It’s Friday morning, just after 8AM. A blanket of clouds fills the sky over a hot and humid morning in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo. On the pavement of Martires da Machava Avenue, everyone wants to get a newspaper but there are not enough to go around. Near the entrance to the yard, a knot of people tussle over a diminishing pack of newspapers.
A few minutes later, an old man dressed in a grey suit pulls up in a silver Range Rover Sport to jump out and grab his newspaper.
This happens every Friday because in Maputo, everyone wants to know. Verdade, which means the truth in Portuguese, is a free newspaper in more ways than one. It is a newspaper that often criticizes and upsets the authorities.
On this particular Friday, the paper publishes comments written by readers on a wall outside the Verdade offices, saying the people are not happy the president of the Democratic Movement for Mozambique, Daviz Simango, won the municipal elections.
Erik Charas, an electrical and mechanical engineer turned entrepreneur, started Verdade six years ago, which appears to be flourishing in a world where newspapers are dying. Verdade is Mozambique’s best read newspaper.
Charas believes that Verdade can be a tool of change in his country’s fight against poverty.
“I thought I’d do greater good for my country than contributing to the bottom line of a company,” says Charas.
Unlike many developed countries where information flows like water, in Mozambique newspapers are expensive and scarce.
Verdade skirts politics and concentrates on the issues of the people: electricity prices; crime; HIV/AIDs and bread subsidies. It receives about 5,000 SMSes a month for a section that focuses on sex and health. The paper also touches on entertainment, nightlife and lifestyle in Maputo.
What also makes this newspaper popular is that it publishes Facebook comments from its readers.
Charas is an unlikely newspaper baron. After leaving his engineering job, he went on to teach at a university in Mozambique before spending nine years at the Graça Machel Foundation.
He left the foundation to try and fail as an entrepreneur. His stint at the foundation was successful and he was signing million-dollar cheques for the projects it ran. He left without having any plan whatsoever.
He launched his own company with various sub-companies within it, including infrastructure, telecoms, finance and transportation. He founded Verdade in 2008 with around $500,000 that he had raised from previous business ventures and private investments.
Verdade appeared to be an outlandish idea, but exploited a loophole in the market left by official and government newspapers, which are not popular with the people.
When it was launched, Charas says the goal was to reach around 50% of the literate population in six years, but sights had to be lowered. There are roughly 12 million people in Mozambique who can read and write. However, according to Charas, Verdade is read by a mere million people, 10 times more than any other official newspaper in Mozambique.
Back at Martires da Machava Avenue, workers distribute newspapers from a garage at the back of a house where 10 journalists work. Verdade workers hand out around 5,000 copies from the pavement outside. Fifty drivers deliver the paper across the country using bright yellow txopelas (tuk-tuks) in Verdade branding. About 2,000 copies are delivered in Nampula; Quelimane receives about 1,000; Pemba 200 and 100 in Bilene. About 1,300 newspapers are flown to Chimoio and Inhambane.
In some of these cities, the paper is distributed on street corners and bus stops.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing for this popular newspaper. In 2013, Verdade saw sales dropping and experienced a loss of 20% in advertising renewals.
“A lot of our renewals say they got calls from officials saying ‘oh you can’t advertise in that paper—it gets critical’,” says Charas.
The print run was cut from 50,000 to 20,000.
“We want to print more papers for the rural areas, rather than for the city dwellers who have internet and can access the newspaper using their phones,” he says.
As for the future? Charas says they would like to associate Verdade with advertisements that people trust and do not give a false message. The 32-paged newspaper has almost no advertisements. Charas says newspaper ads will only get the thumbs up once they have gone through screening for truthfulness in its message.
Charas says he would only like to associate the newspaper with advertising that is truthful because readers trust and believe in the Verdade brand, which he says is linked to advertising.
“We are taking the trust our readers have put in us to a new stage. And you might ask us why… We’ve built a very strong brand that people trust and identify with… People look at it beyond just a newspaper title. It’s part of their voice and people contribute to it.”
“We’re taking responsibility of knowing that if I say that this water is good for you, people will totally trust that and move in mass towards one product or one process. We’ve seen that with the elections. We measured it. We went through the process of doing research about it. We worked with Paul Collier from Oxford University. They did research on the impact of information that gets carried through our newspaper [and the effect it] has on people’s actions and you could tell that [Verdade] really does&#8230;,” says Charas.
Another exciting venture is that the company bought a huge printer in northern Mozambique, which is part of the expansion for Verdade. The people in this part of the country often threaten Verdade employees, demanding the right to know the truth. The paper is currently printed in Nelspruit, South Africa.
Despite the harassment to advertisers and nearly losing revenues through advertising that could force the newspaper to shut down, Charas says Verdade will not go down without a fight.
“If we have to sink while telling the truth, so be it,” he says.

The Truth Hurts

The invention of the automobile has gone hand-in-hand with an unfortunate counterpart: accidents. This has been, mainly, due to driver error, rather than mechanical failure, so the objective for some time has been to eliminate this factor and make the daily commute less stressful. Popular culture brought us examples of cars that were capable of driving themselves, Knight Rider’s Knight Industries Three Thousand (KITT) for example, and it seems these once fairy tale visions will soon be realized.
The development of autonomous cars—and we’ll get to why this term is specifically used, rather than “driverless” vehicles—has been built on advances in safety that really started with seemingly innocuous features such as ABS. Here, an on-board computer senses heavy braking and intervenes before the wheels lock up. It’s therefore trying to circumvent human error, which is what autonomous cars do—just on a grander scale.
Volvo introduced its City Safety feature on their XC60 range some years back, which made use of lasers that could sense an impending accident. The technology assisted drivers by applying the brakes, up to 100% if required. The goal has been to use autonomous driving technology for those tedious commutes to work and back where frustration, tiredness, traffic jams and all those other aggravating factors come into play. This led to the development of FROG (Free Ranging On Grid technology); a car with an on-board computer loaded with maps. The vehicle knows where its starting location is and it checks its progress along the way by counting wheel revolutions, and its proximity to electronic beacons.
FROG is already being used for loading cargo as well as in factories, and the intention is to use it for public transportation. In this scenario, passengers go to a stop point and press a button; essentially calling the car as one would an elevator. You’d then get on and disembark at whichever location you’d selected as you would on a bus or train. Naturally, the downfall of the system is that the vehicles only go to predetermined places.
The autonomous cars of our future will make use of a range of technologies including radar, GPS, computer vision and would necessitate that the various systems of the car communicate with each other. Like the human brain, the aim is to take sensory information, interpret it and react in an appropriate manner. Some systems even allow for their maps to be updated as a result of changes to the environment. Once the technology is widespread enough, we could imagine a scenario where cars could “talk” to one another by sending warnings, to those further behind, of forthcoming obstacles.
Numerous car manufacturers have jumped on the autonomous vehicle bandwagon, but perhaps the most innovative leader in the field is not a maker of transportation, but search engine giant Google. The company has made use of retrofitted cars—usually a Toyota Prius or Lexus RX450H—loaded with LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging), rangefinders, cameras and GPS sensors. Each car’s equipment costs in the region of $150,000 and there are usually 10 vehicles on the road at any given time, testing the systems thoroughly. The current expense of such technology is certainly a deterring factor for any prospective users, as polls have already indicated.
With time prices will decrease; in the future drivers may get some form of rebate or financial assistance from insurance companies. Offsetting the initial outlay are numerous benefits such as increased safety, fewer collisions, less congestion therefore increased road capacity, higher speed limits for autonomous cars, alleviation of parking problems—cars could drop us off and find parking far away and come collect us when required—and an increase in fuel efficiency.
Engineer Sebastian Thrun, the co-inventor of Google’s Street View and a director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, started the Google autonomous car project. Extensive testing has taken place and the cars have driven on roads notorious for their choking traffic or dangerous bends, such as San Francisco’s Lombard Street.
Each car is accompanied by a driver, with an unblemished record, and a Google engineer in the passenger seat. In case of emergencies, the cars have an override system in place, which is very similar to those we find on modern cars with cruise control. Only two minor accidents have been recorded during the more than 482,000 kilometers of testing. Google claims that in both instances a person was driving, not the autonomous system and that the last instance was a bumper-bashing where the Google car got rear-ended.
The above begs consideration for two important points, firstly legislature concerning driverless cars and secondly, who is liable in the case of litigation. In all countries, the law presumes that a human adult is driving their vehicle. On March 1, 2012, the state of Nevada was the first to pass a law allowing for the operation of autonomous cars. In September, California and Florida followed suit.
Unsurprisingly, Nevada requires a person to be behind the wheel at all times to take over in emergency situations. License plates for future driverless cars in Nevada will be red and have an infinity symbol on the left-hand side. This of course limits the benefits of such vehicles as intoxicated drivers, minors or the unlicensed still couldn’t operate them.
In terms of the legal repercussions governing autonomous cars involved in accidents, some creative solutions have been put forward. One idea makes use of an example we’d never normally associate with driving: vaccines. The idea is that autonomous cars will be extremely safe but like a vaccine, where there is a tiny chance it could harm the patient, these vehicles could too. When a fatal accident occurs, according to this theory, the family would be compensated by a fund set up for this purpose.
Another school of thought is that the purchasers, not the manufacturers, of such cars take upon themselves the responsibility. This sounds reasonable until we consider that a software bug or mechanical failure could result in jail time or the driver being sued when in essence, he had no control over the situation. The more likely option is that the manufacturer would carry the blame, and costs incurred, should their product be found wanting. That’s a bitter pill to swallow as even if the percentage of defects is 1, this could still translate into extremely expensive lawsuits.
The last option is to spread the responsibility across all driverless car owners. They’d take out a special insurance package and the insurers would be responsible for determining whether the system, manufacturer or driver was at fault. This is still a complicated approach and difficult to implement but it would necessitate that car manufacturers would have to up their game which, in the long run, benefits everyone.
Jim Pisz, head of Toyota’s business strategy in North America, sums it up: “We feel that with autonomous driving, the driver should always be in control. It’s a critical element to our philosophy: autonomous does not mean driverless.”
Guess we won’t be calling KITT on our watch phone to save us from a sticky situation any time soon.

Tag: Mechanical

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