Dear Mr Dabee,

When I first read your curriculum vitae, I felt a moment of relief. At last, after years of drift, we thought someone with a serious professional record had arrived to help our registry find its way back. You came with the prestige of a Fellow of the Chartered Association of Certified Accountants, with experience across Mauritius, Dubai, and Africa, with credentials from Surrey and from London. Many believed you would be a man of discipline and order. And I must confess that even I, who has watched AfriNIC’s crisis unfold with pain, thought to myself: perhaps now there will be stability.

But today the truth is bitter. AfriNIC remains under siege, and under your hand the community does not see transparency, it sees opacity. It does not see healing, it sees a deeper wound. It does not see trust, it sees suspicion. Elections, which should be the most natural act of renewal for a community-based organisation, have become a battlefield of doubt. Your election guidelines contradict Article 9 of the bylaws on the NomCom, Article 12 on proxies, Articles 11 and 13 on Annual and Special General Members’ Meetings, and Article 12.14 on nomination timelines. ICANN itself, in its letter of 25 June 2025, warned you in direct words that your process violates procedures, that member data was accessed without authority, that legitimacy is being eroded. Those are not the words of activists. They are the words of the very body that recognised AfriNIC in Maputo in 2005 and still holds the authority to withdraw that recognition under ICP 2.

Do you remember June 2025, when elections were suspended because more than 800 suspicious powers of attorney appeared in a community of only 2400 members? Do you recall how genuine members discovered they had been marked as having voted when they never signed any proxy? Do you remember how ISPA of South Africa filed a criminal complaint because they saw fraud unfolding? And yet you pressed on with King’s Counsel at your side, dragging AfriNIC into deeper embarrassment. Who benefitted from this, Mr Dabee. Who gains from chaos and from a registry bleeding in court.

The answer is known. Cloud Innovation holds more than 6 million addresses. Less than 1 percent are used in Africa. The rest are rented abroad in breach of AfriNIC’s charter. That company has launched more than 50 cases to paralyse the registry. It even demanded liquidation in July 2025. Were it not for the Amicus Curiae brief that I coordinated, with more than 200 African organisations and individuals signing, the registry would have been buried behind closed doors. That Amicus was not written with money or with influence. It was written with our tears and with our duty. It was the voice of Africa’s operators, regulators, civil society, women’s groups, and technologists. And it was a reminder that AfriNIC was not created for the courtroom in Port Louis. It was created to serve the villages and cities of Africa.

You know as well as I do that Mauritius today suffers a crisis of confidence. The Attorney General himself once defended Cloud Innovation. Judges who owe their promotion to the former regime now preside over AfriNIC’s fate. And you, with your spouse in the Supreme Court, sit at the very centre of this perception of conflict. It may not be your fault, but it is your burden. No one needs to accuse you of misconduct. The mere closeness destroys trust.

Mr Dabee, AfriNIC is not just a company. It is Africa’s registry. If it collapses, the damage will be continental. But the stain will also be Mauritian. Investors will not forget that an institution entrusted with managing the addresses of the entire African internet was broken under the care of Mauritius. They will not forget that while Africa pleaded for justice, Mauritius drowned AfriNIC in procedure and proximity. You may win in court, but Mauritius will lose in history.

The founders of AfriNIC are still alive. They remember Maputo in 2005 when ICANN gave recognition, when Africa’s registry was celebrated as the fifth in the world. They remember the promise of fairness, of bottom up decision making, of continental unity. They are watching today. What legacy will you want them to speak of when they speak your name. Will they say that you stood for the bylaws and for the integrity of the registry. Or will they say you became the man who let a foreign company with no roots in Africa dictate the end of our registry.

Where I am coming from we have a saying: the ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people. There is another that says when the roots of a tree begin to decay, death spreads to the branches. AfriNIC is that tree. Its roots are rotting under judicial capture, and the branches are dying across Africa. But another saying tells us: even the tallest tree was once a seed that refused to stay underground. AfriNIC can still recover if you have the courage to step aside and let an Inspector do the clean-up openly, with independence, and with respect for the bylaws.

I urge you, resign with dignity. Do not carry this burden into your future. Protect your name, protect the name of your spouse, protect the reputation of the judiciary of your island. Halt this election of 29 August. Let the Inspector that the government appoints investigate fraud and restore transparency. If bylaws must be changed, let it be through the voice of members in Special Resolution, or by open order of the court, not by your pen in private.

You have a choice, Mr Dabee. You can leave as the man who preserved AfriNIC for Africa, or as the man who destroyed it for a company that will one day pack its bags and leave Mauritius when there are no more addresses to exploit. What legacy do you want.

I do not write this with hatred. I write it for posterity. Like many others I have no locus standi to sue you. But I have the duty under ICP 2 to raise my voice as a stakeholder. And I assure you, we will resist. We will resist with words, with organisation, with our solidarity. As Kwame Nkrumah warned, Africa will never be free if it does not win economic freedom. We must dare to invent our own future. The struggle of today is the freedom of tomorrow.

We will resist, because if we do not resist, our children will inherit a digital continent still in chains. We will resist, because if we do not resist, we betray the pioneers who gave us AfriNIC. We will resist, because Africa deserves better.

And so I end with words of wisdom from your own soil:
“Zafèr mouton pa zafèr kabri.” Meaning, my brother, the affairs of sheep are not the affairs of goats. Each responsibility belongs to those to whom it is entrusted. AfriNIC is the affair of Africa, and it must remain in the hands of Africans. We will not let a Chinese businessman or whoever sits behind him capture it. AfriNIC was created through the sweat, sacrifices and vision of pioneers from African countries, with the blessing of ICANN in Maputo. It is not a toy for profit hunters.

Each generation must take up its duty, as Thomas Sankara once reminded us, that while revolution may be betrayed by those in power, it will always be reclaimed by the people. Today the revolution is digital and it is our duty to resist. AfriNIC is not simply an institution. It is the continental root of our digital independence. If it collapses under your watch, history will not be kind, because the whole world is watching Mauritius and judging the credibility of its judiciary and of those entrusted with its institutions.

So I tell you again, zafèr mouton pa zafèr kabri. AfriNIC is our sheepfold, it belongs to our community, and it is not for outsiders to loot or for temporary custodians to gamble with. Our fathers and mothers stood firm for political freedom. Today we must stand firm for digital freedom.

Respectfully,
Emmanuel