Cyber-souveraineté : Pourquoi le virage anti-Big Tech de l'Europe doit alerter l'Afrique
As several European nations gradually disengage from American tech giants in the name of national security, the question of Africa's digital dependence is becoming increasingly urgent. Caught between the risks of geopolitical paralysis and the imperatives of strategic autonomy, the continent has every reason to learn from this global shift and build its own data sovereignty.
Europe facing the challenge of technological emancipation
Europe is beginning a gradual disengagement from certain American technological tools, a movement whose underlying motivations Africa would be well advised to understand.
In France, the government intends to replace Zoom and Microsoft Teams with a national solution called Visio . In Germany, the Windows operating system is gradually giving way to Linux . The Austrian army, for its part, has adopted the open-source office suite LibreOffice . Even the French intelligence services are actively working on an alternative to Palantir , the powerful American data analysis software.
Why are countries that are historical allies of the United States seeking to break free from its technology? The answer lies in one word: sovereignty .
A dependence with direct geopolitical consequences
Today, emails, confidential documents, and sometimes even strategic military data belonging to certain states are hosted or processed by companies like Microsoft , Google , Amazon , and Palantir . However, these American companies remain subject to extraterritorial laws and sanctions imposed in Washington, even when their servers or clients are located on the other side of the world.
A recent example is striking: when the United States sanctioned Karim Khan, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), his Microsoft account was simply deactivated. A single administrative decision made in Washington was enough to deprive a high-ranking international official of a fundamental work tool.
Now imagine this same scenario applied to an entire nation: ministerial email systems suspended, administrative data rendered inaccessible, and critical software deprived of security updates. In the age of the cloud , it's no longer necessary to bomb a ministry to paralyze a government: deactivating an account or canceling a software license can suffice.
Africa faces the trap of dependency transfer
While the African Union has adopted strategic frameworks on data management, cybersecurity, and digital transformation, and several states are gradually building their own data centers , in practice, a large part of African administrations continues to rely on tools, software, cloud architectures , satellite networks, and equipment designed and controlled from abroad.
However, beware of the pitfall of false shortcuts: substituting a Chinese, Russian or European dependence for an American dependence does not constitute a genuine step towards sovereignty.
Africa does not need to produce everything itself immediately, an ambition that would, moreover, be technically unrealistic in the short term. Instead, it must acquire the capacity to control its data, audit its critical systems, and diversify its technological solutions in order to ensure the continuity of its essential services should a foreign power decide to cut off its access.
The strategic challenge of the 21st century
A fundamental question arises for Africa: can a country that has a flag, a government, borders and all the traditional attributes of a nation, but that does not control its communications, its data, let alone the software tools that make its state apparatus function, still truly claim to be sovereign?
Commentaires (4)
Prenons un exemple très récent : de l'achat de CAPACITÉS EN BANDE PASSANTE SATELLITAIRE SUR ONEWEB-EUTELSAT par le Sénégal.
Contrairement au réseau satellitaire Starlink, qui utilise des liaisons laser inter-satellites pour répartir la bande passante entre ses satellites en orbite terrestre basse (LEO), le service OneWeb d'Eutelsat nécessite des stations au sol réparties dans le monde entier pour capter la bande passante des câbles sous-marins et la relayer vers les satellites. C'est précisément ce qui semble avoir été mis en place à Gandour, au Sénégal, un petit village situé à quelques kilomètres seulement de la côte, au large de Dakar. Dakar constitue un point de convergence pour une douzaine de câbles sous-marins — dont certains parmi les plus modernes et performants au monde, tels que 2Africa (Meta), MainOne et Equiano (Google), aux côtés de câbles plus anciens toujours en service. Comment, dès lors, justifier l'affirmation selon laquelle cette initiative viserait à accroître la bande passante satellitaire du Sénégal dans le cadre d'un « New Deal technologique » ? Il est déconcertant — et difficile à accepter — d'entendre de telles absurdités destinées à bercer les Africains d'un faux sentiment de sécurité. Doit-on croire que l'État sénégalais investit (via sa participation au capital d'Orange SN/SONATEL) dans des capacités de bande passante satellitaire alors que celles-ci sont déjà largement disponibles juste sous ses pieds à Gandour, grâce aux câbles sous-marins situés au large de Dakar ? Par conséquent, contrairement aux annonces officielles, nous avons affaire ici à une station relais clandestine de OneWeb ; le réseau OneWeb-Eutelsat devrait verser une somme substantielle à l'État sénégalais au titre de la location du site, de l'utilisation des fréquences, etc.
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