On 20 April 2026, the South African maritime-law firm Dawson, Edwards & Associates published a detailed analysis of how the country protects its undersea telecom cables. The striking finding: there is no single dedicated cable-protection statute. Instead, protection is stitched together from at least five laws — the Marine Traffic Act's Section 8B safety zones, the Marine Living Resources Act's marine-protected-area powers, the National Environmental Management Act's duty of care, the Protected Areas Act, and the Electronic Communications Act 36 of 2005's critical-infrastructure designation. (Dawson, Edwards & Associates)
The instinct of many policymakers, faced with a list like that, is to consolidate — to draft one clean Submarine Cable Protection Act. That instinct deserves a fair hearing before it is set aside.
The honest case for one dedicated law
A single statute has real advantages. It creates one point of legal certainty for cable operators, repair-ship masters, and prosecutors, rather than forcing them to reconcile maritime-safety, fisheries, environmental, and communications regimes that were never designed to work together. New Zealand's Submarine Cables and Pipelines Protection Act is the standard reference: clear zones, clear offences, clear enforcement. The Carnegie Endowment's April 2025 report on Africa's undersea infrastructure makes a parallel governance argument — countries should harmonise their frameworks, designate a single incident-reporting contact, and formally recognise cables as critical infrastructure. (Carnegie Endowment) Where fragmentation produces genuine ambiguity about who can act and who pays, consolidation is the right answer.
Why South Africa's patchwork is not the problem
The analysis shows the existing tools are sharper than the "no dedicated law" framing suggests. Section 8B of the Marine Traffic Act already prohibits anchoring, dragging anchor, or bottom-trawling within 500 metres of a submarine cable, backed by administrative fines of up to R200,000 enforced by the South African Maritime Safety Authority. The Electronic Communications Act 36 of 2005 lets cables be designated critical infrastructure. Civil liability flows through ordinary delict and vicarious-liability doctrine, reaching vessel owners and not just skippers.
That is a functioning regime. The substantive prohibitions a dedicated statute would contain — exclusion zones, deterrent penalties, critical-infrastructure status, operator liability — already exist in South African law. Rewriting them into a single act risks years of legislative delay and inter-departmental turf contests for a marginal gain in tidiness. For a sector where the binding constraint is physical resilience, not legal drafting, that is a poor trade. Proportionate regulation means fixing what underperforms, not relitigating what works.
The real fault line: protected areas versus safety zones
The genuinely hard question the analysis surfaces is spatial overlap. Marine protected areas, created under the Marine Living Resources Act and Protected Areas Act, restrict human activity to conserve ecosystems. Cable safety zones restrict activity to protect infrastructure. On paper they are complementary — both keep vessels and gear away from sensitive seabed. In practice they can collide: an MPA's conservation rules may complicate the urgent seabed intervention a cable repair requires, and the two regimes answer to different departments with different priorities and timelines.
This matters because repair speed is everything. When the WACS, MainOne, SAT-3 and ACE cables failed off West Africa on 14 March 2024, 13 countries suffered degraded or near-total outages. (Cloudflare) Carnegie estimates that single event cost Nigeria over $590 million in four days. With roughly 99% of the world's data crossing subsea cables and 77 cable networks serving Africa, every day a repair ship waits on overlapping permissions is measurable economic damage.
The threat is mostly mundane — and that argues for the existing tools
It is tempting to frame cable risk as sabotage. The reality is more prosaic: most faults are accidental, caused by fishing gear and anchors. In the Red Sea in early 2024, four cables were severed in an incident widely attributed to a vessel's dragging anchor; Fortune noted plainly that "underwater cables are prone to damage from ships' anchors." (Fortune) Section 8B's anti-anchoring rule is aimed squarely at exactly this failure mode. The problem is not that South Africa lacks the rule — it is whether the rule is monitored and enforced across a vast exclusive economic zone.
What proportionate reform looks like
Three fixes, none requiring a new statute:
- Pre-clear repair access through MPAs. A standing memorandum between SAMSA, the environment department, and operators should grant expedited seabed-intervention permits for emergency cable repair inside protected areas, with environmental safeguards attached rather than a blanket bar. (Marine Traffic Act 1981)
- Fund monitoring, not paperwork. Section 8B fines deter nothing if violations go undetected. AIS-based anchoring alerts over cable corridors cost a fraction of a single outage.
- Designate every landing cable critical infrastructure under the Electronic Communications Act and publish a single incident-reporting contact, as Carnegie recommends.
South Africa already wrote the rules. The 2024 outages show the deficit is in detection, repair access, and coordination — operational gaps that a fresh act would not close. Better to make the patchwork run fast than to spend a parliamentary term making it look neat. (Marine Traffic Amendment Act 38 of 1993)