The Righteousness Trap: Do Ewaste Exports Pollute, or Empower, Africa?

The Righteousness Trap.

A problem recognized years ago comes into comically dramatic form in the Netflix Series "Tiger King". When megalomaniacs think their opinion is righteous, their followers and staff - and Big Cats and Export Markets - become collateral damage.

By Chris McAndrew - https://api.parliament.uk/Live/photo/bxXGHuLA.jpeg?crop=MCU_3:4&quality=80&download=trueGallery: https://beta.parliament.uk/media/bxXGHuLA, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67598764 Righteousness Trap

Lord Chris Smith [LCS] (Christopher Robert Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury, PC, to be exact) inspired INTERPOL's Project Eden. He wanted to show he meant it, and demanded the prosecution of Joseph Benson. Over the course of Project Eden's 5 year mission, LCS ignored multiple studies that disproved his claim of "80%" waste dumping. He is not a bad human. He just got trapped.

He strives to be a righteous human. So righteous, in fact, that he gloried in others following him...

Into the Righteousness Trap.

The initial assumption - that Africans were coming to Europe to BUY Europe's worthless e-waste - paying thousands per container to prepare, ship, and clear it through customs - and then dumping 80% of it into a city landfill - was preposterous. There is no way that Lord Chris Smith or his team interviewed a single person in Africa's Tech Sector.  They had zero physical evidence of their public contention that 80% of these exports were for scrap.  They wallpapered announcements with photos of African children, and described African metal recycling community with words like "pawed at" and "primitive". To an experienced exporter and former Peace Corps volunteer like yours truly, Project Eden was fundamentally bigoted at the outset. 

Righteous environmentalists - like priests and ayatollahs - can become blinded by praise and pride. Unconscious of their institutional racism, they never checked whether junk in Agbogbloshie is decades older than what is being imported to Africa today. They never even took the most basic step - available in seconds via online World Bank data, to see how many millions of Ghana households had at least one TV set 15 years earlier, or to compute how many TVs would be "normally" in the junkyard.  They went directly to rewrite the rules to criminalize Joe Benson's business, and then spent five years making his life miserable and flagrantly declaring his guilt in the press.

Exports of functional and repairable electronics empowered Africans with the critical mass of users profoundly necessary since 1960 to support the infrastructure of electric grids, radio and TV broadcasts, internet cable, dedicated satellites, and mobile phone towers. If not but FOR #freejoebenson, Africa would not have been "EDEN", your holiness, any more than Joe Exotic was preserving tiger habitat. The control of the trade by one party is control of empowerment.

Do ewaste Exporters pollute Africa, or empower Africans?  

A handful of experts who knew next to nothing about Africa's Tech Sector, electric grid, mass communications, consumer demand, or scrap metal recycling sector were holding meetings and conferences with each other to write the rules for Africa. They decided their answer.

Self Righteous Tiger Kings / Attention whores

I seriously doubt that empowerment concept ever came up amidst the white saviors who promoted the e-waste hoax, the myth of 80% dumping, to promote their careers. They naturally assumed they were educating each other, and assumed the privilege of defining what Africans were allowed to repair. It was an incredibly small circle of self-proclaimed authorities working with no peer review of their dumping claims, like the owners of America's Big Cat Farms.

Only a few, such as Basel Convention Secretariat Dr. Katharina Kummer-Peiry, would actually investigate the question. She was viciously criticized by the High Priest of Ewaste Propaganda in Seattle. In alarm as the data began to come back, Jim Puckett slung harshly critical letters to representatives of Basel Convention signatory countries, BECAUSE KATHARINA FUNDED A STUDY IN AFRICA TO INVESTIGATE BASEL ACTION NETWORK'S "80%" DUMPING CLAIMS. He succeeded in getting her removed, but the data had been done.


We've been over and over that data, and the seductive monetary interests of the charitable industrial complex. Like the Zoo owners who claim to "rescue" tigers and lions, the NGOs considered the data to be their private purview. 

To some degree, in early episodes, we sympathize with all of the Big Cat owners. What The Tiger King illustrates is how an individual, such as Lord Chris Smith or Jim Puckett, can be drawn into a mosh pit of attention hunger rivaling that of these characters:

Joe Exotic
Doc Bhagavan Antle
Jeff Lowe

(And some might question Carole Baskin)

The Tiger King series also features multiple interviews with the actual employees and caretakers in these Big Cat Farms. Those people are following the directions of their leaders. Like Greenpeace researcher Kevin Bridgen and Andy Higham, who were working to inform and prosecute under the orders of Lord Chris Smith, there are characters in Tiger King who are sympathetic, even as they became increasingly less and less "unwitting" that baby tigers grow up to be cats that the "Zoo" must euthanize. Higham you could call the Erik Cowie of Lord Chris Smith's Crusade against Africa's Tech Sector. Neither appears to me to be in a "Righteousness Trap", their egos appear healthy and in check, they just have a job in some other leader's attention whorehouse. But by this time, they must also be increasingly less unwitting that the 80% waste claims they operated under were wrong.

Following rules set by Righteous

Do Big Cat Farms Save Tigers?
Do Big Cat Farms Exploit Tigers?

You have the Dunning-Kruger Effect - that more intelligent people realize an issue is complicated and are therefore less certain... less educated, or less intelligent people, form an opinion under the wall of sound... that feels righteous. People who appreciate nuance tend to be less certain, and may be more prone to follow orders. People who don't process  (listen to, consider) opinions they disagree with will become more certain of themselves. And when Dunning-Kruger effect hits morality judgement, they create a righteousness trap. 

If someone is really truly blowing the whistle, not to call attention to themselves, but to herald caution, I observe that they tend to be less certain at the beginning. Like the way I promoted BAN.org as well-intentioned doing research and partnershipping with them until 2008ish. Via Dunning Kruger effect, I knew that I might be wrong. And thus, I was soon outgunned by an opponent in the Righteousness Foxhole, defending the 80% problem he faked with all the arms he could muster. He went after my reputation, after my company, after my regulators, and after my clients. He saw himself as the King of the E-waste throne, and the King made the rules and the statistics.

Despite the success of his efforts against Kummer-Piery, BAN was unable to prevent us from shifting the agenda.

Do e-waste Exporters pollute Africa, or empower Africans?

Do OECD Anti-export rules empower, or disemploy Africans?


Considering my own tendency for righteousness, either answer can lead into the Righteousness Trap. There is certainly a "gray market" area to consider. I'm not calling for zero regulation. Just for informed, unbiased regulation.

And the same may be said for the Victimhood Trap. (Worthy of a Part II blog).

Those two, Victimhood and Righteousness, exert a great deal of leverage on social media dialogue.

My answer is that before you get into a room with a bunch of group thinking Europeans on how to bring environmental justice to Africans, you better read background data. If you test the water in the Agbogbloshie Odaw River, you better assess how many automobiles are being scrapped there in proportion to electronics. You better count the burning tires, and weigh the wire from auto-harnesses, before you let your water test be used to lynch the Tech Sector.

You'd do better to listen to, and interview, every darn African importer, presumed innocent until proven guilty, before you as a privileged European create the remote possibility that Joseph "Hurricane" Benson lays off all his staff and serves time in prison. You better play by the rules of habeas corpus, and make sure the "e-waste cadavers" BAN and Greenpeace film at Agbogbloshie were not imported 20 years ago and collected from Accra homes and businesses - and BEFORE, not after, you create a rule that results in the prosecution of Joe "Hurricane" Benson.

Workers following self righteous leaders are also Collateral Damage

"Waste colonialism - when waste rules are written by rich people who define as waste something the poor would like to own"

LORD CHRIS SMITH - THE RIGHTEOUSNESS TRAP

OECD Savior Nations - in White

Once again, I have a tingling sense of righteousness in my own fair trade recycling cause. But at least it isn't monetized, like E-Stewards racketeering. 

But I'm fairly certain that Joseph Benson did more for to improve the world and the environment than did Lord Chris Smith. LCS held all of the power in the interaction, and wee little knowledge. I found Benson very easy to find and interview, and wonder why BBC and Sky News were unable.

Like Lord Chris Smith, reporters like Raphael Rowe allowed their righteous caring about restoring Africa to "Eden" to be  turned into a regulatory bludgeon, used for profit by Planned Obsolescence, Big Shred, and the Charitable Industrial Complex. 

Project Eden was before SBC Kummer-Peiry's studies on the ground in Accra and Lagos. It was based on the ether of Righteous feelings, press cameras, attraction to power.

I sat and listened to Lord Chris Smith's 2010 speech, in the room, in person.  To my ears he simply denigrated a talented negro tech sector with it (righteous feeling, no power, all the facts).

He disempowered Africa's TechSector.  And it was all part of the Righteousness Trap that has undermined otherwise well-intentioned religious people around the world. LCS introduced the comical testimony of  Mike "fishing as a boy" Anane, whom he could not possibly have vetted... whose very claims that he was swimming and fishing in Agbogbloshie in 1999 may as well been to claim he'd built London Tower. No one with so much as a map of Accra - on google maps - could have allowed such a claim to stand.

The meter of opinion on the issue does not capture the opinions of Africans who were empowered by good enough used goods.  If you had bothered to interview them, as WR3A did, you'd know a lot more about brown-outs, preference for solid state home-used electronics, distrust of warranty-pulled-alter-marketed "new" goods, etc.

The ladder out of the righteousness trap is listening to other perspectives, embracing humility, but adhering to logic.

I will re-post on this blog any reply from Lord Chris Smith... though I doubt he will request that.

He will also not sue, and not just because he would lose. It would actually draw even more attention to a blog that rarely gets anyplace close to viral. That has been BAN's strategy - virtually zero responses (except for the attempt to spike a GPS at a client's non-public office).

Most of us are a bit younger than LCS, and unless he revisits his 2010 diatribe on FREEJOEBENSON, that we will be the ones to write his digital tombstone.

The more intelligent and educated you are, the less certain. Educated people know we might be wrong.

TIGER KING on Netflix is ultimately about "attention whores", people who leverage things - like caring and staring at rare endangered species - to make money, get famous, or obtain sexual favors. Baby tigers in particular are in high demand to stoke a person's "nurture instinct", which - like greed, fear, and sexual interest - is evolution-ally pre-programed in our DNA. Those characters are fascinating because they are real. They exaggerate a aspect of humanity, more pronounced in some than in others, which is a proclivity to appear to be better than we are.

It's a slippery slope from appreciating praise and recognition, based on intentions and aspirations, to becoming unwilling or unable to see that in reality the medicine you are selling is poison. Thomas Midgely - did he ever suspect that his invention - leaded gasoline - would poison millions and create brain disorders?

That slippery slope from genuinely caring about a cause, such as endangered species or a petrochemical company's profits or African orphan scrap collectors creates moral blindness.

When you find something rare (tigers, African importers) that triggers interest in you, in a positive light, you can build a missionary temple around it. But instead of stretching to the clouds, you are digging your own trap.

This is swordfish bait.