African smartphone users will soon have an alternative means to get round the power shortages afflicting much of the world’s poorest continent – a portable charger that relies on hydrogen fuel cells.
British company Intelligent Energy plans to roll out 1-million of the new chargers in mid-December, mainly in Nigeria and South Africa, after successfully testing them in Nigeria over the last five months, its consumer electronics managing director, Amar Samra, said.
“In emerging markets where the grids are not reliable and people are using [mobile phones] as a primary device, it is mission critical; if you’re out, you’re out,” Samra said on the sidelines of a telecoms conference in Cape Town.
The chargers are designed to back up the spread of smartphones and tablets across countries where cellphones have already helped to transform lives and businesses.
(Pic: Reuters)
Industry body GSMA, which represents about 800 of the world’s mobile operators, said in its latest report that smartphones were key to boosting mobile Internet access in sub-Saharan Africa where current penetration of 4% of the population lags the global average of 17%.
Ericsson predicts that smartphone traffic in Africa will increase tenfold between 2013 and 2019, when around 476-million devices will be in use.
“Alternative sources of power are very important, because smartphones and other devices need lots of power and you need to charge up every four hours, so for a businessman it is crucial,” said Melvin Angula, an engineer attending the conference.
The hydrogen chargers, which fit easily into a handbag, consist of a fuel cell and a non-disposable cartridge that can be detached when exhausted.
Samra said consumers could expect to pay less than $5 dollars to “refuel” a cartridge of the charger.
This would translate to a cost of less than $1 to charge a phone, he said, adding that final costs would ultimately depend on how telecoms companies marketed and sold the product.
Samra said that if bought over the counter, the entire device will cost under $200, although options being considered include $10 a month for a two-year contract or getting it for free.
“We always have problems with cell batteries, so everybody will be keen for portable energy. But, it has to be the right price for it to fly in our markets,” said businessperson Thabo Magagula, who also attended the conference.
Besides Intelligent Energy, Japan’s Aquafairy has also been developing fuel cell chargers, Samra said.
Other companies, such as Dubai-based developer Solarway, have launched solar powered kiosks designed for communities that are not linked to a power grid, each capable of charging up to 40 cellphones a day.
As his feet hit the pedals at lightning speed, Haile Gebrselassie barely breaks a sweat on an exercise bike at his gym in the Ethiopian capital’s upscale Bole district.
He then proceeds to work on his chest muscles, hours after jogging down the forested hills in the northern suburbs of Addis Ababa.
The 40-year-old still maintains the tough regimen that brought him track glory and international recognition for two decades, after clinching the 5 000 metres and 10 000 metres races at the 1992 Junior World Championships in Seoul.
Some 27 world records, two Olympic gold medals and four World Championships titles later, Gebrselassie, regarded by many as the greatest long distance runner of all time, says he still does not know when he will retire from sport.
But he has yet to start on his one longstanding ambition – to enter politics – something he now plans to do at Ethiopia’s legislative elections, in two years’ time.
“Now I think I am a little bit mature. As I told you in 2010, my ambition was politics,” he told Reuters. “Now 2015 is the perfect time.”
“People think I will become a parliamentarian, but the competition won’t be easy. That’s why I needed to prepare two years in advance.”
Haile Gebrselassie celebrates with his national flag after competing in the men’s 10 000m final at the “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. (AFP)
Known as “The Emperor”, Gebrselassie enjoys immense popularity in the Horn of Africa country and has used his winnings to build a successful business empire including hotels, a car dealership, a cinema and a sports complex.
But some in Ethiopia have expressed their surprise at his political aspirations, given the country’s dubious democratic track record.
Politics is dominated by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front, in power since 1991 when it ousted Mengistu Haile Mariam’s military junta.
In Parliament, all but two of the 547 seats are held by the ruling party. There is one independent member and only one from an opposition party, which often accuses the government of arbitrarily arresting its members.
Gebrselassie plans to run as an independent, and says he is not daunted by the prospects of politics tarnishing his reputation as a sporting hero. The ruling party had yet to express a clear opinion on the popular athlete’s bid for public office.
Sport scandal “We are dreaming about a democracy like the ones in Europe and America, it’s a long process. How can you expect [that] in 20 years?,” he said.
Ethiopia has come a long way, he says, from the days of military leader Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose purges killed tens of thousands of people in the mid-1970s when victims’ bodies were often left in the street to discourage dissent.
“We have to give chances. Now we are here, at least we are safe to come back home, at least we are safe to do something else,” he said.
Gebrselassie has yet to issue a policy manifesto, but he says he would support measures to help fight poverty and enable Ethiopia to become a middle-income country.
“As citizens, all of us have a responsibility. Its not only a responsibility for the government or the opposition, all of us have our own responsibility,” he said.
“If we achieve that … we can change this country, we can reach the democracy we dream [of] and we can eradicate poverty.”
Speaking on the latest doping scandal to hit international athletics, Gebrselassie urged anti-doping bodies to widen the scope of their investigations, after former world sprint champion Tyson Gay failed a dope test but denied knowingly taking a performance-enhancing drug.
The scandal marked yet another blow for the sport after former world 100 meters record holder Asafa Powell and Olympic 4×100 meters relay silver medallist Sherone Simpson also said they had both tested positive for the stimulant oxilophrine at June’s Jamaican championships.
Gay said he had “put his trust in someone” and that he had been let down.
Gebrselassie said he “still could not believe” the weekend’s disclosures.
“It’s better to stop these problems from the root. You don’t know sometimes, [whether] in these kind of problems there is someone behind [the athlete’s doping],” he said.
In Nouakchott, a dusty city wedged between the Atlantic ocean and western dunes of the Sahara, a young hip-hop fan co-ordinates a diverse group of hackers targeting websites worldwide in the name of Islam.
Logging on to his computer, he greets his Facebook fans with a “good morning all” in English before posting links to 746 websites they have hacked in the last 48 hours along with his digital calling card: a half-skull, half-cyborg Guy Fawkes mask.
He calls himself Mauritania Attacker, after the remote Islamic republic in West Africa from which he leads a youthful group scattered across the Maghreb, southeast Asia and the West.
The Mauritania Attacker’s current profile picture on Facebook.
As jihadists battle regional governments from the deserts of southern Algeria to the scrubland of north Nigeria, Mauritania Attacker says the hacking collective which he founded, AnonGhost, is fighting for Islam using peaceful means.
“We’re not extremists,” he said, via a Facebook account which a cyber security expert identified as his. “AnonGhost is a team that hacks for a cause. We defend the dignity of Muslims.”
During a series of conversations via Facebook, the 23-year-old spoke of his love of house music and hip-hop, and the aims of his collective, whose targets have included US and British small businesses and the oil industry.
He represents a new generation of western-style Islamists who promote religious conservatism and traditional values, and oppose those they see as backing Zionism and Western hegemony.
An unlikely hacker base
In April, AnonGhost launched a cyber attack dubbed OpIsrael that disrupted access to several Israeli government websites, attracting the attention of security experts worldwide.
“AnonGhost is considered one of the most active groups of hacktivists of the first quarter of 2013,” said Pierluigi Paganini, security analyst and editor of Cyber Defense magazine.
An online archive of hacked websites, Hack DB, lists more than 10 400 domains AnonGhost defaced in the past seven months.
Mauritania, a poor desert nation straddling the Arab Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, is an unlikely hacker base. It has 3.5 million inhabitants spread across an area the size of France and Germany, and only 3% of them have internet access.
Much of the population lives in the capital Nouakchott, which has boomed from a town of less than 10 000 people 40 years ago to a sprawling, ramshackle city of a million inhabitants. In its suburbs, tin and cinder-block shanties battle the Sahara’s encroaching dunes and desert nomads stop to water their camels.
In the past six months experts have noted an increase in hacking activity from Mauritania and neighbouring countries. In part, that reflects Mauritania Attacker’s role in connecting pockets of hackers, said Carl Herberger, vice-president of security solutions at Radware.
“This one figure, Mauritania Attacker, is kind a figure who brings many of these groups together,” Herberger told Reuters.
Modern technology, ancient mission
Mauritania Attacker says his activities are split between cyber cafes and his home, punctuated by the five daily Muslim prayers.
Well-educated, he speaks French and Arabic among other languages and updates his social media accounts regularly with details of the latest defacements and email hacks. He would not say how he made a living.
His cyber threats are often accented with smiley faces and programmer slang, and he posts links to dance-floor hits and amusing YouTube videos. But his message is a centuries-old Islamist call for return to religious purity.
“Today Islam is divisive and corrupt,” he said in an online exchange. “We have abandoned the Qur’an.”
Mauritania Attacker aims to promote “correct Islam” by striking at servers hosted by countries they see as hostile to Sharia law. “There is no Islam without Sharia,” he said.
Mauritania is renowned for its strict Islamic law. The sale of alcohol is forbidden and it is one of only a handful of states where homosexuality and atheism are punished by death.
The quality of Mauritania’s religious scholars and Quranic schools, or madrassas, attract students from around the world. Mauritanians have risen to prominent positions in regional jihadist groups, including al-Qaeda’s north African branch Aqim.
As hackers from the region organise into groups, the Maghreb is emerging as a haven for hacktivism as it lacks the laws and means to prosecute cyber criminals, Herberger said.
“There’s a great degree of anonymity and there’s a great degree of implied impunity,” he said.
Security sources in Nouakchott said they were not aware of the activities of Mauritania Attacker.
He says he supports Islamists in Mauritania but opposes his government’s support for the West, which sees the country as one of its main allies in its fight against al-Qaeda in the region.
With tech-savy young Muslims in the Maghreb chafing under repressive regimes, analysts anticipate a rise in hacktivism.
Hacking is a way for young people to express religious and political views without being censored, says Aaron Zelin, a Washington Institute fellow.
“These societies are relatively closed in terms of people’s ability to openly discuss topics that are taboo,” he said.
For disillusioned youth in countries like Mauritania, where General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz seized power in a 2008 coup before winning elections the next year, hacking has become “a way of expressing their distaste with status quo,” Zelin said.
Capability
AnonGhost’s global reach is its greatest weapon, but it has yet to stage a major attack on a western economic target.
Most of AnonGhost’s campaigns have simply defaced websites, ranging from kosher dieting sites to American weapon aficionado blogs, with messages about Islam and anti-Zionism.
It has attacked servers, often hosting small business websites, located in the United States, Brazil, France, Israel and Germany among others.
Mauritania Attacker and the AnonGhost crew say these countries have “betrayed Muslims” by supporting Israel and by participating in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“We are the new generation of Muslims and we are not stupid,” read a message posted on the website of a party supply business in Italy. “We represent Islam. We fight together. We stand together. We die together.”
The team has also leaked email credentials, some belonging to government workers from the United States and elsewhere.
As part of a June 20 operation against the oil industry, carried out alongside the international hacking network Anonymous, Mauritania Attacker released what he said were the email addresses and passwords for employees of Total.
A spokesperson for the French oil major did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
One security expert said AnonGhost’s attacks exploited “well-known vulnerabilities in configurations of servers” in target countries rather than going after high-profile companies.
Carl Herberger, vice-president of security solutions at Radware, remains unconvinced AnonGhost has the technical skills to wage full-scale cyber terrorism by harming operational capabilities of companies or government agencies.
“The jury is still out,” he said, but cautioned against underestimating the emerging group. “You’re never quite sure what they’re going to do on the offensive, so they have to be right only once and you have to be right always.”
After two days trapped in freezing cold water and breathing from an air bubble in an upturned tugboat under the ocean, Harrison Okene was sure he was going to die. Then a torch light pierced the darkness.
Okene (29) is a ship’s cook who was on board the Jascon-4 tugboat when it capsized on May 26 due to heavy Atlantic ocean swells around 30km off the coast of Nigeria, while stabilising an oil tanker filling up at a Chevron platform.
Of the 12 people on board, divers recovered 10 dead bodies while a remaining crew member has not been found.
Somehow Okene survived, breathing inside a four foot high bubble of air as it shrunk in the waters slowly rising from the ceiling of the tiny toilet and adjoining bedroom where he sought refuge, until two South African divers eventually rescued him.
“I was there in the water in total darkness just thinking it’s the end. I kept thinking the water was going to fill up the room but it did not,” Okene said, parts of his skin peeling away after days soaking in the salt water.
“I was so hungry but mostly so, so thirsty. The salt water took the skin off my tongue,” he said. Seawater got into his mouth but he had nothing to eat or drink throughout his ordeal.
Harrison Okene says it’s a ‘miracle’ that he survived. (Reuters)
At 4.50am on May 26, Okene says he was in the toilet when he realised the tugboat was beginning to turn over. As water rushed in and the Jascon-4 flipped, he forced open the metal door.
“As I was coming out of the toilet it was pitch black so we were trying to link our way out to the water tidal [exit hatch],” Okene told Reuters in his home town of Warri, a city in Nigeria’s oil-producing Niger Delta.
“Three guys were in front of me and suddenly water rushed in full force. I saw the first one, the second one, the third one just washed away. I knew these guys were dead.”
What he didn’t know was that he would spend the next two and a half days trapped under the sea praying he would be found.
Turning away from his only exit, Okene was swept along a narrow passageway by surging water into another toilet, this time adjoining a ship’s officers cabin, as the overturned boat crashed onto the ocean floor. To his amazement he was still breathing.
Okene, wearing only his underpants, survived around a day in the four foot square toilet, holding onto the overturned washbasin to keep his head out of the water.
He built up the courage to open the door and swim into the officer’s bedroom and began pulling off the wall panelling to use as a tiny raft to lift himself out of the freezing water.
Fish eating dead bodies
He sensed he was not alone in the darkness.
“I was very, very cold and it was black. I couldn’t see anything,” says Okene, staring into the middle distance.
“But I could perceive the dead bodies of my crew were nearby. I could smell them. The fish came in and began eating the bodies. I could hear the sound. It was horror.”
What Okene didn’t know was a team of divers sent by Chevron and the ship’s owners, West African Ventures, were searching for crew members, assumed by now to be dead.
Then in the afternoon of May 28, Okene heard them.
“I heard a sound of a hammer hitting the vessel. Boom, boom, boom. I swam down and found a water dispenser. I pulled the water filter and I hammered the side of the vessel hoping someone would hear me. Then the diver must have heard a sound.”
Divers broke into the ship and Okene saw light from a head torch of someone swimming along the passageway past the room.
“I went into the water and tapped him. I was waving my hands and he was shocked,” Okene said, his relief still visible.
He thought he was at the bottom of the sea, although the company says it was 30 metres below.
The diving team fitted Okene with an oxygen mask, diver’s suit and helmet and he reached the surface at 19.32pm, more than 60 hours after the ship sank, he says.
Okene says he spent another 60 hours in a decompression chamber where his body pressure was returned to normal. Had he just been exposed immediately to the outside air he would have died.
The cook describes his extraordinary survival story as a “miracle” but the memories of his time in the watery darkness still haunt him and he is not sure he will return to the sea.
“When I am at home sometimes it feels like the bed I am sleeping in is sinking. I think I’m still in the sea again. I jump up and I scream,” Okene said, shaking his head.
“I don’t know what stopped the water from filling that room. I was calling on God. He did it. It was a miracle.”
Abdu Ibrahim Mohammed was 15 years old when he began trekking with caravans of camels to collect salt in a sun-blasted desert basin of north Ethiopia that is one of the hottest places on earth.
Now 51 and retired, he has passed his camels to his son to pursue this centuries-old trade in “white gold” from the Danakil Depression, where rain almost never falls and the average temperature is 34.4 degrees celsius.
Sulphur and mineral salt formations are seen near Dallol in the Danakil Depression, northern Ethiopia. (Pic: Reuters)
But the tradition of hacking salt slabs from the earth’s crust and transporting them by camel is changing as a paved road is built across the northern Afar region.
Although the road being cut through the Danakil Depression is making it easier to transport the salt, the region’s fiercely independent local salt miners and traders are wary of the access it might give to industrial mining companies with mechanised extraction techniques that require far less labour.
“Most of the people who live here are dependent on the salt caravans, so we are not happy with prospective salt companies that try to set up base here,” said Abdullah Ali Noor, a chief and clan leader’s son in Hamad-Ile, on the salt desert’s edge.
“Everything has to be initiated from the community. We prefer to stick with the old ways,” he added.
Thousands of camel herders and salt extractors use traditional hoes and axes to carve the “white gold” out of the ground in the Danakil Depression.
Many of the salt diggers live in Hamad-Ile and hire out their services to different caravans. The work, however exhausting, still draws thousands onto the baking salt flats.
“You forget about the sun and the heat,” said Kidane Berhe (45), a camel herder and salt merchant. “I lost a friend once on the salt desert because he was working too much with no protection from the sun. Eventually he just collapsed.”
Once workers find a suitable place to mine salt, they extract, shape and pack as many salt slabs as possible before starting their two-day journey to the town of Berahile. (Pic: Reuters)
The tarmac road will link the highland city of Mekele with the village of Dallol in the Danakil Depression, a harsh but hauntingly beautiful geographical wonder of salt flats and volcanoes once described as “a land of death” by the famous British desert explorer Wilfred Thesiger.
The road has cut from five hours to three the drive from Mekele to Berahile, a town two days’ trek by camel from the Afar salt deposits that one of Ethiopia’s main sources of the crystalline food product.
New roads like these are gradually helping to transform this landlocked Horn of Africa state, which has a unique culture and history but has been racked by coups, famines and droughts, into one of the fastest-growing economies on the continent.
As Africa’s biggest coffee producer, Ethiopia’s economy remains based on agriculture, which accounts for 46% of gross domestic product and 85% of employment. But its nearly 94-million population – the second biggest in Africa – is attracting the attention of foreign investors hungry for new markets.
Access to market
Further south in the Danakil Depression, at the salt reserve of Lake Afdera, industrial salt production is already underway.
A company named Berhane and Zewdu PLC came to the desert plains near Hamad-Ile in 2011 aiming to produce salt there, according to Noor.
Clan leaders saw the threat to their ancient trade and lined up to oppose the project. Fearing sabotage of its equipment, the company left the following year, local people said.
But Noor still welcomed the new road.
“The new highway will give easy access to the market, which will bring benefits and development to this region,” Noor said.
The development he talks of is visible in Berahile, where caravans from the salt pans come to drop off their cargo so it can be transported to the rest of the country. Most residents are involved directly or indirectly in the salt business.
Telephone and electricity networks have been extended to the town over the past four years, a new Berahile Salt Association was established in 2010 to facilitate trade and a recently built salt store is now the biggest construction in town.
“Thousands of people benefit from this work as the salt here is exported throughout the country,” said the head of the association, Derassa Shifa.
A man prepares bars of salt to be sold in the main market of the city of Mekele, northern Ethiopia. (Pic: Reuters)
For now, tradition and modernity co-exist – the organisation buys salt from the caravans that make the four-day trek to the salt flats and back, then sells it to merchants who carry it away by truck.
The salt blocks, which were once used as a unit of money, are sold across Ethiopia, many of them to farmers to provide their animals with essential minerals. Ethiopia has the largest livestock population on the African continent.
