Three government websites in Zambia have gone down, reportedly the result of technology acquired from China in an effort to shut down the Zambian Watchdog, an online whistleblower publication.
According to the Zambian Watchdog, mobile service providers in Zambia have suffered large scale financial losses following the prior blocking of the publication and are reportedly now demanding compensation from the government.
The Zambian Watchdog has further accused the country’s government of hiring the “substandard” Chinese technology at the expense of the maize meal and fuel subsidies.
However, it would seem the technology in question has not shut down the Zambian Watchdog website, but has resulted in the downtime of the Zambian State House website, the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC), Zamnet and the Times of Zambia.
The Zambian Watchdog has managed to keep their website available to the world through a number of various proxy sites, but still cannot be accessed through its original Uniform Resource Locator (URL).
“Internet on most service providers has become very slow, especially on Zamtel due to the heavy devices (Chinese technology) placed at Lamya and Celz House to block websites,” reported the Zambian Watchdog.
Concerning the government compensation to mobile mobile operators, the Zambian Watchdog said the government will “further refund the mobile phone companies huge sums of money for loss of revenue as a result of people not buying talking time for internet browsing”.
