AFRINIC

African Network Information Centre

Abbreviation	African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC)
Formation	11 October 2004
Type	Not for Profit
Focus	Allocation and registration of IP address space
Headquarters	Ebene, Mauritius
Location	Mauritius
Services	Internet Number Resources Management (ASNs, IPv6 and IPv4)
Official language	English and French
Key people	Dr. Christian Bope (Chairman of the Board of Directors) Eddy Kayihura (CEO)
Affiliations	IANA, ICANN, ASO, NRO
Staff	50+
Website	www.afrinic.net

AFRINIC (African Network Information Centre) is the regional Internet registry (RIR)^[1] for Africa. Its headquarters^[2] are in Ebene, Mauritius.

Before AFRINIC was formed, IP addresses (IPv6 and IPv4) for Africa were distributed by the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), and the RIPE NCC. ICANN provisionally recognised AFRINIC on 11 October 2004.^[3] The registry became operational on 22 February 2005. ICANN gave it final recognition^[4] in April 2005.

Organisational structure[]

Board of Directors[]

The AFRINIC Board consists of a nine-member Board of Directors.^[5] Six of the directors are elected to represent the different sub-regions, while two directors are elected to serve on the Board-based solely on competency as opposed to regional representation. The last seat on the Board is filled by the Chief Executive Officer.

Elections are held at each AFRNIC Annual General Meeting (AGMM), which is conducted around May/June every year. Voting takes place both on site at these meetings and prior to the meeting via online voting.

Council of Elders[]

The AFRINIC Council of Elders consists of six former AFRINIC chairpersons.

They fulfill an advisory role and harness all their experience leading the organisation as former Chairs.

The Members of the AFRINIC Council of Elders are:

1. Dr. Nii N. Quaynor (AFRINIC Board of Trustees Chair: 2001-2004)
2. Mr Pierre S. Dandjinou (AFRINIC Chair: 2004-2008) Board Member: 2004-2010
3. Dr. Viv Padayatchy (AFRINIC Chair: 2008-2011) - Board Member: - 2005-2011
4. Mrs Maimouna Ndeye Diop Diagne (AFRINIC Chair: 2011-2012) - Board Member: 2010-2013

AFRINIC Staff[]

AFRINIC staff carries out the daily operations of the organization.

The Staff is structured in nine departments: CEO's Office, HR and Administration, Research and Innovation, Finance and Accounting, External Relations, Communication and Public Relations, Member Services, IT and Engineering, and Capacity Building. These divisions encompass all AFRINIC activities, including that of acting as a central source of information for Members.

AFRINIC's open policy development process also invites stakeholders interested in Internet number resources from around the world (but mostly the African region) to participate. These include representatives from governments, regulators, educators, media, the technical community, civil society, and other not-for-profit organisations.

Public Policy Meeting[]

Each year, AFRINIC conducts two public policy meetings. These give the community the chance to come together for policy development, information sharing, and networking. The first Public Policy Meeting of each year is known as the Africa Internet Summit (AIS), and the second is held as a standalone meeting. The meetings are held in various locations throughout Africa.

Controversies & Scandals[]

AFRINIC has been at the center of a number of organizational controversies in the past five years.

Corruption[]

A former senior management member from AFRINIC, Ernest Byaruhanga, committed what is tagged to be Africa’s greatest internet heist. In total, 4.1 million IP addresses were stolen. 2.3 million came from AFRINIC’s “free pool” and a further 1.7 million were “legacy” IP addresses. They were worth around $87M, according to MyBroadband. IPv4 addresses, which were already reserved and in use by major organizations were effectively hijacked and sold. These reappropriated IP addresses were used to forward spam, breach data records, and compromise functioning websites. Dozens of South African-based companies and businesses were impacted. Education sectors and the Department of Defence were also hit, losing addresses worth approximately $5.3M.

Sexual Harassment[]

In March 2018, a sexual harassment complaint was filed by the RIR's former head of external relations, Vymala Poligadu. She alleged that she had been sexually harassed by Afrinic's former chair Sunday Folayan,former vice-chair Hytham El-Nakhal and former finance director Patrisse Deesse. She also alleged that they had been actively plotting to get her fired from her position. The internal report detailing Poligadu's accusations was then leaked onto the organization's discussion mailing list by an anonymous poster, writing in response to a complaint by another member about high staff turnover.

Sunday Folayan and Haitham El Nakhal quit after the victim filed the complaint detailing the toxic and unprofessional work environment in AFRINIC, while stating that she is just one of many female staff who are harassed and intimidated daily by the AFRINIC male staff. Instead of conducting an investigation, AFRINIC covered up the scandal by not addressing the text messages pestering the now-departed AFRINIC female staffer, and has announced that there had been no evidence of harassment, bullying or intimidation on the part of certain members of the board.^[6]

Lawsuits[]

Lawsuit due to previous senior management's corruption[]

Afri Holdings Ltd & Others vs AFRINIC[]

On June 2020, AFRINIC was taken to court by one of the men whose name and company has been linked to the heist of the African Internet resources committed by a founding member of AFRINIC, Ernest Byaruhanga. In a notice sent to individuals and organisations that hold IP addresses in the African region, the current AFRINIC CEO Eddy Kayihura stated that an application for an interim injunction against AFRINIC was brought before the Commercial Division of the Supreme Court of Mauritius. The application was lodged by Afri Holdings Ltd, Netstyle A. Ltd, and Elad Cohen. Internet investigator Ron Guilmette has linked Netstyle and Cohen’s e-mail address to suspicious activity in South Africa, caused by large chunks of South African Internet Protocol address space, worth millions of dollars on the open reseller market, being stolen by AFRINIC's ex top senior executive Ernest Byaruhanga. Affected IP addresses include a block that belongs to Sasol, and blocks which appear to belong to Tredcor, Afrox, Woolworths, and SITA. Documents obtained in August 2019 also showed that Cohen is a director and shareholder of Afri Holdings Ltd. ^{[7] [8]}

Logic Web Inc vs AFRINIC[]

On 01 October 2021, Logic Web Inc initiated an application for an interim injunction against AFRINIC. LogicWeb Inc has received a 196.52.0.0/14 block under the registered name of "ITC", which is a made-up name for a fake corporate entity that never existed, and one that was invented by the ex AFRINIC senior management Ernest Byaruhanga as a WHOIS cover story for his IP addresses famous heist. The 196.52.0.0/14 block was another one of AFRINIC's senior management's thefts from the free pool, and one that was subsequently sold or gifted to the proprietor of LogicWeb, Inc. of New York, USA, i.e. a certain Mr. Chad Abizeid. Some time after Mr Chad Abizeid received the 196.52.0.0/14 block that was stolen by Ernest Byaruhanga , which is worth well over $5 million dollars, USD, Mr. Abizeid tried to sell off the entire thing at once. Before recently reclaiming the stolen Internet Resources, the current AFRINIC Ceo, Eddy Kayihura, has known about the misappropriated 196.52.0.0/14 block for quite some time without taking any actions of reclaming it, in fear of facing a lawsuit from Mr Abizeid, similar to the AfriHoldings lawsuit case.

AFRINIC's scandal of committing the biggest Internet Resources heist, valued at more than 50 million dollars, is still affecting businesses operations that are struggling to recover from AFRINIC's attempts of concealing the gravity of the thefts by reclaiming the stolen IP resources, with little to no consideration of the consequences on the African Internet Connectivity. These businesses are now taking the matter to the Mauritius Courts by filing lawsuits against AFRINIC's management. ^[9]

Lawsuit due to legal dispute with its membership[]

Cloud Innovation Ltd vs AFRINIC[]

Afrinic has been in a feud with Cloud Innovation (CI) since July 2021, as it intended to revoke over 6 million IP addresses from the company backing the claim with a breach in policy. Afrinic’s attempt to seize IP addresses currently under Cloud Innovation’s domain backfired, as by bringing the issue directly to court, without an effort to de-escalate the matter, the RIR did not follow its own in-house policies.

As a result of the unfounded claims advanced by Afrinic, the Supreme Court of Mauritius ordered to freeze the RIR’s bank accounts, crippling its operations. Although due to court order Afrinic has restored CI’s IP address blocks on July 15th, the RIR’s bank assets remained frozen until October 15th, when they were granted the removal of the freezing order against AFRINIC in the Mauritius Court. The litigation is still ongoing.

With the amount of IP adresses involved and Cloud Innovation's large international customer base, this ligation is said to be potentially impacting a large majority of the Internet's connectivity and operations. Professionals have shown concerns about the possible consequences that would result from Cloud Innovation's membership termination. ^[10]

IPv4 exhaustion[]

In April 2017, AFRINIC became the last regional Internet registry to run down to its last /8 block of IPv4 addresses (102/8), thus triggering the final phase of its IPv4 exhaustion policy. As a result, AFRINIC then implemented a soft landing policy for allocating the last /8 to its users, in which, since Phase 2 of the exhaustion period (started in January 2020^[11]), each AFRINIC customer is eligible for just one final maximum allocation of a /22 block of IPv4 addresses until the block is exhausted.^[12]

AFRINIC training[]

AFRINIC conducts a number of training courses^[13] in a wide variety of locations^[14] around the region. These courses are designed to educate participants to proficiently configure, manage and administer their Internet services and infrastructure and to embrace current best practices.

WHOIS database[]

The AFRINIC WHOIS Database^[15] contains registration details of IP addresses and AS numbers originally allocated by AFRINIC. It shows the organisations that hold the resources, where the allocations were made, and contact details for the networks. The organisations that hold those resources are responsible for updating their information in the database. The database can be searched by using the web interface on the AFRINIC site or by directing your whois client to whois.afrinic.net (for example, whois -h whois.afrinic.net 196.1.0.0/24).

The AFRINIC membership[]

Major^[16] Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Internet exchange point (IXPs), governments and academic institutions.

Policy development process[]

AFRINIC's policies are developed by the membership and broader Internet community. The major media for policy development are the face-to-face Public Policy Meetings,^[17] which are held twice each year, and mailing list discussions.

AFRINIC's policy development process^[18] is:

Open	Transparent	Bottom-up
Anyone can propose policies.	AFRNIC publicly documents all policy discussions and decisions.	The community drives policy development.
Everyone can discuss policy proposals.		AFRINIC documents all policy discussions and decisions to provide complete transparency of the policy development process.

Economies[]

AFRINIC's service region^[19] is divided into six sub-regions in Africa for statistic gathering purposes and for Board of Directors elections to ensure regional representation.

These sub-regions are: Northern, Western, Central, Eastern, Southern and the Indian Ocean.

AFRINIC's service region also includes several islands located in the Atlantic Ocean which are listed in the Western or Central African regions.

EASTERN REGION	WESTERN REGION	CENTRAL AFRICA	NORTHERN AFRICA	SOUTHERN AFRICA	INDIAN OCEAN
Burundi	Benin	Cameroon	Algeria	Angola	Mauritius
Djibouti	Burkina Faso	Central African Republic	Egypt	Botswana	Réunion
Eritrea	Cape Verde	Democratic Republic of the Congo	Libya	Lesotho	Comoros
Ethiopia	Côte d'Ivoire	Equatorial Guinea	Morocco	Namibia	Mayotte
Kenya	Gambia	Gabon	Sudan	South Africa	Madagascar
Tanzania	Ghana	Republic of the Congo	South Sudan	Swaziland	Seychelles
Rwanda	Guinea	São Tomé and Príncipe	Tunisia	Mozambique
Somalia	Liberia	Chad	Mauritania	Malawi
Uganda	Mali			Zambia
	Niger			Zimbabwe
	Nigeria
	Senegal
	Sierra Leone
	Togo

See also[]

• Address Supporting Organization (ASO)
• Internet Governance Forum (IGF)
• Number Resource Organization (NRO): an organization of the five RIRs
• World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)

References[]

External links[]

• AFRINIC website
• AFRINIC Meetings archive

Coordinates: 20°14′42″S 57°29′30″E / 20.2450°S 57.4916°E / -20.2450; 57.4916