In the midst of the pandemic, Facebook (and partners) announced 2Africa a new subsea cable. About the same time last year, Google also announced a subsea cable called Equaino. Both cables have been presented as (better) connecting Africa to the world - that is factually inaccurate. The diagrams below by Steve Song under the auspices of Many Possibilities gives you a historical account of Africa been connected to the world by subsea cables since 2001 through SAT3 – a consortium of majority Africa owned telecom operators.

As per the second diagram, Google and Facebook are building the 19^th and 20^th cables which would be live in Q4 2021 and Q4 2023 respectively. Hence Facebook and Google cannot be connecting Africa to the world in 2020 - at best their two new cables could serve as redundancy to the existing ones as well as provide capacity in the future.