In talking with a number of the UN folks here in Abengourou (who in turn have talked to other folks/officials in the area and beyond) a larger picture of what is happening with d'Off d'10 emerges.
As I mentioned earlier, there are some rather large problems with the Azito power station in Abidjan. This actually wasn't news as the station has been under repair for some time now. The repairs took awhile to get going, not because of any issues at a local level, but because this station is owned by a French company who appeared to be a bit lax in getting around to making the repairs. They are indeed underway now and if all goes well, the station should be back up to full potential by mid-March. This is an optimistic estimate, albeit one tinged with a degree of sensibility as even if this station is back up to full potential, there will still be cuts, but only in the neighborhood of four hours a day or so. Personally, I'm hoping that however they end up being, there is at least power through the night as sleeping fanless is funless.
But this power station wasn't the only electrical issue in all of this and the power cuts should have started some time back. It just so happened that there was an event you might have heard of called the African Cup of Nations which finished last week, crowning Egypt as the champions. Once over, the cuts happened. Coincidence? Not at all. For those in the US, it is probably difficult to understand that much as Eddie Izzard proclaimed, "Cake or Death!" it is "Football or Death!" for the rest of the world when it comes to watching the game. If Côte d'Ivoire blacked out during those matches, there would have been riots. People can drink warm beer a lot happier than watching no football, so given this disposition, the authorities realized that more power needed to appear as it wasn't coming from Azito. They turned to their minority power production that exists in the form of hydroelectricity. The dams were opened fuller than they should have been to run the turbines higher and generate more power. While this worked, it has severely reduced the banked supply of energy which is why once Azito comes back online, there still won't be enough power. All the cost of a Football Now, Sweat Later platform in government. So Populist...
Eventually, the rains will come to the far North of the country and the dams will be refilled to produce all the power that is needed. Unfortunately, this happens in May. Until then, it is what it is and the soft, purring sound of diesel generators shall be heard lulling many an Ivorian to sleep.
As a footnote very much worth mentioning, the elections that were supposed to happen for the last five years, but were truly and like, so totally going to happen last November, probably won't even happen in 2010 now. Some estimates even put them at March of 2011. The reason for this being that the president of the Election Commission was found fraudulently adding 429,000 people to the rolls that didn't exist. Naturally, it makes sense that this fellow was a member of the opposition, but this doesn't do too much for the cause of the opposition as he is now going to jail and large chunks if not all of the electoral process need to be restarted, delaying this election; which the process of having is much like distilling molasses in the middle of January, in Canada, by a couple of moose, who are holidaying in Cuba, watching the Cup of Nations, with full air conditioning through the night.
I was spoiled. Côte d'Ivoire seemed like a tropical vacation initially. Hot yes, but not insanely humid in the current season. A pleasant breeze washes across many places (especially Abidjan) in the evening and it is in general, quite pleasant. I'm here for work, but despite jetlag, I felt like I was on vacation for my first week here.
And then Tuesday hit. Without warning, in the middle of the night, the power went off and with it the water. The two systems are completely intertwined and it appears that there is no backup generator to keep the water pumping once the power stops and thus, the chateau d'eau drains quite fast leaving you in the dark and unable to wash, rinse, or flush.
Honestly, while it means stooping to heavy generalization, I should have known better. I've been to Kinshasa and the friend's place I stayed at, while having a lovely, 10th floor view of Brazzaville across the Congo River, was prone to water outages. They were prepared though and had what must have been a 500L reserve tank as high up as they could place it in the apartment to gravity feed when the water went off. Tuesday, I had no such setup and while there are buckets at my place, my wife and I had neglected to fill them. Dumb was us, but filled from henceforth they shall be.
It is an easy assumption to make that while in Côte d'Ivoire, things such as water and power wouldn't be a problem. The infrastructure is overall, very good. While something like 7,000 (presumably small) villages aren't electrified, all the main cities are properly wired and the grid, at normal times functions quite well. There is also stable internet--at home I might add. The roads are good. The Abidjan airport is very modern and even tops Kotoka in neighboring Ghana. And yes, the railroad, while only for cargo, still functions well. You would never know that the country is technically a divided one, emerged from a civil war less than a decade ago, and has the telltale white SUVs of the UN Mission flitting about the countryside.
Apparently, Côte d'Ivoire has the ability to generate 0.89 gigawatts of power. Not bad, but if they were to make full usage of all the hydroelectric power available, then they would have 2 gigawatts at the ready. The issue is that currently, they're not and on top of that, there is a large degree of electricity being exported to Ghana, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, and Togo. You can draw your own conclusions as to why this might be when there is currently a 150 megawatt deficit in the country. Naturally, it rubs me the wrong way, having lived in California during the rolling blockouts there that ended up costing the state billions of dollars in corruption waste to companies such as the now defunct Enron. This is on a smaller scale monetarily, but still the same thing.
But, what specifically happened Tuesday?
...a failure occurred on a group of central heat [no idea what this means in French] Azito. "We will be without this group until May. During this period, the country will experience a shortfall in electricity production of about 150 megawatts. So there will be disruption on the network…"
Azito is a gas-powered station in the suburbs of Abidjan. I am unclear as to what "la centrale thermique" is, but whatever the case, it isn't functioning and thus, because of this, there isn't enough electricity. The weird part in all of this is apparently a third turbine is being readied at this station, but they are waiting until demand is high enough to use it. It would seem that domestic demand is not only high enough, but due to it growing at 10% a year; it has exceeded any possible supply that is currently available. I can only figure that they must mean that they're waiting for international demand to be great enough to get this going, since that appears to be who they cater to.
I've no idea how all this plays out, but it appears that it should all get straightened out just about the same time I'm scheduled to leave the country, which seems fitting, given that I'm to blame for the troubles in the first place. It the meanwhile, I just hope that they somewhat stick to the blackout schedule and I remember to keep buckets and jerry cans full.
Until Our Independence also has a take on the situation as well.
It would be funny in a macabre way if it wasn't so damned annoying and holding back commerce in Sub-Saharan Africa. Naturally, I'm talking about electronic banking transactions and how you run in to so many roadblocks along the way. For me, it's more of an annoyance as I have European and American citizenship which my banking credentials are based upon. I can always refer back to these documents when needing to prove whatever it is that the banks need me to prove.
For someone in Africa, it's tremendously more difficult to complete online transactions, as banks and anyone other site with heavy security protocols assumes that Africa is full of scammers and frauds. Naturally, this chases away all the normal people and leaves just the scammers and frauds deceiving away, thus self-fulfilling these assumptions. And yes, it really is targeted at Africans. For instance, I had a couple of hour layover on my trip to Abidjan and I spent it catching up on things on airport wifi in Charles de Gaulle. No problems there, but the minute I fired up my machine to access the same sites in Côte d'Ivoire (in this case Facebook and my bank) all of the sudden the extra security verification greets me. This is obviously much better than an outright block, but still, it's incredibly frustrating. And again, this is because I have an established history with these sites in the US. If I were a new user, all kinds of other problems would arise, especially with Google, which I'll get in to in a later article.
But what makes me really crazy is when companies aren't honest about it. While I'm not sure if it's still the case, as they just launched a large redesign, Air France US would simply not allow you to buy tickets from from Côte d'Ivoire. And they fly to the main city of Abidjan as well as own a large stake in Air Ivoire! They don't admit it though. You encounter a generic "there was a site error" message every time you try to access things on the site, when someone accessing from Europe or North America at the exact same time has no problem. It's quite crappy and I would assume that this is not a problem when using Air France CI.
I'm not saying anything terribly new in all of this. These problems get twitted about often. They're just backwards thinking and the reason why the importance of European an American financial interests are on the wane in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Chinese and other Asian countries realize the huge market that is here and are approaching this continent as equal business partners as opposed to former colonies. Needless to say, they're finding a lot more opportunities.
So, I've been settling in to my new home well. Admittedly, as I saw, all the action is down in Abidjan and Abengourou is a bit slower pace. It's relaxing though and as there is ready internet here, I have no complaints. There really aren't too many choices in landline internet and as far as I know, Aviso is the only one in these parts.
At $45 USD a month for 1.2Mb down and 384Kb up, as internet goes in West Africa, it's pretty reasonable and so far, pretty reliable. Yes, there are times when it is slower than others, but that just makes me have more of a purpose in online activities. The farting around aspect in being online gets largely reduced.
The only problem I'm having (and this is where the request for help comes in) is that this package came with this clunky USB modem to connect with. There are two and at times more of us who need to use this connection, so this simply won't work as it is a one to one setup.
From the US I brought two ADSL modems (a Zxyel and a Brightport) as well as an Apple Airport Express. I figured that at least one of the modems would work and that the Airport could be set up with a PPPoE connection to bypass this whole USB modem garbage. It turns out that this doesn't work and I'm stumped. In theory, everything should be happy. The Airport is set up and everything gives the appearance of connecting. The modem has a solid DSL light and seems to be happy. But, when it comes to actual browsing; nothing. Pages don't resolve, nor do attempts to ping outside addresses.
At this point, I'm kicking myself for bringing the Airport because, while compact, easy to carry, and hapy to switch between 120/240v, it is also without a great many options and I can't configure the WAN side of things as I would like to. So, is it the case that I need to spend another $100 of Aviso blood money to get their router/hub (which is the upgrade to this USB modem) or is there simply some setting somewhere that I'm not aware of?
Any help would be greatly appreciated and earn a Flag or Castel (the big one, not the small one mind you) upon sucessful wifi-ification of this connection. Thank you!
For the first half of this year, I'll be based in Côte d'Ivoire. I'm really quite excited and am looking forward to working with the local tech and blogger scene in the country, which is quite strong and with some really talented people.
While I've been to Congo and Ghana before, this will allow me a longer time to dig in to the local scene and hopefully be able to promote the projects that others are working on such as those in the Akendewa organization. Also, I'll be able to attend some really great events like the upcoming BarCamp Abidjan. This is also going to give me the chance to break out of the chicken-scratch mode of French that I don't really speak and to properly learn the language once and for all as it's pretty imperative that if you want to work on pan-African projects, you really need to be bilingual in English and French. Plus, it will make me seem far fancier than I actually am.
While there, I'll still be toiling away on Maneno and working with others to expand the architecture. There are a lot of great elements in the Alloco release, but the next one, Fufu is going to allow a great deal of external customization and more URL hosting options. Plus, we should be working to promote more BlogCamps in the region to get more people online and writing.
Most importantly, it will be great to get out of the cold, dreary days that California has had recently and dig in to a plate of Alloco (loved the Ghanaian version), as well as hopefully some of those beans in a red red, which I simply can't eat enough of, although I'm as to a loss of what it's called in Côte d'Ivoire or if it even exists.
So, while I'll be spending most of my time up in Abengourou, if you pass through there or Abidjan, let me know. I'd be happy to meet up for a bière.
Two suitcases with 23kgs apiece to last me until the middle of the year. That's pretty much what I have to plan for right now. When one isn't as much of a geek, this is an easier thing to plan. When one is me, there is all kinds of electronic crap and other tool crap that needs to be tossed in to the allowed 46kgs. As seen above, that is the bulk of my non-essential items, although, despite not being clothes or a toothbrush, I find everything in there to be essential.
I'll write more about this in a later post, but I'm heading off to Côte d'Ivoire for the next five months. For those unfamiliar with Sub-Saharan Africa, it may seem like I'm actually bringing too little. But really, it's not so much that these things don't exist there (they do) but more that I prefer mine, I have them, and I don't want to buy them again. That and I'm no fashionista, so I don't need 46kgs for clothing. Some people do and they scare me to no end.
In there are pretty regular things like: screwdrivers, set of metric socket wrenches (I own nothing in the American system), tape measure, hammer, network patch cables, a DSL modem, a wired router (wireless is already there ahead of me), surge protectors, multiple power adapters, power converter, and spare laptop batteries. No, I'm not planning to do any construction while there, but you only find out how useful some tool is once you don't have it. Honestly, if I had to choose only one, it would be my ridiculously-colored, purple Leatherman Juice XE 6. It's compact and has a variety of extremely useful tools; the Swiss Army Knife of the 21st century. My wife has the smaller C2 and finds it to have no end of value. Of course, as the dents will testify, the Leatherman makes for an incredibly poor hammer.
There a few non-geek-guy things on there that are probably noteworthy. The pillow (that rolled up white thing in the left) is essential. While I can stand a foam or hard pillow for a few weeks, on an extended basis, my neck gets really messed up as it gets no love from all the computer work I do either. That is a half kilo bag of tea with my tea infuser. You really can't leave home without that either or you're going to be drinking Lipton and anyone who likes tea won't like that. Lastly, at the bottom, there is a toilet seat. Yeah, that seems rather random to bring, but once I'm there, I'll write more about that on my other, personal blog. And no, I have no plans to host any bachelor parties. That is what it is.
My Weku writes up a breakdown about a new African photo sharing site from developer Kwabena Aning in Ghana.
Bumni Oloruntoba on A Bombastic Element points out a really well-done map showing the connectedness of various African countries.
Or, "The Explorer The" in German. Clement Nyirenda comments on the fact that Germany officially told people to get off Internet Explorer; a move of Germany's seconded by France just yesterday. I mean, think about it, how often do France and Germany agree on anything? So yes, Internet Explorer is that bad.
For those unfamiliar with it, The Daily WTF is a collection of ridiculous stories from technology. It has a decidedly geeky focus though, and at times, they mention a joke in some programming language that even leaves me scratching my head. But, there is an overarching theme to a great many of the articles that come through in that some geek recounts how he was hired to rehash some system, somewhere that someone cobbled together with something that somewhat worked.
While good for a laugh, it belies the fact that a lot of organizations simply do not have the budget to hire a tech or web person (at least prior to this global economic crisis anyways.) This in turn means that someone who is probably happier taking photographs or coordinating reports becomes the de facto in-house tech person and is forced to make a great number of decisions that aren't necessarily beneficial to the organization short of helping some goal limp to its finish. Then, somewhere down the line, someone stands back, shakes their head, and says, "Holy hell, this needs some advising from someone with the word 'technology' in their title."
I'm assuming that there is something of a similar backstory to this and is the reason that Tobias at Kabissa posted an open discussion about web solutions in Africa. It's a good thread, which most likely due to the tragedy in Haiti hasn't been seen by a lot of folks due to the work going on amidst the destruction there and the work that needs doing.
I just wanted to point it out as there have been a great variety of items submitted to the discussion. I wrote a lengthy chunk that I actually want to work over a bit and post here as I left out Google Sites as an option and a number of things could be refined.
Overall though, people were suggesting a great many of the CMS solutions that exist for free and for an organization with a limited budget present fantastic opportunities to leave behind whatever set of static HTML pages 27 people had added to over the last 10 years. More input is needed though and as Tobias pointed out after a number of posts had come through, there should be more of a focus on finding whatever most approximates a silver bullet insofar as a solution goes. Naturally this varies a great deal given the environment and focus of the organization, but still there are a number of different options that are all good, but most of us showed up to the discussion ready to ride our favorite bicycle, which probably hasn't helped the organization in deciding on what they should go with. I suppose it's because ultimately there is no perfect solution and so, the discussion needs more discussing.
Observations from a blogger who has come back in to the blogging fold after other social media systems have picked up in popularity. Definitely food for thought.
A really fantastic graphic about Americans and how they give to charities. Basically, they give a lot, but not necessarily wisely. Take a look, it's mostly pictures!
If you haven't give it a try. This could really change things a great deal in the video arena for those of us on slower connections. Of course, it doesn't work on every video on YouTube, but the fact that they're deploying this is quite cool.
Just this last week, @googleafrica fired up and started tweeting. Now, this account has been around for a very long time and was completely unused. I can't really fault them for just wanting to hold it. Given the massive adoption rate that Twitter has seen, it was inevitable that they could easily lose out on what is there name. From the first tweet on January 6th, they've already amassed 200 followers. Not bad. Not bad at all.
Anyone who reads my blog with regularity knows that I've been very critical of the Google Africa blog with what I feel is good reason given that it doesn't relate pressing news or give much information in general as to Google's work in Africa--and Google does a lot of work in Africa. I'm very curious to see how the Twitter account will work out.
I find blogs to be more of a broadcast medium and Twitter to be more of a social medium. For the Twitter to go anywhere, that will mean engaging the audience a great deal more than the blog does. It's obviously too early to pass any judgment on this, but I am curious as to how they'll approach their Twitter account. Of course more than anything, I'm really interested as to the "Why now?" element in all of it, except that it's the start of a new year.
On a separate note, they're following 43 people. If you look through that list and are familiar with Twitter and bloggers in Africa, you'll see a lot of the same names are on other lists. It's a bit scary to think that the list of those important to Africa (a continent of one billion people) on Twitter is just 43 people. I think that more than the tweets they produce, who they follow in time, or put on lists will be more interesting if they work to engage the Twitter medium more.
