By Sallieu S. Kanu
Minister of Communications Technology and Innovation, Salima Bah
Minister of Communications Technology and Innovation, Salima Bah has laid out clear plans on how Sierra Leone will deal with recent internet outages. The plans include a long term and short term approach, underscoring the importance of internet to everyone in the country.
At the weekly government press briefing, Minister Bah said her urgency stems from the President’s passion to make sure everybody gets access to internet in the country.
“The President considers internet and mobile service as a basic human right, so we all take it very seriously,” Madam Bah said.
Moderator of the Press conference and Minister of Information, Chernor Bah also re-emphasized the same point. “Internet is part of our daily existence; it is our bread and butter. If internet shutdown, everybody will know because of how much we rely on it,” the Minister of Information said.
Sierra Leone has faced some internet outages at a national scale and international scale, Madam Bah said significant investment in the current internet infrastructure over the years meant that Sierra Leone was in prime position to deal with the problem swiftly.
“Significant investment has gone into the infrastructure both by government and the private sector,” she said, adding that “Liberia was out for a week, whiles Sierra Leone was only offline for 45 minutes.”
Madam Bah said government’s goal is to make sure this doesn’t happen. As a solution, Minister Bah has already met with her Guinean counterparts to find a mutual solution, which will be an “Emergency Bandwidth”.
“Over the weekend I led a delegation of sector players to Guinea. we want to create an interconnection with them so if we are down we can get some bandwidth from them and the same goes vice versa when Guinea is down,” she said.
Madam Bah also justified why Guinea is a smart option for a plan like this. “Why Guinea is important is because Guinea is one of our neighboring countries and this is only possible with them. In addition, Guinea has six more options because of the multiple borders it shares with different countries. So, whenever we are down, we can benefit from Guinea because they have multiple options.”
Like so many countries, Sierra Leone relies on the ACE submarine cable which runs from Europe right down the West Coast of Africa, to South Africa. The cable connects more than 455 million people in more than a dozen countries. Problems in the corridor can affect any other country along the line. Sierra Leone has only one Ace submarine cable, running from Paris, Lisbon right down to Cape Town.
Executive Director of Zoodlab, Mamoud Idris said Sierra Leone’s cable is ageing.
“This cable is getting old; it was laid in 2012 and we are having problems with it. The risk of the cable cutting is increasing, intentionally or unintentionally the cable is being cut.”
While finding a quick fix, Madam Bah said the country is also working towards a long term sustainable solution.
“Ultimately for true protection and to limit our vulnerability, we need two cables at any given time. The private sector is forming a consortium, looking at Meta 2 Africa cable. On the government level we are working with ECOWAS, they have a program to support countries with one undersea internet cable,” she said.