When Meta unveiled Project Waterworth in February 2025 — a 50,000-kilometre subsea system linking the United States, India, South Africa, and Brazil — it did more than add another line to the global submarine cable map. It re-cast South Africa as a central node on a new transcontinental route, and pulled African policymakers into a debate they have largely been catching up on: how to govern the physical layer of the internet without smothering the investment that is finally arriving.
The timing is not accidental. In March 2024, four major cables serving West Africa — MainOne, WACS, SAT-3, and ACE — were severed in close succession off the coast of Côte d'Ivoire, knocking out connectivity in Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, and other states for days. Months earlier, in the Red Sea, cuts to Seacom, EIG, AAE-1, and TGN-EA disrupted East African traffic for weeks, with full repairs delayed by the security situation around Yemen. The lesson was uncomfortable but clear: the cables Africa depends on are concentrated on a handful of corridors, repair ships are scarce, and a single bad week at sea can isolate entire economies.
Why Waterworth matters
Project Waterworth, by Meta's own description, is designed with deeper burial, route diversity, and higher fibre-pair counts than legacy systems. For African networks, three things stand out.
- A new long-haul axis. Linking South Africa directly to Brazil and to the US East Coast reduces dependence on the heavily-loaded Mediterranean and Red Sea corridors that have repeatedly failed.
- South Africa as a hub, not a terminus. Combined with the Meta-anchored 2Africa cable (which is landing across more than 30 countries as it comes online), Waterworth strengthens Johannesburg and Cape Town as interconnection points for the Southern Hemisphere.
- Hyperscaler-led capex. Like Google's Equiano and Umoja systems, Waterworth is privately funded by a content provider rather than a traditional telco consortium — a model that has accelerated African capacity faster than any public programme.
The regulatory question Africa now faces
The instinct after the 2024 cuts has been to reach for critical-infrastructure designations, mandatory landing-station diversity, and in some quarters, local-ownership rules for cable assets. South Africa's regulator ICASA, Nigeria's NCC, and Kenya's CA have all signalled tighter oversight; the African Union's Data Policy Framework (2022) and the Smart Africa initiative have likewise placed resilience on the continental agenda.
Some of this is overdue and welcome. Designating cable landing stations as critical infrastructure — with clear physical-security standards, faster repair-vessel clearances, and protected anchoring zones — is a proportionate response to a real vulnerability. So is harmonising permits across coastal states so that a single cable does not face 15 different licensing regimes.
But other instincts risk backfiring. Mandating that cables land in a minimum number of cities, or imposing equity caps on foreign operators, would raise the cost of building in Africa precisely as hyperscaler capex is flowing in. Investors choose routes on engineering and demand, not political quotas. Heavy-handed rules in one jurisdiction simply push the next cable to land somewhere else — as Egypt has discovered with cables now actively engineering around its transit chokepoint.
A proportionate playbook
A pro-innovation, evidence-based response would focus on the bottlenecks that actually slow recovery and deter investment:
- Repair-ship access. The Atlantic and Indian Ocean basins are served by a handful of cable ships. Streamlined clearances for repair vessels — modelled on the International Cable Protection Committee's Recommendation 11 — would shorten outages dramatically.
- Anchoring and fishing protections. Most cable faults are caused by anchors and trawlers, not sabotage. Enforced no-anchor zones with AIS-based monitoring are cheaper than any new cable.
- Open-access landing stations. Requiring non-discriminatory access to landing-station infrastructure (as South Africa effectively does) keeps wholesale prices down without dictating who builds.
- Cross-border IXP build-out. The more African traffic that stays on the continent — via Internet Exchange Points in Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Kigali — the less a single cable cut hurts.
The bigger picture
Africa's bandwidth has grown more in the last five years than in the previous twenty, and prices per megabit have fallen sharply. That is the direct result of private investment by Meta, Google, and a new generation of regional carriers, layered on top of older consortium cables. Project Waterworth deepens that trend and gives the continent a long-overdue southern crossing.
The right regulatory response is not to slow this down with critical-infrastructure rules drafted for a different era of telecom monopolies. It is to focus narrowly on the genuine failure modes the 2024 cuts exposed — repair latency, landing-station security, and corridor concentration — and otherwise let the capital keep arriving. The continent's digital economy depends on a physical layer that is both more resilient and more invested-in. Those goals are complementary, not in tension, if regulators choose the proportionate path.