Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)-The Cyber Crime Bill is a turning out into a thinly veiled anti-freedom claw draped as a feather-light massage-embrace very much primed against both immoral/criminal and citizen freedom/expression on the world’s largest meeting ground.
The government’s move which started in 2014 has seen some alterations to the Bill, which is yet to enter Parliament, with many civil society voices alleging that the law is set to fall short in both scope and intent.
Speaking during a roundtable meeting on the Bill in the capital Harare, Nhlanhla Ngwenya Media Institute of Southern Africa Director said there is need to dissect the rotten from the fresh in the bill as it is a bowel of both.
“We need to expose the fault lines in our own regulations against the regional benchmarks since bills of such a nature and type have been enacted in some countries such as Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Nigeria”.
“What we have witnessed with this bill has been continuous changes and that reflects some element of appreciating the voice of civil society but they are also learning to control as is being reflected in the changes to the bill”, he said.
Ngwenya alleged that the Bill also faced the prospect of quickly failing to stand up to the evolvement of the web world.
“The internet is evolving and we are seeing more gadgets getting connected to it and that will bring in a lot of other issues that include insurance and culpability, then there is the changing state of the person shifting from being a mere consumer into a product himself”, he said.
The cyber Crime Bill has been hogging the limelight of late on the African continent with various states taking to it with the eagerness and ambition.
In Tanzania such a bill was passed a few days before elections in a move naked to its intent.
Otto Saki a lawyer said the universality of the Cyber Crime Bill does not make it a straight shove.
“What is happening in Zim has some resemblance to wat is happening on the continent but that doesn’t mean we have to accept what is not acceptable, we need to think seriously about what we want contained in the bill”.
“While they may be provisions seemingly intended to gag the society we should appreciate that it’s also intended to help society”, he said.
“Our bill is a derivative from the SADC model law but just because it resembles other laws isn’t a fact that should push us to reject it”.
“It’s up to us as Zimbabwe to couch it in the way that we feel will protect the citizenry”, he said.
The post-Snowden era has seen a flurry of cyber activity by governments intent on getting an upper hand in a world rapidly getting more open to individual machinations on the internet.
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