The shutdowns of Chapter 1 have an underlying logic that reaches beyond the local. Information control is also a business and a means of projecting influence, and the African digital economy and internet topology are being shaped (and in places torn apart) by foreign investors whose interests do not always align with those of African civil society. The question to ask of any given investment is who sets the rules, who holds the data, and who can switch the system off. This chapter examines two cases through which those questions come into focus: Russian influence, and the competition of Chinese and American capital across the Gulf of Guinea.
Setting the scene: the splinternet and African elections
Mable Amuron, a research lead at Thraets working on AI, disinformation, and digital information ecosystems, opened the panel by establishing the stakes. Africa is digitizing fast: by her figures some 38 percent of Africans use the internet, 89 percent of them solely via mobile phones, with a sharp urban-rural divide. There are roughly 646 million users today, projected to reach 1.1 billion by 2029. The architecture chosen now, she argued, will determine the architecture of the continent’s democracy, and digital sovereignty is a double-edged sword. Data localization, digital ID, and independent internet exchange points can protect citizens and lower costs; the same infrastructure can enable mass surveillance, opposition tracking, and shutdowns that become trivially easy once national choke points are controlled.
She traced how this plays out around elections, the moment when connectivity control becomes a political instrument. Uganda’s trajectory ran from blocking social media in 2016, to a full shutdown in 2021, to a shutdown that also severed mobile money in 2026. Tanzania saw a nationwide outage on election day under cover of which, by her account, large numbers were killed and thousands of opposition supporters arrested. Nigeria in 2023 offered a subtler failure: a promised real-time results-transparency system went offline for hours on election night, with a substantial share of polling-unit results missing from the portal at the close, while fake result sheets circulated on WhatsApp — a platform that is, as she noted, opaque to fact-checkers and poorly served by content moderation in African languages such as Amharic, Xhosa, and Tigrinya. Her recommendations ranged from human-rights benchmarking of sovereignty policies to AU- and ECOWAS-level frameworks prohibiting election-period shutdowns, and open-source monitoring of internet-exchange-point ownership.
Negotiating sovereignty: Chinese and American infrastructure in the Gulf of Guinea
Charlotte Escorne, a doctoral researcher at the French Institute of Geopolitics (Paris 8) studying the rollout of 5G in West Africa, used maps from her fieldwork to dismantle a common misconception: that African digital infrastructure is simply either Chinese or American. The reality, she showed, is more tangled. The mobile-equipment market is shared among five major vendors (Ericsson and Nokia (European), ZTE and Huawei (Chinese), and Samsung (Korean)) while submarine cables are typically built and run by consortia of telecom operators, alongside some American and Chinese players. African operators source equipment from all of these at once.
Two dynamics, she argued, are changing the sector. Under China’s Digital Silk Road, Huawei and other Chinese actors increasingly offer turnkey “Smart [country]” projects — Smart Senegal and similar programs in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa — combining fiber with digital services for education, health, and urban management, but also, potentially, expanded population monitoring of the kind associated with “safe city” systems. Separately, major content providers such as Google and Meta are now investing directly in physical infrastructure. The central question becomes what these players mean for internet access and digital sovereignty.
Her case study was a March 2024 submarine earthquake off Côte d’Ivoire that damaged four of five cables on that route and disrupted connectivity across eighteen African countries, a vivid illustration of the lack of resilience in network infrastructure. She made two analytical points. First, dependence is shaped by the economic interests of whoever deploys and operates the networks, not a simple US–China divide. Second, new partnerships and technologies offer real opportunities to strengthen African agency, but with limits. Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire function as regional hubs not merely because they reach submarine cables (so do Ghana and Nigeria) but because they have dense terrestrial networks and cross-border interconnections, a configuration owed in large part to Orange’s strategy of interconnecting the markets it serves.
Chinese involvement in the region’s submarine cables, she showed, is in fact relatively limited: a single Chinese-built cable runs from Dakar to Cabo Verde, and even that belongs to and is used by the Senegalese government. Zoom out to the continental scale, however, and the picture shifts: Huawei has deployed a significant volume of terrestrial infrastructure across Africa, closely aligned with the Digital Silk Road’s diplomatic and economic engagement. Newer entrants such as Starlink complicate matters further, offering connectivity that can bypass local regulation: an advantage for users, but also a source of unequal competition for local operators and, in places such as Mali, a potential security concern. Her conclusion echoed the panel’s refrain: digital sovereignty in Africa cannot be reduced to a binary contest between Washington and Beijing. It emerges from a complex interplay of global corporations, regional operators, and state actors, and governments are not passive, increasingly using infrastructure itself as a tool of control, as Senegal’s own shutdowns during the protests of 2020 and 2024 attest. The challenge is not who builds the network, but who controls it and under what conditions.
Exporting the sovereign internet: the Russian model
Alena Epifanova, a research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, presented early findings from a research project on Russia’s export of its sovereign-internet model to African countries through platforms, infrastructure, contracts, and the strategic use of sovereignty rhetoric. She began with the model itself. Since 2019, Russia has built out a system of control grounded in its sovereign-internet law and in TSPU — deep-packet-inspection boxes installed directly in ISP networks that let the state filter, throttle, or block content at will. Alongside filtering sits SORM, a legal backdoor built into telecom networks granting the security services near-total access to transmitted information without the knowledge of users or providers. A third layer, platform substitution, compels companies handling Russian citizens’ data to store it on Russian soil and surrender it on demand — a requirement domestic firms such as Yandex and VK comply with. The trajectory, she summarized, runs from blacklists in 2012 to network-level filtering in 2019 to the rollout of whitelists that leave only state-approved content reachable: surveillance and censorship by default.
This is the model Russia is now marketing abroad, and Africa figures prominently in its agenda. Epifanova traced three channels. The first is commercial platforms, exemplified by Yango — spun out of Yandex in 2024 and nominally headquartered in Dubai — which operates in more than a dozen African countries and is the ride-hailing market leader in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Zambia, while also offering food delivery, logistics, lending, and fintech. The concern is data: investigative reporting has found no physical or logical separation between Yandex’s domestic and international databases, meaning Yango trip origins, destinations, financial data, and communications flow into servers in Russia, where a 2023 law grants the FSB round-the-clock access. The Norwegian data-protection authority concluded that Russian authorities could potentially monitor Yango customers’ movements; the Netherlands opened an investigation. No comparable regulatory scrutiny, she noted, has come from an African authority.
The second channel is surveillance infrastructure. The company Protei supplies SORM-compatible systems and deep-packet-inspection technology to telecom operators across several regions, including documented African deployments — a state operator in the Comoros installing DPI that appears to replicate Russia’s surveillance architecture inside a national telecom, with projects reported in Nigeria and customers listed in Kenya and Tunisia. Protei’s market-entry strategy, she observed, is to enter first as a traffic-management solution and then expand the product suite from within. The third channel is public diplomacy and education: a Higher School of Economics e-governance program running since 2021 and aimed explicitly at Africa, and a declaration on international information security adopted at the second Russia–Africa summit that calls for jointly opposing neocolonialism while affirming each state’s sovereign right to regulate its national segment of the network. In practice, she argued, that framing invites African partners to adopt a governance model that carries surveillance and censorship as standard features.
Toward digital sovereignty as autonomy
The thread running through both cases is that “digital sovereignty” is a contested word. As Daouda Diagne had argued in the previous session, in Senegal it is often deployed as a populist slogan, and it can mean either independence from foreign technology or simply the government’s own ability to splinter the network. The panelists’ shared conclusion pointed toward a more constructive reading: sovereignty understood as autonomy — the capacity of African states and communities to build and govern their own infrastructure in the interests of their citizens, rather than either depending on foreign systems they cannot control or asserting a sovereignty that mainly empowers the state to disconnect its own people. That reframing (from sovereignty-as-isolation to sovereignty-as-self-determination) does not resolve the tension so much as relocate it: to the harder question of how communities build the infrastructure they need when the economics, the routing paths, and the regulatory frameworks all conspire against them.