African States Need to Adopt Cybercrime Legislation, Here’s Why

Africa is being taken for a ride in digital transformation, but are we really prepared for it? Digital Transformation only started being a big thing after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the Africa Cloud and Security Summit, Francis Mwangi moderated a panel that discussed why Africa as a continent needs to have Cyber crime legislation. It is more important now that Africa becomes aware of the cyber threats and how to avoid them or how to recover after attacks. Africa is currently a target by a lot of attackers.

One of the panelists, Dr Bright Mawudor, the CTO at Xetova, said that Africa was kind of forced into digital transformation after the pandemic.

“Digital transformation was not a thing anyone thought about before Covid came. The pandemic forced people to stay at home and work from there. In most companies, only the IT people were left in the office and other employees had to quickly learn how to use the software that would keep them connected to each other even as they are working from,” Dr Bright said.

He further said that because all this was unplanned by anyone, then the move to the cloud is inevitable. However, Africa should be ware of the cyber security risk that comes with Migration to the Cloud and our governments need to have cyber crime legislation.

Mutheu Khimulu, a Cybersecurity lawyer in Kenya, was also a panelist at the discussion and she reiterated what Dr Mawudor said on Africa’s preparedness. She believes that we have what it takes in the continent to be cybersecure but we lack awareness, capacity, and adequate resources being directed towards cybersecurity. Our systems/infrastructure are more vulnerable and this make us easier targets of Internet attacks.

“In Africa, we have a population of around 1.3 billion but we have less than 10,000 cybersecurity experts. In the legal space, we are very few who can handle cyber security cases. This has to change, we need to be prepared for anything as we migrate to the cloud,” she said.

Kenya, Swaziland, and Senegal are African countries that have been touted as having the best national cybersecurity strategies. Mutheu further talked about cyber insurance in the continent. She said that it is existent but it needs to be made better and more effective.

Evans Kahuthu, an Information Security Expert, was also a panelist at the event and he talked of the challenges the government sector is facing with cyber crime and cybersecurity.

“More people are implementing IoT (Internet of Things) but it is becoming a challenge because IoT on itself is insecure because the speed with which it’s being rolled out on is only for convenience. We are not ready to keep up with that,” Evans said.