DELTA: IMF, Botswana, Bullyboys, Tinkerers and Liberal Bubble-heads

One my flight back from the EU, I had the good luck to find myself seated next to a young woman from Botswana.  I learn she's a student of economics (probably) returning for her sophomore year at a very selective small women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts.

As my twins are just starting college life, we had a lot to chat about in the beginning, about the cost of USA tuitions and fees, financial aid, and jobs.  My wife teaches at Middlebury, and (I'll call her Mosta, a pseudonym) knew the Cameroon program my wife set up and was considering applying for next year.  Mosta described her father as a retired road construction engineer, and her mother ran a nursing program at a Botswana hospital.

Botswana Africa is considered one of the most democratic and least corrupt countries in the sub-sahara, though Mosta and I quickly agreed that it was a low bar.  She knew the term "resource curse".  Botswana is home to diamond mining (and not much else), and reliant on raw materials contracts.  She understood and agreed with my "development" theory.   Nations whose path to wealth was mainly tied to being somehow related to someone with the sharpest elbows inside a bureaucracy which controlled foreign access to those raw materials.  The curse of natural resources lies in the bullyboy culture within the governments who find themselves awash in cash from resource contracts but don't have much of a private sector in other home businesses.

OP ED: Recyclers, Stewards Must Free the Geeks of Color

[6/20/2014] We are all familiar with the photos of wide eyed, poor children in faraway, exotic places. CARE, UNICEF and others have tried to be more sophisticated about the “poster child” syndrome, but many others will fill the space. A child’s photo often earns a quick sympathy buck.

It's the gift that keeps on taking. Through either God’s grace or a million years of evolution, we are capable of nurture, we can empathize.  Risk to a child is as frightening as risk to ourselves.

But in a new development, poster children are becoming a tool of major industries. Electronics manufacturers practicing “planned obsolescence” and “big shred” machine makers are funding a photo campaign to stop the secondary market. It is an example of what Peter Buffett calls the "charitable industrial complex" [NYT Op Ed 2013].

Reuse and repair have met anti-gray-market alliances in the back alleys of prohibition trade.  The anti-reuse complex have created a racial profile of traders in used goods. The campaign actually accuses overseas buyers of poisoning their own children.

What is unique about this "e-waste" campaign is that, unlike CARE or UNICEF or Save The Children or OXFAM, the fundraisers do not share a dime of proceeds with the children in the photos.   In a crassly opportunistic way, they actually use the kids images to arrest their parents. Among philanthropic colonialists, the e-waste export campaign is an abusive step parent.

Joe Benson, a 54 year old man, born in Africa, never went to school. He registered legally as a reuse business in London. He was sentenced Thursday to 16 months in prison. During sentencing, either the London judge or the barrister compared Benson's export to "rape". When I compared these "bullyboy" cases to Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" in 2012, little did I know how similar the trials would be.

#freehurricanebenson

Research E-Waste, Free the Hurricane Tinkerers in Africa

That Exotic Africa, the "Back to Eden" goal, the backwards Heart of Darkness, in need of the Great Green White Father to rescue them from their primitive E-Waste "e-waste hell".  Ok, this is not just another insult blog.  This contains some really terrific leads for academic researchers who want to publish something new about "e-waste" exports.  I have some very new and interesting leads below.

I'm fooling around with some background research, looking at the growth in number of households in Nigeria which have televisions in use (World Bank), the number BAN and ITC and UNEP say are imported, the percentage of sales which UNEP says are used/secondary to new.

Guess what?  Yet another data point.   I don't have time to really polish the argument below, but it adds up to about 85-90% reuse.

The growth in the number and percentage of Nigerian households who own TVs correlates to two things:

1. the number of units entrepreneurs like Joseph Benson shipped there (BAN, UNEP, USITC)
2. the growth in use of internet and TV use in Nigerian households (World Bank)
3. the percentage of e-waste from Nigeria's own cities (UNEP)

There's nothing exotic going on here.  The "Great White Father", Jim Puckett, acts like some kind of a "no dancing dad", an Environmental Fundamentalist from Footloose II, a back-to-Eden, anti-growth, anti-globalization preacher, who has a right to point fingers at free market traders who obey the Basel Convention - which permits export for repair, something Jim voted against and lost.   BAN adorns its NGO website with fire and brimstone photos of poor kids at dumps, and says those photos trump the data.

J.Lepawsky photo, Accra (property of ... African)

But all the data is adding up to the same thing.   African cities are getting electricity.   Africans are moving closer to the city, where the electricity is.  Africans growth of internet and television use is exponential, much greater than the growth in OECD.   The growth is high where per capita income is $3000 per year, a market which cannot afford brand new equipment.  The brand new equipment sales in Africa are rife with ESD (electrostatic discharge) failure rates, as faulty equipment in new packages finds its way to countries with lesser warranty law enforcement.  And the per capita generation of "e-waste" grows in these countries, along with the growth of the internet.

Hardly a case for the arrests of Hurricane Joe Benson, Hurricane Hamdy, or Hurricane Chiu.

Link to Cahil Milmo and BAN, months before the sting by Milmo on Benson.  Follow up by Milmo, crowing over Benson's conviction of exporting TVs for dumping and burning.

UNEP found containers like Benson's, analyzed during his trial, were 91% reused... a higer reuse rate than brand new product.  The rest of this blog shows how World Bank data could have exonerated Mr. Benson, and disproven BAN's "Digital Dump" allegations, without even the benefit of the UNEP sampling.

The eight men, whose firm’s operated across the country, were found to have been at the heart of a lucrative trade which sends tonnes of waste computers and other consumer durables to west Africa and Asia every year to be stripped of valuable metals in grim conditions, often by children. 

One of the company owners, Joseph Benson, whose BJ Electronics toured civic waste sites picking up electronic goods to be sent illegally to Nigeria from east London, was convicted following an investigation by The Independent,Sky News and Greenpeace.

Except the premise "to be stripped of valuable metals in grim conditions, by children" is completely false.  That allegation was presented to the UK Independent by Basel Action Network (first link).   It was disproven by UNEP.  Like a modern day Mockingbird Robinson, Joe Benson has given up on the trial process.   Below, I provide hard evidence that BAN's "statistic" was false to begin with, and allege that our society would never have taken the accusation seriously in the first place if the trade in used TVs was between two white men.