LUSAKA, ZAMBIA – Information and communication technology ministers from Eastern and Southern Africa have endorsed a new US$2 billion submarine cable project put together under the aegis of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD).
The cable will run around Africa’s west and east coasts, extending to India, the Middle East, the U.K. and the U.S., according to the NEPAD’s e-Africa Commission Deputy Chairman Henry Chassia.
The e-African commission in Johannesburg is part of the NEPAD and chartered by the African Union to build and develop the continent’s IT infrastructure.
“The ministers have all endorsed the rolling out of a new cable that would cost $2 billion as soon as possible. The cable will have landing point provisions in all coastal and island countries,” Ngabo Nankonde, a spokesman for the Communications Authority of Zambia, said.
Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, South Africa’s communications minister, said the 50,000-kilometer NEPAD cable would be 60 percent African-owned while 40 percent will be owned by foreign companies.
The new cable will have a capacity of 3.84T bps (bits per second), and is Africa’s most expensive, and longest, cable project.
IT officials, including ministers from Zambia, Uganda and South Africa, met in South Africa last week to discuss and endorse the project and the time frame for rolling out the cable. The cable plan calls for landing points in all coastal and island countries and will provide increased capacity to all destinations.
Although the ministers agreed that the cable should be operational by 2010, funding details of the project are still sketchy. It is not clear whether African governments will allow companies funding the East Africa Submarine Cables System (EASSY) project to also fund the NEPAD cable project.
The EASSY project is supposed to be operational by 2009. It will connect 21 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa including Zimbabwe, Namibia, Malawi and Botswana. Up to now, the venture was Africa’s largest undersea cable project.
According to the Matsepe-Casaburri, the main difference between the cable projects is that the NEPAD cable would be mainly owned by African investors, unlike the EASSY project, which is about 70 percent owned by foreign companies.
Matsepe-Casaburri said African governments clearly had to lead their own undersea cable initiative as private telecom operators are mainly concerned about profit, and are less interested about the developmental benefits of providing cheap voice and data services. The 60 percent ownership by the African governments will make it easy for them to control the pricing of bandwidth, he said.
