"Exaggerations Have Been Made" - NGO Exec Director

He huffed and he puffed and he blew the Hoax down

I'm really busy this month, in part due to the month away (Austria IERC conference, then 3 weeks in Ghana).  And I was in the Ozarks all last week for my father's DNR and funeral, simultaneously dealing with a tornado that wiped out water, electricity, internet, and my mom and dad's barn in Arkansas.  So... the blog's always poorly edited, but this month I've got really good excuses for it.

Here's what sticks with me from the January IERC Austria conference.  I sat on a panel with Jim Puckett, the Executive Director of the E-Waste NGO Basel Action Network.  We were speaking to a crowd of about 100 European WEEE delegates.

I opened by saying I used to be a teacher in Cameroon, Africa, from 1984-86.  I'd recently been to Agbogbloshie, and was going back again immediately after the conference.  I told the European audience that the junk they had seen photographed there was generated by African households and businesses, after decades of reuse.  Yes, it was originally imported used, but almost always repaired and used for 10-20 years before Africans discarded it.  I told them that 30 years ago my landlord had no running water but owned a (used) TV.  I told them that there wasn't any mystery around the baseline data - the World Bank clearly says that MOST households in cities like Accra had TV or computer 20 years ago, and the assumption that junk captured by photo-journalists was "dumped" in hundreds of sea containers by unscrupulous recyclers was categorically false;  I told them I had met Michael Anane, that he was not telling the truth about Agbogbloshie being a remote fishing village and he had certainly not been fishing and swimming there 20 years ago, that I was unable to find any newspaper that employed him, and that the people I asked in Agbogloshie said he worked for the AMA, the municipal land development group that forcibly evicted thousands of Old Fadama slum dwellers near the site, which they have a published plan to develop into shopping malls etc. The junk is collected in pushcarts from Accra city streets. I told them that the World Bank and IMF determined 15 years ago that used electronics in Africa were essential to creating the "critical mass of users" to fund TV stations and programming, cell phone towers, and internet cable.  I told them that Africa's Tech Sector found "Project Eden" to be scary, a threat to their livelihood, and cringe-worthy as a moniker.

E-waste Ebola Connection?

In conclusion, I counted backwards from 3, snapped my fingers, and  told them to forget all of the things Jim Puckett had told them for the past 15 years.

Jim's response?

"I will admit, exaggerations have been made."

It strikes me, 6 weeks later, as an incredible use of passive voice.  Exaggerations "have been made" by someone.

Exaggerations have been made, indeed.  Agbogbloshie photos have now disappeared from the CAER website, the conference speakers were now talking about keeping copper inside Europe's "circular economy", and Blacksmith Institute had changed its name.  That NGO allegedly told journalists 2 years ago that Agbogbloshie was the "most polluted place in the world" - something Blacksmith then denied but wouldn't issue any clarifying statement, despite our sending evidence they were cited by the journalists as the source of the claims about Agbo.  They did not tell me how much money they received to "transform" and "save" Agbogbloshie...