Ghana issues ultimatum to state agencies over use of private emails

Ghana’s government has issues an ultimatum to state agencies and employees to stop using private email domains for official communication to avoid security risks.

Minister of Communication Ursula Owusu-Ekuful said over the weekend that by the end of the year, all government agencies should fully migrate onto the government domains, local media report.

“By the end of this year, we don’t want to receive any official communication from any ministry, department or agency on any email platform either than .gov.gh.,” she warned.

“That information is not your personal information, it is official communication, and it is governments work so that must be on the government platform,” the minister added.

She was speaking to information technology professionals in the capital Accra, calling on them to help in achieving the smart country dream while being security conscious.

Last month, the Tanzanian government also issued an ultimatum to state institutions to immediately change their website domain names from .com to .tz to promote the country’s identity.

Deputy Communication Minister Edwin Ngonyani instructed the country’s communication regulatory body to implement the order and take action against those who fail to make the switch.

.gh (Ghana) and .tz (Tanzania) are Top Level Country Domains (TLD) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) that oversees its approval process. As of February 2017, there were 1528 top-level domains registered.

The common domain names used are .com, .org, .net which are open for any person or entity to register. However, the country, government, education and institutional domains are restricted to the institutions and purposes they were intended for.