The Empty Chair: Raise Your Hand If...

Raise Your Hand if you know who STEVE JOBS is.

Now, Keep your hand raised if you know who Jim Puckett or Basel Action Network is.

Now, Keep your hand raised if you know who TERRY GOU is.

Keep your hand up if you know who Simon Lin is.

Keep your hand up if you know Dr. Graham Mytton is.

Keep your hand up if you know who Prince Nico Mbarga is.

Keep your hand up if you know who Awal Muhamed, Yaro Muhammed, or Razak of Savelugu is. 

Keep your hand up if you've ever been to Savelugu.

Now unless you are author Adam Minter... my guess is your arms are back to your side. You'll need both of them when I conclude this talk.

The technology for "touch-screen" information feedback - sending data via touching a display device - was originally developed for cathode ray tube CRTs in Germany in (I think) the 1960s (based on my interview with Allen Liu, retired CEO of Net Peripheral, in 2016).  That patent was either abandoned or purchased by the Taiwanese engineers - graduates from University of Taiwan in Taipei - decades later. These tinkerers* applied to very small handheld touchscreen devices.  The "patent claims" by Apple and Samsung over smartphone touchscreen technology went nowhere 15 years ago (if anyone remembers those court cases, keep your hand raised) because neither invented it. Taiwan was the Cyrano of electronics invention, rising from "contract manufacturing" to schematic design wizards.  Terry Gou is the Taiwanese CEO of Foxconn, which manufactures most iPhones. Simon Lin is the Taiwanese CEO of Wistron and Acer.

Author, Author!

The seat next to me is empty, because those of you who lowered your hands might think I'm an expert. But everything I'm telling you today is either public data, available from World Bank and IMF loans for electric grid and hydroelectric projects which provide electricity to more than 90% of people in the world.  And if you had not interviewed fake experts like Jim Puckett of BAN, or Sasha Rainbow (Placebo MTV documentary director), or photojournalists like Kevin McElvaney and other "poverty porn purveyors" who got their information from Mike "Fishing as a Boy" Anane - that the center of capital city Accra was a remote fishing village in the 1990s... etc.

For twenty years, what I have learned by listening to the Tech Sector, listening to importers, listening to the founders of great OEMs, was derided by a lot of idiot white people who were given the privilege to sit before conferences in that chair.  People from Greenpeace, from European institutions, people like Interpol's Cornelius... people who probably meant well, but who were completely responsible for the false arrest, denigration, defamation, discrimination, and imprisonment of Tech Sector workers like Joe "Hurricane" Benson, an African who may well have become the "next: Steve Jobs, the "next" Terry Gou, or the "Next" Simon Lin. (Keep your hand raised if you remember Steve Jobs second company, "NEXT").

Euro Agbo Porno Photo Journos 1: Flog African Tech Sector "E-waste"

My last post kind of took on European "White Savior Complex" in the e-Waste story.  I hesitated before hitting "publish".  Was I being too hard on Europeans?

The latest "European photo-journalist safari" came out the day after.  Italian photojournalist Stephano Stranges announced fundraising for his, well, somewhat creepy African series "Victims of our Wealth" or "Le Vittime della nostra Rizzchessa". Screenshots below...



From his website "Stranges Images" (which is largely in English, though he's Italian), you get the picture, so to speak.  The metal mining exploits Africans to make electronics, and then the Africans are exploited a second time by the selfsame electronics in Agbogbloshie.

Coltan, in other words, the mineral that everyone carries around in his or her pocket, is the object of a long commercial chain that implicates serious consequences in terms of human and environmental rights.   This mineral which is used in the production of various high tech materials, is especially fundamental in making smartphones. 

The compulsive consumption and the continual updating of these objects, fed by by the media’s barrage of ad campaigns, has caused the coltan industry to grow exponentially since the end of the 1990’s. From that point, there has been the exploitation on the part of large multinationals and the catastrophic consequences regarding the people from areas like DR Congo.   My photographic project, therefore, starts in this area of the world, as the initial link in a process that begins with the extraction of the mineral followed by the production of the object (South East Asia) and then moves onto the excessive use in every corner of the planet, ending up in the immense African dump sites (in particular, Ghana).

Now in fairness, I am greatly concerned by the Coltan Mining in the Congo (have been upfront that Congo and Amazon metal mining was topic Numbro Una since 1980s - that's WHY I got into recycling!).  So I have some schadenfreude of my own in Stranges photos of African mining.  (Some historical confirmation at bottom).

So I figured what the heck, I'll talk to them about it... by twitter (next page below).

Look at the specific claim made to support the photojournalism. Data journalists log, Photojournalists flog...

Its name is Agbogbloshie, but when you look for it, you better ask for “Sodom and Gomorrah”, everyone knows it with that name. It is the black dump of the West. 100,000 tons a year including mobiles, fridges, televisions, computers. Here, they are burnt, opened, selected, recycled and re-sold, to then enter again the cycle of production and sale. 80,000 is the estimated population, mainly coming from the North and the most depressed areas of Ghana. 

80,000 residents managing 100k tons per year of foreign waste?  What does that look like? Do you see that in their photos?

I saw 25 people in Agbogbloshie, managing 500 lbs per day of wire.  It was mostly from automobile consoles.  It was not EVEN hysterically remotely close to the photojournalist claims, and the photojournalists own photos prove my points - and disprove theirs!

Sodom and Gomorrah? Fishing as a Boy? Mike Anane via PBS Frontline

"Photojournalism without data journalism jails and fails"

Immediately after our 3 week investigation of Agbogbloshie, Tema, Tamale region and Accra, I went to Vancouver to meet with Graham Pickren and Peter Klein, both professors.  Pickren was very kind to meet me for lunch.

Peter Klein initially returned my messages, but did not seem to want to meet.

Klein's at UBC Vancouver, which is responsible for the PBS Frontline episode in 2010 that labelled Agbogbloshie as "Sodom and Gomorrah."  The label was based on interviews with Mike Anane, who has been repeatedly represented as a "journalist" in Ghana.

n'importe quoi

My interviews with the scrappers at Ghana led me to believe Anane is not a journalist at all.  I can't find any record of any articles published by him, or any newspaper, radio, or television station he has worked for.  The Agbogbloshie scrappers claimed he was "in cahoots" with AMA, the Ghana developers who wanted to evict them from the increasingly valuable real estate near the center of Accra.  I've written about that before.

Here's another UN sponsored report, by African researchers, on the sources of pollution at the Odaw River lagoon of Agbogbloshie (2002).  It's incredibly well documented, and none of it jives with Frontline.

What I haven't really had the guts to do is to question Mike Anane's credibility.  I interviewed him at an Interpol meeting in 2010.  And I've promoted alternative experts such as Grace Akese of Memorial University or Emmanuel Eric P. Nyalete of Georgia Tech.  But when it comes to being an American questioning an African about his depiction of Africa, I've only attacked Anane's figures, his statistics, his 500 containerloads per month story.  And independent scholars back us up ("Criminal Negligence?")

The claims of the Agbogbloshie scrap workers do appear to hold water.  Take a look at the specific Anane representation below, still on the PBS website.

Anane makes a specific personal claim:

"I've always known Agbogbloshie as part of the country's westlands. As a kid, I used to play football here.  Some of my friends would go fishing in the lagoon.  When I went back and saw the huge amount of computers shipped in and dumped here, it mad me angry that these children had come to break them up." - Michael Anane

Now this is specifically an eyewitness claim.  Anane is personally claiming to PBS to have seen computers "shipped" to Agbogbloshie.  In the AlJazeera E-Waste Republic series and Cosima Dannoritzer's "The E-Waste Tragedy" Anane makes the same boast... this was a pristine riverside, a fishing village. 

Now how does this square with all the reports of Agbogbloshie, and the Odaw River Lagoon, since 1960?  How does it compare to eyewitness reports from any of my own interviews?  And Anane's claims to have been an editor in 1991-95 for "Triumph Newspaper" (no record of the paper in Ghana, though there's a Triumph newspaper in Kano, Nigeria).  Either Anane was in northern Nigeria, or he was editor from a remote location before the internet. But if that's the timeframe when Agbogbloshie was ruined in Accra, it's at a time when 1) Agbogbloshie was a city dump and auto scrapyard for a city of millions, and 2) there were no strict "ewaste" regulations to avoid as "drivers" per UNEP / "StoryofStuff", and 3) it's definitely not near "the outskirts", it's in the middle of the gosh darn city, visible on Google Maps.  Nothing adds up... except Anane's speaking fees.   Oh, didn't know that? Ask reporters, like those of #ewasterepublic  about the Anane speaking fees, and fees to photograph his collection of plastic with asset tags.

Nyalete, Odoi, and Akese say otherwise, and the reports like the one linked above are pretty darn thorough.  Agbogbloshie was a polluted dump before personal computers were sold in USA, let alone discarded. It's larger and more polluted to the degree Accra is larger and more polluted. There is no international dumping link, and no evidence of Eden after the Akosombo Dam of the Volta River was completed in 1965.  Electricity led to WEEE as roads led to cars.

But Anane specifically says it was "teeming with fish" in 1999.

Dan McKinney and M. Anane report that Agbogbloshie river was teeming with fish in 1999.  Bullhockey

Agenda Shift 2: Agbogbloshie Ghana explained in 11 Minutes / McElvaney Akese Osseo-Asare

This 11 minute video of the exchange between 3 experts in e-waste of Agbogbloshie seems to get into the weeds at some points, but has everything you really need to know on the subject.  Wait for the end, when Ph.D student Grace Akese of Memorial University responds to the German photographer Kevin McElvaney's description of the "mysterious" free market fraud which (he alleges) dumps hundreds of thousands of tons (or millions, perhaps) of obsolete non-working electronic waste on the poor of Africa.

DK Osseo-Asare (an American who has lived in Ghana for 11 years) responds to McElvaney first, explaining that his allegation they goods don't work and aren't repaired is a bit ignorant.  The used products are more likely to work than brand new product sold in Africa.

Then Grace Akese of Kumasi, Ghana, who has researched the flow of goods throughout their 20 year lifecycle, has a chance to answer the question.  Her command of every study and fact about "e-waste" export to Ghana emerges patiently and slowly.  Then she schools McElvaney in a "drop-the-mic" conclusion.



91 percent of the used electronics Africa imports are reused for years.  Asset tags add value in Africa's secondary market.  An African consumer would no more scrape one off than you'd remove Jennifer Lopez's nametag from a shirt at the thrift shop, or scrape off a brand logo.