What Happens when a Private Sector Player becomes Critical National Digital Infrastructure?
What Happens when a Private Sector Player becomes Critical Digital Infrastructure?
The case for treating critical digital systems as a governance priority
By Ethel Cofie | EDEL Technology Consulting | March 2026
The Incidents That Changed the Conversation When Private Systems Become National Critical
A private platform becomes national-critical when its failure stops being “a company incident” and becomes a country incident.
You see it when:
- an outage affects multiple sectors at once (payments, telecoms, government services),
- regulators convene industry players in crisis mode,
- business continuity becomes a public-interest issue, not just an internal SLA.
The Incidents That Changed the Conversation
In March 2024, subsea cable disruptions cascaded across 13 West and Central African countries simultaneously. Internet connectivity on which payments, logistics, and government services increasingly depend was severely degraded. This was not a cyberattack. It was not a governance failure. It was a technical disruption to privately owned, shared infrastructure. And yet its consequences spread instantly across national borders, affecting commerce, public services, and daily life in ways that no single country had adequately prepared for.
Two months later, East Africa experienced similar faults affecting major undersea cable systems, with operators scrambling to activate redundancy measures that, in many cases, were insufficient to absorb the load.
By July 2024, the CrowdStrike-related global IT outage had reached South Africa disrupting banking channels and aviation services, and demonstrating once again how upstream third-party technology dependencies can rapidly become national continuity incidents.
In early 2025, Zambia’s regulator moved beyond apologies. Following an Airtel network outage, the regulator ordered formal customer compensation under consumer protection and quality-of-service frameworks. It was a quiet but important signal: the era of outages being absorbed with a press release may be ending.
Once outages and maintenance schedules become public-interest events, the service has effectively crossed into critical national dependency territory whether or not the law has caught up.
This last point matters most. When Safaricom pre-announces M-Pesa maintenance windows, and MTN Ghana announces a six-hour MoMo downtime for upgrades, both operators are doing the responsible thing. But they are also inadvertently demonstrating something important: these platforms are no longer private services with public users. They are public utilities operating under private ownership. The logic of governance has to follow.
Defining “Critical” Without Drama
The word “critical infrastructure” tends to trigger one of two unproductive responses. Technocrats dismiss it as political grandstanding. Nationalists use it to justify protectionism. Neither response serves Africa well.
A more useful definition is operational: a private system becomes nationally critical when its failure stops being a company incident and starts being a country incident.
You know you are there when an outage affects multiple sectors simultaneously. When regulators convene industry players in emergency mode. When business continuity is no longer an internal SLA conversation, but a public-interest question.
Most importantly: when you realise that you, as a regulator or a board member, have no contractual basis to demand answers, no audit right to verify recovery timelines, and no exit plan that could survive scrutiny.
I propose a simple designation test.
- If a system would cause material disruption to commerce or essential services within 24–72 hours of failure;
- if there is no substitute capable of absorbing its volume within weeks;
- if its compromise would enable national-scale fraud or disruption; and if its policies create public-interest consequences
It qualifies!
Three or more of these conditions met means likely critical. Five means systemically critical.
This is not an exotic standard. It mirrors frameworks already operationalised in Europe, Singapore, and Australia. What is different is the urgency of Africa’s timeline.
What Africa Is Already Doing and Why It Matters
The encouraging news is that Africa is not starting from zero. Across the continent, there is serious legislative and regulatory architecture already in motion.
Ghana’s Cyber Security Authority is implementing Critical Information Infrastructure provisions under the Cybersecurity Act of 2020, with designation, registration, compliance audits, and duties of critical infrastructure owners.
Kenya has enacted Critical Information Infrastructure and Cybercrime Management Regulations establishing audit, inspection, and recovery plan requirements.
South Africa’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Act of 2019 provides for declaration, resilience measures, and establishes a Critical Infrastructure Council.
Nigeria gazetted its Designation and Protection of Critical National Information Infrastructure Order in 2024. Rwanda, Mauritius, and Morocco each have operational cybersecurity governance frameworks that explicitly address critical digital infrastructure.
These are not peripheral developments. They represent a continent-wide shift in how digital systems are understood by legislators and regulators from technical matters for the IT department to governance matters for the boardroom and the policy room.
The gap is not in vision. The gap is in operationalisation: in the contracts, audits, incident disclosure norms, supplier accountability mechanisms, and exit-readiness standards that translate legal frameworks into practical assurance.
Governance designed before scale arrives has leverage. Governance designed after scale arrives manages consequences.
The Real Governance Questions
For regulators, the practical next steps are clearer than many acknowledge. Tiered designation systemically critical, sector-critical, important allows proportionate oversight without regulatory overreach.
Download the Regulator’s Playbook: Governing Critical Digital Infrastructure a 20-page operational guide for financial sector regulators, central bank supervisors, and policy architects who have the legislative framework but need the enforcement architecture to match. It covers how to tier and designate critical operators without triggering investment flight, how to build incident disclosure regimes that are actually enforceable, and how to extend accountability through supply chains you don’t directly supervise. Every framework has been stress-tested against real African market conditions
Mandatory measurable continuity standards, with evidence submission rather than assurance, create the accountability infrastructure that incidents currently expose as absent. Supply chain accountability, extending obligations through to critical upstream providers, closes the gap that the CrowdStrike incident made visible globally.
But the governance challenge is not only a regulatory one. It sits equally in the boardrooms of private-sector operators.
Boards of companies that operate at national scale payment platforms, dominant mobile networks, carrier-neutral data centres need to ask a different set of questions than they currently do. The standard governance framework asks about uptime, cyber risk, and compliance. When you are nationally critical, the questions become sharper.
What event turns us from a national champion into a national risk overnight? If regulators asked for proof of our recovery capability tomorrow, could we provide it cleanly with test results, audit trails, and a dependency map? Do our supplier contracts contain the reporting and recovery responsibilities we would need to honour our obligations to the country? Have we tested recovery under realistic conditions, or only documented it?
The operators who are asking these questions proactively building what might be called an assurance pack, a national incident operating mode, and realistic exit readiness before they are forced to are the ones who will shape how regulation lands. The ones who wait will be regulated reactively, in the aftermath of the next incident, with less influence over the design of what follows.
Download Board Governance Playbook: Critical Digital Infrastructure a 20-page practical guide for private-sector boards and regulators, covering designation readiness, incident governance, supplier accountability, and exit readiness frameworks.
The Window Is Open But Not Indefinitely
The strategic question is not whether Africa should digitise. That question was settled long ago. The question is whether Africa will set the terms of its digital dependencies before scale makes those terms hard to change.
Governance frameworks designed now before a critical platform reaches the scale that makes re-negotiation prohibitively costly have leverage. Governance frameworks designed after the fact manage consequences. The difference between the two is not just technical. It is strategic.
Africa has the legislative foundations, the regulatory momentum, and the convening infrastructure to lead this conversation. What is needed now is the translation of frameworks into operational discipline: measurable continuity standards, verifiable governance, exit readiness, and early visibility into concentration risk applied proportionately, without becoming anti-investment in character.
The question, ultimately, is whether Africa becomes the architect of its dependencies or inherits them by default.
FURTHER READING & GOVERNANCE TOOLS
This article draws from companion documents developed by Ethel Cofie policy series:
- Africa’s Digital Sovereignty Framework the full analytical framework including the Critical Service Operator designation test, country-by-country legislative overview, and the complete private-sector and regulator playbook.