As global concerns rise over deliberate sabotage of submarine internet cables, Botswana’s digital lifeline to the world may be more fragile than it appears.
A new report by US cybersecurity firm Recorded Future warns that state-backed actors are increasingly targeting subsea cables infrastructure that carries 99% of the world’s international data traffic. With limited repair ships available and “plausible deniability” disguising sabotage as accidents, experts caution that outages will last longer, cost more, and paralyze economies.
For a landlocked country like Botswana, which depends on cables landing in South Africa and Namibia, the risks could be devastating. A prolonged disruption could cripple sectors critical to national stability:
A major disruption to submarine cables could have far-reaching consequences for Botswana, with banking systems facing delays in processing transactions and freezing ATMs, mobile money services like Orange Money and MyZaka grinding to a halt, fintech start-ups struggling to function, and e-commerce platforms unable to connect small businesses with customers while even government operations under the country’s digital transformation efforts would be severely affected.
BoFiNet, Botswana’s state-owned wholesale internet provider, insists it has measures in place. “BoFiNet as part of a consortium operating submarine cables continually engages with governments responsible for water rights where the cables transverse around cable security and overall maintenance issues,” said Keleabetswe Loeto, BoFiNet’s Public Relations, Marketing & Communications Manager. She added that the company sits on cable security committees to “assess these challenges and come up with the right mitigations”
On redundancy, Loeto pointed to routes across both the east and west coasts of Africa: “BoFiNet has direct capacity on cables on either side of the continent for redundancy purposes, on WACs and EASSy. Additional to that, BoFiNet has procured capacity on other cable systems through third-party operators”.
BoFiNet also stresses regional collaboration. “BoFiNet’s NOC directly works with the designate NOC for each Submarine cable system that BoFiNet has capacity for, for 24/7 monitoring”. But monitoring alone may not stop deliberate sabotage, particularly when hostile states use merchant vessels to drag anchors and disguise attacks as accidents.
Repair capacity remains another weak point. With only around 80 commercial cable repair ships worldwide, most already busy laying new systems, outages could take weeks to fix. BoFiNet acknowledges this but maintains it can reroute traffic. “Where there is impact on more than one cable system, BoFiNet uses its strategic partnerships with other Regional and International Operators to procure additional alternative routes on short-term bases”
Still, the question remains: would those alternative routes be enough to keep Botswana’s economy afloat during a large-scale outage? BoFiNet says yes, noting that its customers service providers are “all critical for the economy of the country”. But experts warn that satellites, often viewed as backups, carry less than 1% of international traffic a fraction of what would be lost if multiple cables went down.
The uncomfortable truth is that Botswana’s digital resilience rests on infrastructure beyond its borders cables running through shallow, vulnerable waters, in regions of heightened geopolitical tension. While BoFiNet insists it is prepared, the Recorded Future report suggests the world is sleepwalking into a crisis.
