Somaliland does not recognize having given consortium DARE1 authorization to land its cable on its shores
January 24th 2020
The Somaliland government declared on January 22, 2020 that it had not been informed of the landing of the submarine optical fiber cable DARE1 on its coast in Berbera.
At a press briefing, Abdiweli Abdullahi Sheikh Yussuf, the Minister of Telecommunications, Post and Technology, said that “the government of Somaliland has no prior information and has not authorized an optical fiber submarine cable for entry to the port of Berbera on the Red Sea. Djibouti has not contacted us on this matter. The cable belongs to Djibouti although it is intended to benefit the entire region. ”
According to Abdiweli Abdullahi Sheikh Yussuf, the only information held by the government was that Somtel, one of the country’s telecom operators, like Telesom and Somcable, had a stake in the company and that the DARE1 cable has a regional ambition . The departure of the minister comes three days after the official inauguration, by the Djiboutian Prime Minister, of the operational services of DARE1 on the Djiboutian coast and the announcement of its extension to the landing stations of Mombasa in Tanzania, Berbera in Somaliland, and in Mogadishu, seat of the Somali federal government.
The DARE1 cable is not the only telecoms infrastructure whose deployment has been blocked by the Somaliland government, reports menafn.com. The cable in which Telesom had an interest, after concluding an agreement with OmanTel in February 2016, could not enter the country from Puntland as planned.
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