ZIMBABWE is facing growing cybersecurity threats due to its over-reliance on international digital servers for data storage, a senior official has revealed.
A government report recently noted a surge in organised cybercrime over the last three years, including online scams, business email compromises, investment fraud, malware and ransomware attacks.
Technical director at the Scientific and Industrial Research and Development Centre (SIRDC), Tawanda Mushiri, said storing personal and national data on foreign platforms posed a severe risk to data sovereignty and security.
“We really need to be careful on data sovereignty,” Mushiri said while addressing academics at the International Conference on Education (ICE) hosted by the Zimbabwe Open University (ZOU) in Harare on Monday.
“Some people smile because their data is on Dropbox, Google Drive or the cloud. But where is the cloud? Where is Google Drive? These are key issues,” he said.
“The first thing a foreign adversary would do is check our data. People are monitoring us, they are checking our data and preparing themselves for whatever happens. They know us more than we know ourselves.”
Mushiri called for technological self-sufficiency, pointing to China as a model.
“That is why you see China closed in on itself.
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“They don’t use Google or WhatsApp; they have their own systems because they are prepared.”
ZOU vice-chancellor Paul Gundani urged academics to embrace and develop local artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
“If you conduct a cartographic analysis of AI content, you will see that Africa is nothing, literally nothing. That is the big challenge,” Gundani said.
“If we simply use ChatGPT, Deepseek or Meta, we are not contributing towards the equity we want.
“We are promoting a situation where the global north and China dominate Africa. We must think through what this means for us and for future generations.”
The two-day ICE conference ran under the theme Transforming Education: The Future of ODEL and Technology in Teaching and Learning.
It brought together ODEL and non-ODEL practitioners, academics, researchers, policymakers and consultants from across southern Africa.
