On April 13, 2026, MTN Sudan began doing what it has now done every spring for six years running: switching off mobile and fixed internet for the country's students. Acting on a directive from Sudan's Cabinet, operators suspended service daily — except Fridays — from 1:45pm to 5:15pm local time for the duration of the Sudanese Certificate secondary-school examinations, which ran through late April. Roughly 564,000 candidates sat exams across some 3,333 centres. This is the sixth consecutive year Sudan has blacked out connectivity for exam season, a streak that has made it the country with the most internet shutdown events in Africa since 2019, according to the Internet Society's Pulse tracker.
The case the government would make
It is worth stating the official rationale honestly, because it is not frivolous. Across the region — Iraq, Algeria, Syria, Jordan, and Sudan — education ministries argue that exam papers and answer keys leak onto Telegram, WhatsApp, and Facebook in real time, letting candidates in later sittings or different time zones cheat off images snapped in earlier ones. In a high-stakes system where a single national certificate gates university admission, the integrity of the exam is a genuine public good, and the fairness owed to honest students is real. A government that did nothing about industrial-scale leaking would be failing them too. Exam-related shutdowns have, on that logic, become the single most common stated reason for shutdowns tracked worldwide since 2023.
Why the remedy fails its own test
The problem is that the cure is both over-broad and, increasingly, ineffective. A three-and-a-half-hour national blackout does not surgically disable a leaked-paper channel; it disables everything. Hospitals lose telemedicine and e-prescriptions, businesses lose card payments, families lose contact, and — in a country still riven by civil war — humanitarian coordination and emergency communication go dark for millions who never sat an exam. The 2026 windows fell in the afternoon, the heart of the working day. This is the textbook definition of a disproportionate measure: it imposes broad, indiscriminate harm to address a narrow problem that better-targeted tools could reach.
And it no longer even works as designed. Cloudflare's network data showed Sudanese ISP traffic collapsing on cue inside each window — but SpaceX's Starlink traffic continued straight through. Starlink has gone from zero to roughly a quarter of Sudan's internet market in barely a year, becoming the country's second-largest provider by share. Anyone determined to leak or receive an exam paper now has an obvious, government-proof channel; the people left offline are overwhelmingly ordinary households on terrestrial mobile networks. The shutdown has become a tax on the poor and the law-abiding while the motivated route around it — the worst possible ratio for a measure justified on integrity grounds.
A continental pattern, not a Sudanese quirk
Sudan is the sharpest case, but it sits inside a worsening regional trend. The #KeepItOn coalition's 2025 annual report, Rising Repression Meets Global Resistance, documented at least 313 shutdowns across 52 countries — with 15 African countries shutting down access 36 times in 2025 alone. Tanzania led the continent with eight shutdowns, including a roughly five-day nationwide blackout around its late-October election that one cost estimate put at around $238 million. Ethiopia remains the cautionary extreme: the Institute for Security Studies counts roughly 30 shutdowns there since 2016, and the UN estimated its three-week July 2020 blackout cut off more than 100 million people, crippling humanitarian documentation in Tigray and Oromia.
The economics are damning regardless of the stated motive. Top10VPN's research put the global cost of government shutdowns in 2025 at $19.7 billion across roughly 120,000 hours of disruption. Sub-Saharan Africa absorbed well over a billion dollars of that — losses borne by exactly the small traders, gig workers, and fintech users that African governments otherwise court with digital-economy strategies. You cannot court mobile-money adoption and routinely switch off the network it runs on.
The better path is proportionality, and courts are pointing to it
None of this requires governments to abandon exam integrity. It requires them to pursue it proportionately: secure the paper-distribution chain, watermark and stagger question sets, prosecute the specific officials and channels that leak, and run exams on offline-secured local networks. These are harder than flipping a national kill switch — but they target the wrongdoers rather than the population.
The legal direction of travel favours that discipline. The ECOWAS Court of Justice has repeatedly held member-state shutdowns unlawful, finding Togo's 2017 blackout a violation of free expression, and Senegal's 2023 shutdown was likewise ruled illegal. The principle these rulings embody — that a blunt, blanket disconnection cannot be a proportionate response to a targeted problem — is precisely the one Sudan's annual ritual fails. The #NoExamShutdown campaign run by Access Now, SMEX, and the Internet Society is right that the burden should sit with the state to prove necessity and proportionality, not with citizens to prove they were harmed.
Sudan's sixth straight exam season offline is not evidence the tactic works. It is evidence of institutional habit outrunning both rights and results — a measure that no longer stops the leak it was built to stop, yet still goes dark on half a million students and everyone around them.