IP for Africa. Not Africa for AFRINIC.

“IP for Africa” means the addresses belong with Africa’s networks, not with the office that records them.

An operator in Lagos, Bujumbura or Maseru that lawfully holds addresses should be able to keep them, use them wherever its customers are, take them to another registry and sell its services to the world. It should have a vote in the registry that serves it, and a court to turn to when that registry overreaches. A registry keeps the record, and AFRINIC’s own mission statement says as much: “To serve the African Internet community”. Serve, not rule.

AFRINIC is an address book.

It records which network uses which numbers, so that no two networks use the same ones, and that is all it was set up to do. In Lu Heng’s words: “An address book helps you find a house. It does not give its keeper ownership of the city.” The keeper does not own the houses, control the streets or command the residents. Yet AFRINIC is the only registry a network in Africa may use, and those who control it have taken that monopoly for ownership: of the addresses, of the networks that run on them and of a continent’s internet. Being the only registry in Africa makes AFRINIC a monopoly. A monopoly owes its customers more, not less.

AFRINIC is not Africa.

It is a private company registered in Mauritius, run by a Board with eight elected seats. Africa is 54 countries, each with its own parliament, courts and regulator, and more than 1.4 billion people, and not one of them voted for that Board. Even AFRINIC’s own members were not left to choose it freely: in June 2025 AFRINIC’s Receiver annulled an entire election over “one disputed proxy”, “silencing hundreds of valid votes”, and his rules for the next one banned the proxy voting that AFRINIC’s constitution allows. Members elect the people who keep their record. Nobody elected anyone to rule a continent’s internet.

Under “for Africa”, Africa’s networks have been fenced in.

On 4 February 2026 AFRINIC’s Board ratified a transfer policy under which, in AFRINIC’s own words, “AFRINIC-issued IPv4 cannot be transferred out of the region”. Its own assessment said what the rule is for: “AFRINIC will not lose its current resource members to other RIRs in outgoing transfers.” Its legal assessment called the choice “purely and simply a business decision”. A rule that stops African operators from leaving protects AFRINIC’s business, not Africa. The freedom to leave is what keeps a registry honest.

Under “for Africa”, the networks AFRINIC serves are being asked to give up their say.

The proposed constitution drops the members’ power to determine AFRINIC’s general policies by ordinary resolution, which the current Article 7.6(iv) gives them. Under its Article 7.2A, two-thirds of the directors may refuse a proposal that ten members have put forward. Under its Articles 8.5 and 8.6, the suspension and termination of members may be delegated to officers, and a terminated member still has to return its addresses. The directors who stand to gain are the ones overseeing the draft. How does taking power from the networks you serve protect Africa?

Registering addresses through AFRINIC takes nothing from Africa.

AFRINIC is not the source of the numbers: by its own account they “are allocated to AFRINIC and the four other RIRs by Public Technical Identifiers (PTI)”, the body that coordinates the internet’s identifiers for the whole world. AFRINIC is one counter in a global system, and a network that registers at that counter has taken no one’s property. What did go missing went missing inside AFRINIC. Its own audit, published in 2021, found that 2,371,584 IPv4 addresses had been “misappropriated from AFRINIC’s pool of resources and attributed to organisations without justification”, and that a former employee “was found to have misappropriated” resources from that pool.

When a court in Africa was asked, it said no to AFRINIC.

In July 2021 the Supreme Court of Mauritius blocked AFRINIC’s Board resolution against our membership, an order those then running AFRINIC “deliberately flouted”, as the Court’s judgment of 19 July 2022 records. It restrained AFRINIC from terminating our membership, and it refused to treat our going to court as an abuse: Cloud Innovation “cannot be taxed for resorting to an independent court to safeguard its rights”. AFRINIC’s management also asked, repeatedly, for the status and immunities of an international organisation, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs replied that the request “cannot be entertained”. A registry that works for Africa’s networks has no need of immunity from an African court.

Every government, regulator and operator in Africa can put five questions to AFRINIC.

None of them takes a lawyer to ask.

1. You keep the address book. When did that make the city yours?
2. Who gave a private company in Mauritius a mandate to speak for 54 countries?
3. Why may a network in Africa not choose another registry, or take its addresses to one?
4. Why should members give up their power to set AFRINIC’s policies?
5. Where are the 2,371,584 addresses your own audit found misappropriated?

“IP for Africa” is a good promise. It is not a title deed.