You have to feel sorry for Nigeria. Home to almost 150 million people, it is widely known for its oil wealth, financial corruption, election disputes, tribal strife and advance-fee fraud. But mostly for the last one. This is causing no end of pain and poverty.
Nigeria's tainted reputation masks the fact that it managed its first civilian-to-civilian power transfer since independence last year, and is less corrupt than half the African countries surveyed by Transparency International, including its neighbour, Cameroon. It is also responsible for less spam than the USA, Russia, and dozens of other countries, notes Lanre Ajayi, the director of the Nigerian ISP Association.
Yet Africa in general, and Nigeria in particular, bears an outsize burden because of spam.
Cost is an obvious issue, but it's not the whole story. Globally, spam accounts for about three quarters of all mail traffic, and that share is fairly stable over time, says James Blake, chief product strategist at Mimecast, a company with South African roots that provides e-mail archiving, filtering, retention, and policy enforcement for international clients.
Africa's scarce bandwidth, especially on international cables, makes spam an expensive business for ISPs. Few have the financial strength to carry such costs, or can afford the staff, resources and technical skills to combat spam. All pass the costs on to their customers. The result is unnecessary expense in the poorest and most under-serviced areas of the world.
Potential ISP customers give the internet a wide berth because of its reputation as a corrupt world of fraudsters, making ISPs even more dependent on the corrupt customers they do have. Spam is directly responsible for low internet adoption in Africa and holds back the continent's development in the global, information-based economy.
The most painful effect, however, is that it affects national reputations. Nigeria struggles to sell financial instruments because of its reputation as a nation of 419-scammers, says Ajayi. Foreign investors are extra wary of buying government debt or private company shares, and all because of spam. Many international telcos simply block the entire Nigerian domain space. When Nigerians open a newspaper in South Africa, or bid for a football club in England, mutters in the local pubs are of money-laundering and fraud.
Perhaps anti-spam law is inadequate because spam is seen by the political elite as something only rich people with internet connectivity whine about.
Ivo Vegter, freelance journalist and columnist
To make matters worse, few countries in Africa have effective laws to combat spam. Many countries lack the experience, or even the rules, for handling electronic evidence. Laws that do exist, like the abortion known as South Africa's Electronic Communications and Transaction Act, are woefully inadequate. They permit spam by default, often on spurious freedom-of-speech grounds, and they place the onus on recipients to resort to the most inadvisable of all possible options: respond to the spammer with a request not to spam. Most South African ISPs, instead, try to rely on the Internet Service Providers Association's code of conduct to fight spam, not on a useless law that can't even define spam properly, let alone be enforced against the actual spammers in a civil or criminal court.
Perhaps anti-spam law is inadequate because spam is seen by the political elite as something only rich people with internet connectivity whine about, or something that is easily filtered out and affects only the overhead costs of corporate internet titans.
The reality, however, is that spam is among the reasons poor people don't have internet access. They either distrust the internet, or can't afford it because of the extra storage, salary and bandwidth costs caused by spammers. And they can't do business with the outside world, because all the outside world ever sees are amusing attempts to swindle them online.
The same political elite that dismisses spam as a technical problem, however, complains that foreigners won't do business with Africa. They blame imperialism or rich-world self-interest or capitalist exploitation or racism. Yet reputation is often the most likely cause an investor would distrust African business. Ask Russia, or Eastern Europe. They have the same problem. Not every Russian is a spamming fraudster or a mafia hacker, but that's the first thing you think when you get a business proposition from a Russian, is it not?
Until African governments enact laws that are sound both technically and in principle, the scourge of spam cannot be eradicated. Until they work together with ISPs to bring to justice those who use the internet as a haven for fraudulent money-making and money-laundering, Africa's reputation for corruption won't go away. Until African ISPs take responsibility for the spammers on their networks, instead of turning a blind eye if the monthly subscription gets paid, Africa's population won't get to exploit the opportunities of the 21st century information age.
Before blaming the rest of the world, Africa has its own porch to sweep.
Ivo Vegter is a columnist, freelance journalist. He blogs at http://ivo.co.za/.
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