By BAKANG MOKOTO
19 August 2035- Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development, Mmamoloko Kubayi said although significant progress has been made to empower women and in ensuring that they assume positions of responsibility in all spheres of society, there remains a lot of work to be done to ensure that the workplace is a conducive environment for women to thrive and prosper.
Kubayi said sexual harassment and abuse of power by men who are in positions of responsibility is a blight in the society.
She further said women are still asked for sexual favours in return for promotion and other benefits to which they are entitled, is a cancer that they must fight hard to eliminate. Kubayi added that they have asked her to talk about is not completely divorced from what she has just raised about creating a conducive environment for women to thrive and prosper.
“Today, you have asked me to speak about repositioning the NPA as the heartbeat of the justice system. To have a clear vision of how we can reposition an institution such as the NPA we need to clearly understand both the, domestic and global environment, under which the institution is operating.
“It requires us to understand the complexities of the world in which criminals operate and the sophisticated tools that are in use today when crimes are committed,” said Kubayi.
She said the kind of changes that have happened in the world require institutions that are flexible, innovative and adaptive to remain effective and resilient. Kubayi said they need to ask themselves the question: “What is it that we are going to do to ensure that the NPA is a flexible, innovative and adaptive organisation?
“The most fundamental point to understand is that the NPA exists because our country and world in general is afflicted by crimes and the criminals responsible for those crimes need to be held accountable.”
She said an ideal world, there are some who would insist that their focus should be on ending crime so that they can live a crime free world. Kubayi said unfortunately, the real existing world is such that crime will always be with them and as such there will a need for the NPA to continue to do its job and do it well.
“We now live in a world in which rapid technological changes that include the emergence of artificial intelligence have changed life as we know it.
“These changes have changed the way we interact, the way we produce goods and the way crimes are committed. Crimes that we used to watch in science fiction movies have become a reality today and we have to find ways of building the capacity to tackle them,” she said.
Kubayi said historically, they have known the generators of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) relied on the exploitation of human victims. She said these new technologies, this kind of material are becoming a thing of the past.
“In 2024, the Internet Watch Foundation released a report in which they raised a concern about the emergence of AI-generated content which has now replaced human involvement.
“Prosecutors who have dealt with these types of cases in the United States have already raised their concern that AI-generate CSAM, complicates detection efforts and raises new ethical and legal challenges,” said Kubayi.
She said they need to ask themselves the question: “Are we ready to tackle this type of crime? Will we be able to detect this crime before it destroys the fabric of our society?
“The team has been led by Ismail Momoniat has done a sterling job to get our country off the FATF greylist. We ended up in the greylist because there were concerns raised about our capacity to prevent and detect certain types of financial crimes that can compromise state security or fund terrorist organisations.”
Kubayi said as they are making progress in dealing with these challenges, these new technologies are likely to further complicate how they tackle financial crimes, artificial intelligence is poised to completely change how money laundering happens. She said human mules and manual coordination, particularly for cybercriminals, drug traffickers, and fraudsters are what traditional money launderers rely upon to achieve their end.
“New AI driven technologies such as synthetic ID generators and automated cryptocurrency account creation, are poised to automate these operations significantly accelerating the speed with which these crimes are committed.
“This means that we need to start today our work to train our people to be able to deal with crimes of this nature otherwise we will stay on the greylist for longer than we would like,” said Kubayi.
She said other complexity that AI has brought is the level of autonomy, which these technologies exhibit which is sometimes difficult to understand on whom to lay the blame when a crime has been committed. Kubayi said US Department of Homeland Security has highlighted in their 2022 report on “Emerging Threats in AI” that Autonomous AI systems could eliminate the need for human hackers enabling widespread attacks at a scale previously unimaginable, with dire economic and security implications.
The Guardian 