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# Altron just switched on a national security system for Zambia's government, and has put no price on it
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/altron-zambia-national-security-system-no-price/
- Published: 2026-09-10T03:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-10T03:29:59.000Z
- Description: A Johannesburg-listed company built the layer that lets Zambia sign things online, and no value for the contract has been disclosed anywhere.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Companies, Business Bagel News, #big

A licence application in Zambia used to need a printer, a courier and a filing cabinet. This week the country switched on the system that lets it stop needing them: a national framework for proving that a person, a business, a document or a government website is genuinely what it claims to be. The company that built it is listed in Johannesburg.

The thing itself is a public key infrastructure, and Business Day's description of it is the useful one, a passport office for the internet. It issues digital certificates and vouches for them, so a contract or a land record can be signed online instead of printed, couriered and filed. Zambia's telecoms regulator sits at the top of that chain as the office every other certificate in the country traces back to.

Altron Security is the division that did the work, and it was assembled by purchase. Altron bought Ubusha Technologies in 2020 for R360 million and LAWtrust the year after for R245 million. The combined business has been the cryptography provider behind South Africa's own smart ID card for more than twelve years. It won the Zambian contract three years ago.

## What the contract is worth

No price has been put on it. No value, no duration and no start date beyond three years ago has been disclosed, no SENS announcement covers the work, and Altron's own newsroom carries nothing about Zambia. For scale, Altron Security turned over R411 million in the year to February and made R90 million of operating profit, inside a group that took R9.6 billion and made R1.2 billion.

Altron Security's managing director, Andrew Whittaker, told Business Day that Zambia is meant to be the first of several. "It's our aim to build this for multiple countries across Africa," he said. His argument is that governments cannot run real digital services without it: "You've got to be able, with a high assurance, to verify that a person was there and for them to be able to agree to something in the form of a digital signature." It fits a wider Altron push to earn more outside South Africa.

## Not the ID card itself

One thing this is not. What Altron built is the trust foundation, described by both partners as the base on which Zambia can build digital identity and secure online government. Zambia's actual national digital ID platform is a separate procurement, run by the Smart Zambia Institute on the open source MOSIP stack, and still looking for an international integrator. Smart Zambia said in January that Zambians would be holding digital ID cards by the end of this year, under a digital programme carrying $100 million of World Bank funding.

The Zambian government's own announcement of the launch never mentions Altron. The caution in it came from Smart Zambia's national coordinator, Percy Chinyama, who warned that institutions end up tied to their suppliers less because of the systems they buy than because they have nobody in-house able to run them.