Achtung Germany! Agbogbloshie (Ghana) Pollution is from AUTOMOBILE Waste Not E-Waste / WEEE

MISDIRECTED FOCUS

The 'Burning Environmental Issue' is Automobile Waste, not e-waste.

Clean up Africa's car pollution, worry about electronics later (when you understand it).

Hey, Listen..."Sending European used cell phones" to Africa is not the problem, and arresting African export-import traders won't clean the water or bring back "Eden".



For two years, I've been making the point that Agbogbloshie is not the largest e-waste dump in the world, and that geeks of color are being racially profiled and arrested.  Those things are true.  But Accra is polluted, and the grants to date are misspent and misdirected.

Before Germany spends $15M - 25M on an e-waste recycling solution, they should look at the photos in the link more carefully.

It's a tire, and a ball of automobile wire, not a cell phone.

There is a serious pollution problem in Accra and other African cities. Its cause should be obvious as you wend your way from Accra's Kotoka International Airport to the hotel, the day before you spend another hour wending your way to Agbogbloshie's slum... or stuck bumper-to-bumber in Accra (or Lagos, or Nairobi) traffic.

Cars.
Autos.
Vehicle-Waste.

Follow the trail.

[photos taken at Agbogbloshie Scrap Yard by Robin Ingenthron for WR3A - except for the screenshots from MTV music videos of Placebo and Beyonce, and DW article]

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