Tag: africa

How Mastercard’s Digital ID Project Is Being Used by Governments To Track Health and Vaccination

In Mastercard’s ongoing technological pursuits, there seems to be an agenda of consolidating digital dominance. The so-called “Community Pass” project, helmed by Tara Nathan, Mastercard’s executive vice president, claims to integrate marginalized communities into the digital world. However, with only 3.5 million users so far, skeptics of digital ID plans may wonder about its real reach and intentions.

Nathan’s recent appearance on the company-sponsored podcast “What’s Next In,” touted the supposed merits of the Community Pass. Launched in 2019, this platform ostensibly provides individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia-Pacific with a digital ID and wallet, allowing them access to services such as government benefits and humanitarian assistance.

Nathan waxed eloquent about the supposed benefits of digitization for developing economies. But her emphasis on using offline digital channels to supposedly empower marginalized individuals raises eyebrows. Is this another case of a multinational company trying to sell its tech solutions to unsuspecting communities under the guise of altruism?

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Nairobi’s High Court Puts Hold on US-Backed Kenyan Troop Deployment to Haiti

Kenya’s High Court put a temporary suspension on a planned troop deployment to Haiti. The Joe Biden administration made a deal with Nairobi to deploy its soldiers to Haiti on a mission approved by the UN Security Council. The US agreed to finance the mission and train the Kenyan soldiers. 

On Friday, former presidential candidate, Ekuru Aukot, filed a petition with the high court arguing that sending troops to Haiti violated the Kenyan constitution. The high court granted a temporary block on sending the soldiers. President William Ruto’s administration will have three days to appeal. 

The Biden White House has sought a country to lead a mission in Haiti for over a year. After Canada rebuffed the US request, Washington was able to enlist Nairobi into sending 1,000 soldiers to Haiti. The White House inked a new defense agreement with Kenya and agreed to provide $100 million to finance the deployment. 

Additionally, US forces will train the Kenyan soldiers. The UN Security Council approved the deployment, but the soldiers will not operate as official UN Peacekeepers. Peacekeepers have a dark legacy in Haiti. During the UN mission to the country from 2004-17 caused a cholera outbreak that killed nearly 10,000 people and engaged in rampant rape of women. 

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Gates Foundation Wants Help to Create Digital ID and Payments System

“Financial inclusion” seems to be the buzzword that proponents of digital IDs, payments, and data exchange have picked for their PR sloganeering in favor of something that is, objectively, very controversial.

And where better to “test” something of that kind than among those who due to their economic circumstances don’t have much of a say – like a number of African countries.

But don’t expect those behind the effort, juggernauts like Mastercard or the (Bill) Gates Foundation, to ever spell it out in those stark terms. After all, it’s genuine concern for other humans, equity, equality, and kindness that’s been behind the billions, if not trillions of dollars they have amassed thus far, right?

Clearly not.

But what are they up to now?

“Stakeholders” they call themselves – self-appointed though, and their goal – other than, ostensibly, to keep the “global south” in check – is to make sure that digital public infrastructure projects, “including digital IDs,” get as much traction as possible in developing countries (first).

Both Mastercard, and the Gates Foundation, are telling us this is part and parcel of their selfless global fight against poverty and other ills plaguing humankind.

Their resume, though, these last couple of years/decades, does speak for itself – specifically, otherwise.

Right now, Mastercard, that little person’s best friend /s, has come up with something called Community Pass. “Farm Pass” – apparently a “sub-project,” is another term being thrown around.

Reports say it’s “a platform for digital IDs aimed at individuals such as business owners and farmers.”

And wouldn’t you know it, it’s one that happens to focus on African countries.

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Zimbabwe alien encounter: How 62 kids ‘saw UFO land outside school’ in staggering mass-sighting featured in Netflix doc

Many consider the 1994 “encounter” to be the most significant of the 20th century, especially due to the high number of witnesses.

And almost 30 years on, many of the now-grown students stand by their extraordinary claims.

Sceptics have slammed the alleged sighting as a prank, mass hysteria, or simply suggested the children misinterpreted what they saw.

But others, including experts in the documentary, highlight the unique nature of this case.

The new Netflix series explores the events of September 16, 1994, and investigates whether the children can be considered as reliable witnesses.

It also digs deeper into four other eerily similar stories of people who claim to have had encounters with non-human life forms.

The show has hit screens just as two so-called “alien corpses” have been put on public display in Mexico City.

UFO enthusiast Jaime Maussan presented them at a congressional hearing after they were found in Peru and tests confirmed they were not manufactured by humans.

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The New Colonialist Food Economy

This past summer, the global trade regime finalized details for a revolution in African agriculture. Under a pending draft protocol on intellectual property rights, the trade bodies sponsoring the African Continental Free Trade Area seek to lock all 54 African nations into a proprietary and punitive model of food cultivation, one that aims to supplant farmer traditions and practices that have endured on the continent for millennia.

A primary target is the farmers’ recognized human right to save, share, and cultivate seeds and crops according to personal and community needs. By allowing corporate property rights to supersede local seed management, the protocol is the latest front in a global battle over the future of food. Based on draft laws written more than three decades ago in Geneva by Western seed companies, the new generation of agricultural reforms seeks to institute legal and financial penalties throughout the African Union for farmers who fail to adopt foreign-engineered seeds protected by patents, including genetically modified versions of native seeds. The resulting seed economy would transform African farming into a bonanza for global agribusiness, promote export-oriented monocultures, and undermine resilience during a time of deepening climate disruption.

The architects of this new seed economy include not only major seed and biotech firms but also their sponsor governments and a raft of nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. In recent years, this alliance has cannily worked to expand and harden intellectual property restrictions around seeds—also known as “plant variety protection”—under the fashionable policy mantra of “climate-smart agriculture.” This broad rhetorical phrase conjures a suite of practical, climate-driven upgrades to food production that conceals a vastly more complicated and contentious effort to reengineer global farming for the benefit of biotech and agribusiness—not African farmers or the climate.

The tightening of intellectual property laws on farms throughout the African Union would represent a major victory for the global economic forces that have spent the past three decades in a campaign to undermine farmer-managed seed economies and oversee their forced integration into the “value chains” of global agribusiness. These changes threaten the livelihoods of Africa’s small farmers and their collective biogenetic heritage, including a number of staple grains, legumes, and other crops their ancestors have been developing and safeguarding since the dawn of agriculture.

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These ancient whittled logs could be the earliest known wooden structure

Some 500,000 years ago in central Africa, ancient human relatives chopped down trees and transformed the wood into digging tools, wedges and what might just be the world’s earliest-known wooden structure.

Now, remnants of this ancient woodworking have been found at an archaeological site in Zambia called Kalambo Falls. Researchers can’t definitively identify the possible structure, which might have been a raised platform, a shelter or something else entirely. Whatever it was, it pre-dates the evolution of Homo sapiens by more than 100,000 years, hinting that hominins that lived long before our own species were already working wood.

Wood tends to decay quickly in the ground. If it was preserved at archaeological sites as faithfully as materials such as stone or bone, “we would probably use the term wood age rather than stone age”, says archaeologist Larry Barham at the University of Liverpool, UK. He and his colleagues describe the finds in Nature1 on 20 September.

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PENTAGON MISLED CONGRESS ABOUT U.S. BASES IN AFRICA

SINCE A CADRE of U.S.-trained officers joined a junta that overthrew Niger’s democratically elected president in late July, more than 1,000 U.S. troops have been largely confined to their Nigerien outposts, including America’s largest drone base in the region, Air Base 201 in Agadez.

The base, which has cost the U.S. a total of $250 million since construction began in 2016, is the key U.S. surveillance hub in West Africa. But in testimony before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in March, the chief of U.S. Africa Command described Air Base 201 as “minimal” and “low cost.”

Gen. Michael Langley, the AFRICOM chief, told Congress about just two “enduring” U.S. forward operating sites in Africa: Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti and a longtime logistics hub on Ascension Island in the south Atlantic Ocean. “The Command also operates out of 12 other posture locations throughout Africa,” he said in his prepared testimony. “These locations have minimal permanent U.S. presence and have low-cost facilities and limited supplies for these dedicated Americans to perform critical missions and quickly respond to emergencies.”

Experts say that Langley misled Congress, downplaying the size and scope of the U.S. footprint in Africa. AFRICOM’s “posture” on the continent actually consists of no fewer than 18 outposts, in addition to Camp Lemonnier and Ascension Island, according to information from AFRICOM’s secret 2022 theater posture plan, which was seen by The Intercept. A U.S. official with knowledge of AFRICOM’s current footprint on the continent confirmed that the same 20 bases are still in operation. Another two locations in Somalia and Ghana were also, according to the 2022 document, “under evaluation.”

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Musician Akon Says Black Americans Could Move to Africa, Become Millionaires, Cripple US ‘Overnight’

R&B singer Akon may have been born in the United States, but he wants to go back to his roots — which, to him, means constructing a city in his family’s ancestral home of Senegal, which he describes as a “real-life Wakanda.”

Ordinarily, I’d just think this was some idle talk by someone not in compos mentis. After all, one of Akon’s best-known songs was a collaboration with enthusiastic marijuana endorser Snoop Dogg (“I Wanna Love You”), so maybe Akon’s been hitting the wacky tobaccky a bit too often.

However, nothing short of megadoses of LSD could possibly have produced the delusions described by the singer in his promotional push on “Akon City,” in which he promised “every single African American would be a millionaire without even thinking twice” if they relocated to Africa and that America would be paralyzed “overnight” if its estimated 41.6 million black population up and left.

According to a report in AfroTech on Friday, the proposed city in the troubled West African nation of Senegal — which Akon says can be built for the low, low investment price of $6 billion — is intended “to be a safe space for Black Americans and others facing racial injustices.”

“The system back home treats them unfairly in so many different ways that you can never imagine. And they only go through it because they feel that there is no other way,” Akon said in 2020, according to The Associated Press, adding that the proposed African city would be a “home back home.”

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Kenya Kicks Eye-Scanning Worldcoin To The Curb — Refuses To Become ‘Data Harvesting Guinea Pigs’

The Kenyan Ministry of the Interior last week suspended the controversial tech firm WorldCoin and any similar entities from operating in the country.

Co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, WorldCoin offers free crypto tokens worth roughly $50 to people willing to have their eyeballs scanned by a device called the Orb.

“Relevant security, financial services and data protection agencies have commenced inquiries and investigations to establish the authenticity and legality of the aforesaid activities, the safety and protection of the data being harvested, and how the harvesters intend to use the data,” reads a statement from the Ministry issued last week.

Kenyan Cabinet Secretary Alfred Mutua was enraged over the technology, saying in a statement: “Let us support the stoppage of Kenyans being used as guinea pigs and their data being harvested.

“You have to ask yourself why your eyes are being scanned and information gathered. What does it mean and what will it mean to you and your offspring?“

Another CS, Kithure Kindiki, assured citizens that the government would undertake all measures to ensure public safety and the integrity of financial transactions involving so many citizens, according to Kenyans.co.ke.

Further, appropriate action will be taken on any natural or juristic person who furthers, aids, abets or otherwise engages in or is connected with the activities until the government deems WorldCoin is safe. 

Following the directive, police officers were deployed to disperse hundreds queuing at KICC, Nairobi for the exercise. 

The directive comes minutes after ICT Eliud Owalo had stated that the government was yet to kick out the international company as it had not broken any laws.

That said, WorldCoin technically hasn’t broken any Kenyan laws – which, we imagine, is one of the reasons it was rolled out there.

“There are security issues even though in relation to the current data laws, they have not breached anything. Our laws, regulations are not comprehensive,” said Owalo. “Within the existing legal framework today, there are no provisions in the law that the organisation has negated. However, there could be security and regulatory issues around it.”

In response to the ban, WorldCoin co-founder Alex Blania claimed that the company’s intentions are above board.

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Pentagon typo leaked millions of sensitive messages to African nation

A common typo within the U.S. military has misdirected millions of emails and messages containing sensitive information to the African country of Mali, the Pentagon confirmed Monday.

The issue comes from the U.S. military’s “.MIL” domain name used for emails, which is commonly mistyped as “.ML,” the domain for Mali. The leak has resulted in the exposure of unclassified but sensitive information, such as diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers, according to an initial report from the Financial Times.

The Pentagon acknowledged the issue in a statement to Fox News on Monday, saying emails sent outside the “.MIL” domain are typically blocked.

“The Department of Defense is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorized disclosures of Controlled National Security Information or Controlled Unclassified Information seriously. DoD has implemented policy, training, and technical controls to ensure that emails from the “.mil” domain are not delivered to incorrect domains. Such emails are blocked before they leave the .mil domain and the sender is notified that they must validate the email addresses of the intended recipients,” the Pentagon said.

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