IP for Africa, Not Africa for AFRINIC

A slogan is a promise until the registry writes its own name on the deed.

For five years one phrase has done the work that no argument could do: “IP for Africa”.

It is a good phrase. I agree with it.

Addresses for the networks that serve Africans. Who could object?

The trouble is not the phrase. The trouble is the direction in which it is read.

Read forwards, it is a promise a registry makes to its customers: you will get the addresses you need, and the ones you run on are yours.

Those who control AFRINIC read it backwards.

Africa for AFRINIC.

The staircase

Listen to how the claim is built.

Because we are the registry for Africa, the addresses we register are Africa’s.

Because they are Africa’s, they must stay in Africa.

Because they must stay, you may not leave with them.

Because you may not leave, you answer to us.

And because we are the only registry here, there is no one else to answer to.

Each step sounds like stewardship.

Together they are a land claim made by a filing clerk.

A number has no continent

An IP address is a number.

It has no soil, no flag and no passport.

It works for one reason: every network in the world accepts that one network uses it and no other.

The numbers AFRINIC registers did not come out of African ground. AFRINIC says so itself: they are allocated to it, and to the four other registries, by the body that coordinates the Internet’s identifiers for the whole world.

AFRINIC is a counter in a global system.

A network that registers at that counter has taken nothing from Africa.

A convenience, later mistaken for a homeland

The Internet was born as one network.

In 1992 the document that first proposed regional registries, RFC 1366, gave its reason plainly. A registry closer to the networks could serve them better in their own language and customs. That is all it claimed.

It also asked for one registry per region, for efficiency.

So the design gave us two things: a convenience and a monopoly.

It did not give anyone a continent.

Karl Auerbach, an early Internet engineer, has described his last conversation with Jon Postel. In his recollection the regions were drawn “rather arbitrarily” in places, Africa among them, and he came away, as he believes Postel did, thinking the registries should have been temporary bodies that could be created, merged, split or removed as the network changed.

A help desk was assigned a district.

It has since declared the district its estate.

A continent is not an owner

Ownership needs an owner.

Political ownership belongs to a people: those who share a culture, a history and an identity, and a government that answers for them.

A continent is a shape on a map.

What do Cairo, Kinshasa and Cape Town share, beyond that map?

Not a language. Not a legal system. Not a history. Not a government.

Africa is fifty-four countries, and each owns what its own law says it owns.

“Africa’s IP addresses” would need an owner called Africa.

There is none.

There is only a private company in Mauritius, with eight elected seats on its board, volunteering for the part.

The only one in town

If you are the only provider in town, the conclusion should run the other way.

You owe more, not less.

AFRINIC has gone the other way.

In February 2026 its Board ratified a transfer policy under which the addresses it issued cannot be moved to another region. Its own assessment said what the rule is for: AFRINIC will not lose its members to other registries.

Its proposed constitution removes the members’ power to set its general policies.

A provider that locks the door and takes away the vote is not protecting Africa.

It is protecting itself from its customers.

Try it with anything else

The land registry records every title deed. The deeds belong to the owners. It owns none of the land.

The office that issues number plates does not own the cars, or decide where they may be driven.

The telephone directory has never claimed the telephones.

Each of them is the only one of its kind where it works.

None has concluded that the district is therefore its property.

Only here does the clerk say the ledger makes him the landlord.

What was actually taken

I do not write this from a distance.

In 2021 AFRINIC moved to end my company’s membership and take back the addresses our customers’ networks run on. The Supreme Court of Mauritius stopped it three times.

And when AFRINIC audited its own database, it found more than two million addresses misappropriated from its own pool, from the inside.

Nothing was taken from Africa by the networks that registered there.

What went missing went missing in the registry.

Keep the promise

So I keep the slogan.

IP for Africa means that a network in Lagos, Bujumbura or Maseru owns the addresses it runs on.

It holds them, uses them wherever its customers are, takes them to another registry if it chooses, and sells its services to the world.

The deed is the network’s. The registry records it.

It means a vote in the registry that serves it.

It means a court to turn to when that registry overreaches.

It means the freedom to leave.

That is IP for Africa.

I am for it.

A registry is not a continent.

The deed belongs to the network, not to the registry.

A monopoly is not a mandate.

IP for Africa.

Not Africa for AFRINIC.

Further reading, on Cloud Innovation’s site:

IP for Africa. Not Africa for AFRINIC.

An IP address has no continent

Who controls Africa’s internet?

Sources: RFC 1366 (1992); Karl Auerbach’s comment of 31 March 2026; AFRINIC, About; AFRINIC’s ratified transfer policy and its assessment; AFRINIC’s 2021 audit.