Why Nigeria’s Digital Infrastructure Must Move Beyond Capacity to Resilience

Nigeria is rapidly expanding the infrastructure that keeps its digital economy running. But as connectivity becomes more deeply embedded in banking, payments, commerce, healthcare, government and business operations, another question is becoming harder to ignore: how much of the system can keep working when a critical part of it fails?

That is the difference between capacity and resilience.

A country can have more fibre, additional submarine cables, larger data centres and greater international bandwidth and still have a fragile digital system if those assets depend on the same routes, locations or supporting infrastructure.

The March 2024 disruption to West Africa’s submarine cable network demonstrated the risk.

Four major cables —ACE, SAT-3, WACS and MainOne— were damaged, affecting connectivity across several countries, including Nigeria. The Internet Society found that the cables converged around the same physical area off Côte d’Ivoire, exposing what appeared to be multiple routes as a common point of failure.

The episode offered a lesson that is increasingly relevant to Nigeria’s infrastructure planning: redundancy on paper does not necessarily mean resilience in practice.

The same concern exists on land.

The NCC reported more than 5,000 fibre-cut incidents during the first six months of 2026, with road construction, excavation and related civil works among the major causes.

The Commission has subsequently worked with the Federal Ministry of Works on measures to reduce damage to fibre infrastructure during road projects.

Every such incident exposes a dependency in the digital economy.

When fibre is cut, the immediate effect may be a degraded or unavailable telecommunications service. But the wider consequences can reach businesses unable to process transactions, customers unable to make payments, hospitals unable to maintain communications, government platforms affected by connectivity loss and workers unable to perform digital tasks.

This wider dependence is reflected in the NCC’s classification of telecommunications networks, fibre-optic cables, data centres, towers and Internet exchange points as Critical National Information Infrastructure.

It means the resilience of telecommunications infrastructure is increasingly a question of economic resilience.

The challenge, therefore, is not simply to build more infrastructure but to ensure that critical infrastructure does not share too many points of vulnerability.

Different submarine cables should be supported by sufficiently diverse landing and inland routes.

Fibre networks should not unnecessarily converge along the same road corridors. Critical facilities need alternative connectivity and power arrangements. Networks need sufficient spare capacity to absorb traffic when another route goes down.

Geographic diversity matters just as much as the number of assets.

A system with several networks can still experience widespread disruption if those networks depend on the same corridor, landing facility, metropolitan infrastructure or other common component.

This is where the next phase of Nigeria’s fibre expansion becomes important.

Project BRIDGE, which is intended to substantially expand the national fibre backbone and improve route diversity, provides an opportunity to make resilience part of infrastructure planning from the outset.

The measure of success should therefore go beyond the kilometres of fibre deployed.

It should include how many genuinely independent routes connect critical locations and how much traffic can continue to move when one route is lost.

The international network requires the same approach.

Additional submarine cables can increase capacity, but their real resilience depends on where they land, how traffic moves inland and whether alternative systems have enough capacity to carry traffic during a major outage.

There is also a less obvious dimension to resilience: the regulatory environment.

The Nigerian Communications Act gives the NCC emergency powers under Section 148 in specified circumstances involving a public emergency or public safety. These powers include measures such as suspending a licence, taking temporary control of network facilities and withdrawing the use of services or facilities from a licensee, person or the general public.

Such powers serve legitimate public-safety and national-interest purposes.

But in an economy increasingly dependent on uninterrupted connectivity, any intervention affecting communications infrastructure can have consequences beyond its immediate purpose.

That is why regulatory safeguards should form part of the resilience conversation.

The question is not whether government should have emergency powers. It is whether continuity of essential services is sufficiently considered when those powers are exercised.

Section 149 of the same Act already recognises the importance of survivability and recovery, providing for disaster plans covering telecommunications services and network facilities during disasters, crises and civil emergencies.

That principle points to a broader policy objective: continuity should matter as much as restoration.

A bank may eventually restore its connection. A hospital may eventually recover communications. A government platform may eventually come back online.

But for critical services, the more important question is what happens in the period before restoration.

Can payments continue? Can emergency communications remain available? Can hospitals maintain essential connectivity? Can businesses switch to alternative routes? Can networks absorb the traffic displaced by a failed system?

Those are resilience questions.

They also show why the issue cannot be reduced to fibre vandalism or telecom operator performance.

The sources of disruption are diverse. A submarine cable can fail. A road project can sever fibre. Equipment can malfunction. Power can be lost. Vandalism can interrupt a route. A cyber incident can affect systems. And an emergency intervention can restrict access to communications.

The response should therefore be equally layered.

Physical diversity requires different cables, ducts and corridors.

Technical diversity requires alternative networks, power arrangements, data centres and failover systems.

Geographic diversity reduces dependence on the same locations.

Service continuity protects critical economic and public functions.

Regulatory safeguards help ensure that emergency measures recognise their potential wider effects on connectivity.

The NCC’s major-outage reporting requirements provide a basis for understanding where network weaknesses repeatedly occur.

The next step is to use that information not only to repair individual failures, but to identify the common dependencies linking apparently separate networks.

That is increasingly important as digital infrastructure becomes more valuable to the wider economy.

Nigeria cannot eliminate every disruption. Infrastructure will fail, fibre will be cut and emergencies will occur.

The objective is to ensure that the failure of one route does not become the failure of the system.

For an economy increasingly dependent on digital payments, online commerce, communications and government services, connectivity has moved beyond being simply a telecommunications service.

It is economic infrastructure.

The next phase of Nigeria’s digital infrastructure development must therefore ask a bigger question than how much more capacity the country can build.

It must ask how much of the economy can keep moving when part of that infrastructure stops working.