Africa CDC recorded 153 public health events on the African continent in 2022, 166 in 2023 and 212 in 2024. The computational infrastructure needed for genomic surveillance must be able to sustainably accommodate this frequency. However, the analytical capacity in Africa continues to be scarce compared to other parts of the world. In terms of computing capacity, the continent holds only a fraction of global data-centre capacity in a setting where power-supply is costly and unstable, with minimal availability of platform-engineering skills. We outline the concept of a domain-specific platform for routine research computing in such settings and present ABC-cluster as its implementation. The proposed solution turns commodity, heterogeneous and intermittently connected hardware that an institution already owns into a working analytical cluster. This cluster enables the execution of batch jobs, interactive analysis, and deployment of reports and dashboards from one command-line client. The cluster has been designed with reproducibility as the core principles, while serving the diverse workloads that routine analytical work requires. This deposit carries the manuscript and its supplementary material (S1 to S3) as a single file.