gmeltdown

This week I have had several chats with some of my learned friends about the Communication (Amendment) Act 2008. I am convinced that there are still major gaps or areas of improvement if we are to have a conducive legal environment for the growth of a knowledge economy. Perhaps the biggest gap is the basic one of awareness among law enforcers, advocates, judges, prosecutors and the public in general. Many of my learned friends are either themselves ignorant of the existence of the law or are simply skeptical that it is not a practical law. Various sections of the law seem simply Utopian to the some of the lawyers. Some lawyers merely dismiss it as a law doomed to automatically contradict other existing laws. With the lawyers themselves skeptical about our cyber-laws the public confidence on economic activity through the web and other electronic platforms is seriously undermined. The communication amendment act having already been passed and signed, there are at least two more bills ou

With the anticipated landing of various undersea fiber optic cables at our coast, there is bound to be a radical transformation of the average corporate IT infrastructure. Many of the of larger regionally diversified organizations in Kenya have over the years invested heavily in Wide Area Network (WAN) equipment. The investments in hardware havealso gone along with expensive bandwidth provision contracts. This has largely been in pursuit of reliable data connectivity across their organization's branches. Government parastatals form a bulk of such organizations in addition to banks, and several of the larger local companies. Also included among the soon-to-be affected are multinational companies, international NGOs and intergovernmental agencies who have elaborate equipment setups and contracts based on the ageing premise that data connectivity in the country is slow, expensive and unreliable. Fortunately or unfortunately, the above organizations will very soon find themselves havin

One of the best achievements of Kenya's current (nineth) parliament was passing the Kenya Communications (Amendment) Act 2008 [ download pdf ]. Indeed to those watching the developments in the local IT landscape, the law's gazettement on 2nd January was one of the the best new year gifts for 2009. The country became the sixth African country after Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa and Mauritius to enact a law addressing business in the cyber-space. Enactments of these laws are deliberate efforts by the governments to create a conducive legal environment fostering growth of the local knowledge economy. As unfortunate as it would be, the great story of a new beginning for the ICT sector went largely unnoticed. The new law curiously carries a section or two that traditional Kenyan media did not like. Members of the fourth estate had started waging war against the new act as early as 2007 before it was tabled to parliament. So distructive was the media's campaign agai