume foreign AI but build systems that understand local languages, cultures, and realities.

That ambition matters.

But Ghana also faces a regulatory contradiction.

The proposed NITA Bill 2025, which expands licensing and oversight powers over ICT professionals and technology businesses, has sparked national debate. Critics, including IMANI Africa, argue the Bill risks regulatory overreach and could suppress entrepreneurship at precisely the moment Ghana’s startup ecosystem is scaling.

This reflects a wider challenge across African digital economies: how to strengthen governance without restricting innovation.

Research consistently shows that high-growth digital ecosystems thrive when regulation is predictable, proportionate, and adaptive. Nigeria’s fintech success, Kenya’s mobile payments leadership, and Rwanda’s innovation strategy all benefited from relatively flexible early-stage regulation.

The issue is not whether to regulate.

It is whether regulation arrives before ecosystems are strong enough to absorb it.

Africa cannot simultaneously champion innovation while pricing young innovators, startups, and emerging builders out of meaningful participation in the digital economy.

What future-ready digital governance looks like

African digital ecosystems cannot remain unregulated. Cybersecurity threats, AI-powered fraud, digital identity abuse, and misinformation all require serious governance responses.

But governance and innovation should not be opposing forces.

Future-ready digital governance requires proportionate regulation, regulatory sandboxes, startup exemptions, participatory policymaking, and adaptive frameworks that evolve alongside technology.

Countries such as Singapore, Estonia, and Rwanda have demonstrated that strong governance and innovation growth can coexist.

The challenge for Africa is not simply building infrastructure.

To achieve this, African leaders should prioritise policies that retain economic value generated by AI, cloud infrastructure, digital trade, and emerging technologies within the continent. This includes incentivising local ownership, fostering homegrown tech talent, and negotiating equitable partnerships with foreign infrastructure providers.

Make digital systems accessible to all by encouraging open participation for young developers, researchers, startups, women entrepreneurs, and emerging innovators. Policymakers should support this with programs that lower barriers to entry and nurture diverse talent pipelines.

The human stakes of a fragmenting internet

The Splinternet is not just a technology problem.

It is also a human development problem.

When the internet fragments, those with the least infrastructure ownership bear the greatest cost. When AI systems are trained on incomplete data and deployed into contexts they do not understand, underrepresented communities experience the greatest harm.

This is why talent development initiatives matter.

Programmes such as #BeMeDigitalInclusion and STEM Academy Achievers recognise that talent pipelines are not simply educational interventions, they are economic infrastructure. The quality of leadership, values, and inclusion embedded in digital ecosystems will shape the future economies built on them.

Because Africa cannot build a sovereign AI future on imported imagination alone.

The nations that fail to secure digital sovereignty risk becoming perpetual consumers in an AI economy where value increasingly accrues to infrastructure owners.

Final thought

The Splinternet is fragmenting far more than technology. It is fragmenting economic opportunity, developmental possibility, and global influence.

Africa’s AI future cannot depend entirely on imported infrastructure, imported governance models, or imported innovation ecosystems. But neither can it be built through regulatory systems that unintentionally suppress entrepreneurship and participation.

The countries that succeed will be those capable of balancing sovereignty with openness, governance with innovation, and security with economic dynamism.

Africa already supplies the cobalt and lithium powering the world’s AI infrastructure. It contributes to shaping global algorithms.

It is time for Africa to also help shape the rules governing the systems that those resources make possible.

The future digital economy will reward nations capable of building secure, inclusive, innovation-friendly, and globally competitive systems.

That is not simply a technology challenge.

It is a leadership challenge, and one of the defining challenges of Africa’s digital generation.

In the AI era, digital sovereignty will increasingly define economic sovereignty. The future will not belong to nations that merely access AI, but to those capable of shaping the infrastructure, ethics, governance, and leadership behind it.

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