Lobamba– Eswatini’s failure to finalise a national framework for protecting and managing data has come under sharp scrutiny in the Senate, with Senator Lizzy Nkosi warning that the country remains dangerously exposed.
“This is where the country is most exposed,” Nkosi said during debate on the Ministry of Information, Communications and Technology’s (ICT) First Quarter Performance Report.
Nkosi was referring to the long-awaited National Data Governance Policy, which is still being developed by government and is intended to establish how national data is protected and managed.
She pressed ICT Minister Savannah Maziya on when the policy would be completed and urged her to ensure that it was finalised before she leaves office.
The senator’s concerns went beyond the protection of personal information, highlighting the growing strategic and economic value of data held by governments.
Nkosi specifically raised the issue of health data, referring to discussions in which senators had heard that Ghana had allegedly been offered a substantial amount of money for its health data.
She said countries needed to recognise the value of information showing the diseases affecting their populations and the medicines required to address them.
According to Nkosi, access to such information could potentially give outsiders knowledge of the medicines a particular country would need, creating opportunities for those medicines to be sold or manufactured for that market.
In response, Maziya said that the policy was being worked on and gave senators a target for its completion.“I can assure Senators that we are hoping, planning that this will be done before the end of the year,” she said.
The Minister said finalizing the policy would also enable government to determine what legal measures were required to strengthen data governance.
She said government would have to establish whether data governance should be regulated through a standalone law or whether the necessary provisions could be incorporated into existing legislation through amendments.
The issue comes as government accelerates its digital transformation programme, increasing the amount of information being generated and processed through digital government systems.
Worth noting, during the first quarter, the Ministry reported that the Government in Your Hand mobile application had been expanded to include services such as payments for passports, travel documents, birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates and trading licence renewals.
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