A report from GlobalVoices, from a local independent blogger:
Zimbabwe's cyberpunk cities fueled by China
Interrogating the narratives behind Zimbabwe’s smart cities
The government is making a suburb. aka New Harare, with full internet integration. The companies behind this are Chinese government linked companies such as Huawei.
What could go wrong?
Forget the old fashioned methods of just tearing down the suburbs where you are not popular, or sending the bully boys to terrorize villages. With China's help, the plan has upgraded to Big Brother.
New Harare’s plans for omnipresent facial recognition tech combined with AI will usher Zimbabwe into a dystopian era. The technology will be able to match a person’s live images with centralized databases and alert law enforcement when a suspected criminal is detected.
In Zimbabwe, where freedoms are harshly curtailed by the regime of President Emerson Mnangagwa, there are also politically-motivated ulterior motives for this technology. In fact, CCTV (Closed-circuit television) cameras are already being placed in Zimbabwe’s cities where opposition movements are strong.
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