By Busi Mabuza
There is no questioning the gravity of Covid-19 and its disruptive impact on humanity in 2020. Since the beginning of this year the lockdown shrunk the world economy. Massive job losses and closure of businesses ravaged livelihoods; and yet there are positives to extract from this disaster.
Among the industries that benefited from the pandemic are information and communication technology (ICT) and healthcare. Without downplaying the more than 1.6 million Covid-19 deaths to date, we must thankfully acknowledge that the digitisation of our world has accelerated over the past 12 months. We must sustain this momentum into 2021 onward.
Just as we will maintain our hygienic habits, including the wearing of masks, regular sanitising of hands, social distancing and working from home – even after the roll-out of the vaccine – we ought to keep up the pace of digitisation.
Already the vaccination of healthcare professionals is underway in some countries.
The vaccine should lower the mortality rate from the current 2.25 percent recorded by the World Health Organisation, allowing a return to increased movement and economic activity.
Statistically, numbers show that the introduction of compulsory vaccination in the early 1800s decreased the number of deaths per million inhabitants from 3,000 to 10 in under 100 years.
In response to the lockdown, most individuals, companies and other organisations abruptly started working from home. The move exponentially increased the use of virtual meeting solutions, for instance, Zoom Video.
This now well-known and recognised company unsurprisingly grew its market value by a whopping 273 percent in the first half of the year. Other beneficiaries of the shift towards e-commerce, namely Amazon and PayPal, registered 49-percent and 61-percent gains, respectively.
Healthcare companies, such as suppliers of sanitising wipes and Personal Protective Equipment demonstrated that there are fortunes to be made even in a catastrophe.
The other threat to humanity that got more pronounced in 2020, unfortunately, cannot be eliminated as simply as Covid-19 - not even by anti-virus software. It will require a more comprehensive and coordinated response. It is called cybercrime.
Alongside the cheerful shareholders of tech companies like Zoom and Amazon, other devious fortune hunters have become equally bullish. Cybercriminals upped their game in carrying out identity theft, online fraud and other forms of scareware. Even before Covid-19 broke out, the South African Banking Risk Information Centre (Sabric) had pegged the yearly cost of cybercrime to victims at R2.2 billion in 2017.
In August this year, Sabric estimated that personal information of as many as 24 million South Africans and nearly 800,000 businesses got compromised by the hacking of Experian SA.
South Africa is in the same league as Kenya and Nigeria – all leading economies in their regions – in experiencing heightened risks of cyber-attacks, according to Kaspersky security solutions.
In North Africa, the National Cyber Security Agency warned against hacking attempts targeting clients of the Central Bank of Tunisia, a country lauded for its sterling ICT response to manage the effects of Covid-19. Lastly, in the US a cybersecurity breach - so dire it warranted a meeting of the National Security Council at the White House - saw hackers invading the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Microsoft Office software this week.
Reuters’ reports suggest that this attack probably affected the US Treasury and Commerce Department and other government entities.
In looking back upon 2020, we recall how we started on the note of Silencing the Guns, one of flagship projects of the African Union’s (AU) Agenda 2063. In his inauguration speech as Chair of the AU in February, President Cyril Ramaphosa put his focus on peace as a priority across the continent.
It is now clear that his successor in February 2021 will have to add the favourable positioning of Africa to compete in e-commerce while urgently addressing the increased risk of cybercrime to the short to medium-term priorities of the AU in 2021 and beyond.
Busi Mabuza is the Chairperson of ZA Central Registry (ZACR) NPC and Chairperson of the Industrial Development Corporation.
The Star