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As Sudan experiences a civil war where one of the most severe hunger crises of 2023 (and 2024 so far) is ongoing, access to humanitarian aid is both dire and scarce, and innocent lives are being scraped off the planet every day authorities added insult to injury by shutting the internet down when citizens needed it most. 

It was mid-February 2024, almost a year into the ongoing violence, when Sudan’s internet would be disrupted for around 10 days.

While the current civil war has been ongoing for over a year, violence and conflict have clung to Sudan’s back on and off for years, and throughout, internet shutdowns have been the norm.

A humanitarian aid worker in the country explained the most recent shutdown’s impact on their work on the ground, saying:

“Because of the internet shutdown, we are unable to communicate with our volunteers, we are unable to buy food, medicine and deliver these services to those in need.

Most of our soup kitchens in the greater Khartoum are cut off and therefore not working.” 

A civilian expressed: “Due to war, using online banking apps for transactions has gained popularity given the lack of liquidity.

Now, however, we are almost starving because of this shutdown, as we can’t even buy food and medicine.

All my interactions, including business and online courses, have come to a stop too.”

Whether or not access to the internet should be considered a human right is no longer up for debate: it should be.

The internet has become a vital part of the engine that propels the world forward, and to block someone’s access to it is to block someone’s access to their already existing human rights. 

Access to education, food, employment, health, and humanitarian aid, are all within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and because the internet has overwhelmingly become the means by which we access these rights, it should suffice that access to the internet itself should be a human right.

Global Citizen

We go deeper into this argument here.

So when an entire region or nation has been denied the right to access the internet due to political agendas that are not always in the best interest of the people, we should be worried as a global society. 

Internet shutdowns have increasingly become the norm across the African continent, and as uprisings and protests erupt, elections are scheduled and rescheduled, and wars and conflicts continue, it has become both a weapon and a currency.

Internet shutdowns across the African continent are not only frustrating, but they are increasingly harmful.

Here’s what more you should know:

What are internet shutdowns?

We’re not talking about an outage here.

An outage is when an error or accident occurs and the internet goes off as a result, for instance in times of extreme weather where infrastructure is destroyed, or in the case of maintenance repairs.

A shutdown, on the other hand, is the deliberate turning off of the internet to control a population or the information flow surrounding a situation, and is often orchestrated by some form of authority.

One of the most prominent internet crackdowns in recent history was that of the Arab Spring pro-democracy protests.

Global Citizen

Egypt’s authorities at the time caught on to the fact that demonstrators were using the internet to mobilize and multiply the protest movement, and so they shut off the internet directly impacting access to an open civic space for the right to protest and speak freely.

While it wasn’t the first internet shutdown in history, because of the magnitude of the Arab Spring protests, the world opened its eyes to how internet shutdowns can be weaponized.

A similar thing happened in the last African monarchy-state, eSwatini, in 2021, when pro-democracy and anti-police brutality protests erupted, the state shut down the internet citing “security reasons”, depriving children of their education, businesses of their income, and citizens alike of their free speech. 

If it’s still not clear why these shutdowns are a bad thing, a Global Citizen from Ghana, who wished to stay anonymous, broke it down for us: “The internet means Information, which means power in the hands of the people.

The reason governments like to impose restrictions is so the information flow can be stagnant, robbing people of their power to be seen and heard.”

How do governments shut down the internet?

There are two ways that governments can turn off access to the internet.

They can either rely on what’s called a routing disruption, which is to stop the transmission of information altogether, meaning people using the internet can’t connect to it, and information being sent will not find its destination.

This is largely what we’ve seen across the continent, particularly in the case of Sudan and eSwatini.

Global Citizen

The second is called packet filtering, where parts of the internet or specific sites are shut down, or specific content is targeted, for instance, Nigeria blocking access to Twitter in 2021.

What impact is it having on people’s lives? 

Civic space and West African court cases

After making the mistake of breaking Twitter’s “abusive behavior” regulations, former Nigerian President, Muhammadu Buhari’s Tweet was deleted by the social media platform.

In retaliation (or what the government referred to as protecting the state from “undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence”) the government banned Twitter for the entire country.

A ban that would last for seven months.

This move also came mere months after the end of the #EndSARS protests, in which protesters used Twitter as a tool to organize and mobilize their movement. 

At the time, Human Rights Watch and other organizations raised alarm about the impact of freedom of expression and an open civic space, however, these calls were ignored by Buhari’s government.

What’s more is that any use of Twitter, including by journalists and media houses, was deemed “unpatriotic”, and could result in persecution.

We’ll continue the rest of the discussion in our next blog, subscribe to be the first to be notified when it drops.