ISSN: 2222-6990
Open access
Information and Communication Technology ICT and Traditional African Religion TAR (Voodoo/Vodou) promote the integration of socio-cultural, political and economic system of the people in Africa. However, the youth, (Sakawa Boys) merge technology with religion to commit internet fraud. Sakawa is the use of evil occult powers to commit internet fraud by possessing the mind of the foreign cyber target. These Sakawa boys manipulate vodou powers by performing certain frightening rituals for spiritual empowerment before logging into the internet. This has brought different changes to the socio-cultural and ideological bases of Ghanaians. This study reviewed literature on the causal factors, their modus operandi and the consequences of technology human interaction in Ghana. The Internet and Vodou rituals are found to be the major driving force for Sakawa boys to practice their trade. The consequences of the activities of these boys included infertility, mental illness, sickness or death for the perpetrators and the victims of their ritual sacrifices. Based on traditional ethos, this has transformed the preferences and social values of the youth in Ghana.
African Economic Outlook. (2012). “Ghana.” www.africaneconomicoutlook.org .and Communication Technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa: Trends, Concerns and Perspectives. Journal of Information Technology Impact, 9(3), 155-165.
Anderson, R. (2009) ‘Information security – where computer science, economics and psychology meet’, Conference presentation, De Montfort University, 20 April.
Anderson, R., Barton, C., Rainer, B., Clayton, R., Michel, J.G., Eeten, M.L., Moore, T., Savage, S. (2012). Measuring the cost of cybercrime. Rainer B¨ohme, ed., Econ. Inf. Secur. Priv.. Springer Berlin, Heidelberg, 265–300.
Armstrong, A. (2011). ‘Sakawa’Rumours: Occult Internet Fraud and Ghanaian Identity. UCL working paper 08/2011. London: University College London.
Asabere, N.Y. (2012). A research analysis of online social networking sites (SNSs) and Social Behaviour at University of Ghana (UG), Legon, Accra, Ghana. International Journal of Science and Technology, 2(7), 462-472.
Balkin, J., Grimmelmann, J., Katz, E., Kozlovski, N., Wagman, S., and Zarsky, T. (2006). Cybercrime: Digital Cops in a Networked Environment. New York: New York University Press.
Bame, K. (1985). Come to Laugh: A Study of Traditional African Theatre in Ghana. Washington, D.C.: Lilian Barber Press.
BlackHat 2009 Turbo Talk Whitepaper, available at www.blackhat.com/presentations /bh-usa-09/GUERRA/BHUSA09-Guerra-EconomicsCyberCrime-PAPER.pdf [accessed 17 July 2011].
Boateng, R., Longe, O. B., Mbarika, V., Avevor, I., & Isabalija, S. R. (2010). Cyber Crime and Criminality in Ghana: Its Forms and Implications. In AMCIS (p. 507).
Bosco, F. (2012). The new cyber criminals, hackers profile project. Available online at www.uncrime.if/emergingcrimes/cybercrime/. Access on 21st March 2017.
Britz, T. (2009). Computer forensic and cybercrime. New Jersey Pearson Education.
Broadhurst, R. (2006). Developments in the global law enforcement of cyber-crime, Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, 29(3), 408 – 433.
CIA World Factbook. (2010). Ghana. Available at http://www.theodora.com/wfbcurrent/
Collins, C. (2013). Collins English Dictionary. Fourth edition Harper Collins publishers 2013.
Coomson, J. (2006). Cyber crimes in Ghana, Ghanaian Chronicle. Retrieved February23, 2010, from http://allafrica.com/stories/200610040856.html.
Cukier, W. L., Nesselroth, E. J., & Cody, S. (2007, January). Genre, narrative and the" Nigerian Letter" in electronic mail. In 2007 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'07) (pp. 70-70). IEEE.
Danquah, P. & Longe, O.B. (2011). Cyber deception and theft: An ethnographic study on cyber criminality from a ghanaian perspective. Journal of Information Technology Impact [em linha], 11(3), 169-182.
Duah, F.A., & Kwabena, A.M. (2015). The impact of cyber crime on the development of electronic business in ghana. European Journal of Business and Social Sciences, 4(01), 22-34.
De Witte, M. (2013). The Electric Touch Machine Miracle Scam: Body, Technology, and the (Dis) authentication of the Pentecostal Supernatural. Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between, 61-82.
Dinev, T. & Hart, P. (2006). An Extended Privacy Calculus Model for E-Commerce Transactions, Information Systems Research, 17(1), 61–80.
Farlex (2011) ‘Internet fraud’, The Free Dictionary,
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Internet+fraud (accessed 17 June 2017).
Frank, I., & Odunayo, E. (2013). Approach to cyber security issues in Nigeria: challenges and solution. International Journal of cognitive research in science, engineering and education, 1(1).
Grosby, S. (2005). Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Guerra, P. (2009). How economics and information security affects cybercrime and what it means in the context of a global recession. BlackHat USA 2009, Turbo Talk Whitepaper.
IC3 (2010). Internet Crime Complaint
In-Text Citation: (Mohammed, Yusuf, & Saidi, 2019)
To Cite this Article: Mohammed, A. A., Yusuf, A. binti, & Saidi, A. M. (2019). Computer Human Interaction: A Blessing or Curse for Ghanaian Youth? International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 9(3), 884–901.
Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s)
Published by Human Resource Management Academic Research Society (www.hrmars.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode