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.
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| 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.
