Threats

Threats to Individual Privacy To a degree unprecedented in history, individual privacy is now under siege in West Africa. As Africans gleefully clutch to their mobile phones and savor the benefits of this wonderful communication technology, this social revolution may turn out to be a mixed blessing. And unless many irregularities that find abode in the sub-region are fixed, the celebratory mood unleashed by the coming of cell phones will not last. In fact, this may help doom many of the developing aspirations in Africa’s evolving nations. From Nigeria to Ghana, Cameroun to Benin, Tanzania to Cote d’Ivoire, cell phones are fast becoming new tools that allow the invasion of privacy and potential weapons of repression in the hands of power-drunk governments with their ubiquitous and overzealous security arm. With an explosion in the mobile telephony subscriber base, which has now given birth to an unprecedented boom in social and economic activities, African governments now grapple with the flip side of success: being befuddled with an environment where crime festers with dizzying ferocity. As the world’s poorest inhabited continent groans under the pangs of a booming mobile phone-assisted crime wave, seeming helpless sometimes, the glad tiding is that there are new initiatives being put in place to tame the security scourge. But there is also a snag, for some of the measures seem set to both expand

the powers of government and curtail the freedom and privacy of mobile phone subscribers in Africa.1 In a manner that may redefine many things, many African governments are yet to come to terms with the daunting task of crime fighting and respect for constitutional rights of citizens, especially as it borders on privacy and related human rights.

1

Analyzing the implications of the proposed plan of the Nigerian mobile telephone regulator to install gadgets on masts and towers to monitor the location of customers, Oluniyi D. Ajao concluded that this would invite devastating blows on privacy and rights of the citizenry. http://www.ictworks.org/news/2010/08/06/ncc-wants-track-nigerians-movementsmobile-phones (accessed on October 2, 2010)