By KENNEDY MUPESENI –
THE Zambia Information and Communication Technology Authority (ZICTA) is putting in place measures to protect the cyber space in view of increased electronic commercial transactions.
ZICTA director support services, Mofya Chisala said with increased electronic business transactions, ZICTA was working on measures to secure the country’s cyber space.
“We are ensuring that what has happened in other countries in the past where business outlets lost colossal amounts of money like the famous Western Union scandal in South Africa, do not occur here and that is why we are working on measures to secure our cyber space,” Mr Chisala said.
He was speaking in an interview at the ongoing 52nd Zambia International Trade Fair (ZITF) whose theme is “Enhanced Value Addition for Job Creation”.
Mr Chisala said ZICTA introduced Sim card registration to make mobile payments and other mobile transactions more secure.
“SIM registration is one way of making electronic transactions more secure, there are a lot of transactions going on using the mobile platform, we want details of an individual, e-mail and physical address of the user because phones have become centres of payments,” he said.
ZICTA wanted individuals and companies making payments from outside the country more secure.
He allayed fears that ZICTA was planning to switch off mobile phones whose identities in the sim register would not be  clear by August.
“We have given the members of the public six months which will elapse in October this year and not in August and we want mobile companies to rectify anomalies before the deadline,” Mr Chisala said.