Smart Africa under scrutiny: Vision without governance

• Grand continental strategies promise digital transformation, but governance failures expose deep structural weaknesses
• AFRINIC’s collapse and ICANN’s overreach raise doubts about who truly controls Africa’s internet future

When digital ambition meets governance breakdown in Africa

Across Africa, ambitious digital strategies continue to promise connectivity, innovation and economic transformation. Flagship initiatives such as Smart Africa present a compelling vision of a unified, digitally empowered continent. Yet beneath the rhetoric, Africa’s internet governance landscape tells a more troubling story, one marked by institutional failure, external interference and eroding trust.

At the centre of this contradiction sits AFRINIC, the African Network Information Centre. Once tasked with stewarding Africa’s IP resources, it is now widely regarded by critics as a failed registry. Years of governance crisis have culminated in collapse, most visibly demonstrated by the annulment of its June 23 board election over a single unverified proxy dispute. The decision to discard valid votes exposed what many describe as unworkable election standards, accelerating the erosion of trust in governance and leaving Africa’s IP resource management in limbo.

This breakdown matters because IP addresses underpin the continent’s connectivity and digital infrastructure future. Without a functioning, trusted registry, Africa’s position in the global internet ecosystem weakens. In this context, calls from stakeholders such as Cloud Innovation Ltd, AFRINIC’s third-biggest member, to dissolve the registry and initiate a necessary reset have gained momentum. Their demand that ICANN and the Number Resource Organization immediately appoint a new regional internet registry reflects growing recognition that incremental reform is no longer sufficient.

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From vision to reality: Reclaiming regional control of Africa’s internet

Rather than stabilising the situation, ICANN has become a source of further concern. Critics argue that the organisation is losing control while over-extending its reach, undermining courts and threatening Africa’s bottom-up internet governance. Its attempted intervention following a court-approved AFRINIC election sparked backlash, reinforcing fears that ICANN wants to pick AFRINIC’s leaders. The adoption of the ICP-2 compliance framework, reportedly bypassing ICANN’s own multistakeholder processes, has been characterised as a quiet power grab, granting unprecedented authority to de-recognise regional internet registries.

Against this backdrop, initiatives like Smart Africa and the proposed Continental Africa Internet Governance Architecture (CAIGA) appear strikingly disconnected from reality. While they emphasise coordination and policy alignment, they have failed to address the immediate governance vacuum created by AFRINIC’s collapse. More critically, they offer little resistance to external control over Africa’s internet infrastructure, effectively coexisting with ICANN’s expanding influence rather than challenging it.

The result is a growing disconnect between vision and lived reality. African users and businesses generate increasing volumes of data, yet decision-making power remains concentrated in institutions that lack accountability or regional legitimacy. Trust in governance has been badly damaged, and without decisive action, Africa risks further marginalisation within the global digital order. See also: AfriNIC board faces legitimacy test.