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Nkandla from the air: New high res photos released

Scoop of the morning goes to Eyewitness News and Tech Central, which have jointly published new aerial photos of President Jacob Zuma’s controversial compound Nkandla, taken from a high altitude plane. Neither site has revealed the source of the photos, which were shot in August, but they’re more recent than both Google Maps shots of the area and Microsoft’s Bing images, as well as Apple Maps and Nokia’s imagery.

You can see the new pic here.

Nkandla was declared a ‘national key point‘ in 2010. The National Keypoints Act is an apartheid-era law which restricts citizens from accessing information about or photographing places deemed inherent to national security, and a report on the current constitutionality of the Act is due to report back this week.

When security minister Siyabonga Cwele asked the press to stop publishing pictures of Nkandla last week, most papers responded by putting the complex on their front page.

The aerial photos published today may well be the most serious challenge to the Act regarding Nkandla yet – in many countries with similar legislation, Google and Microsoft are obliged to obscure images of installations deemed to be secret by national governments. These rulings are open to interpretation, however, and not all services comply with all requests.

As Tech Central points out, Nkandla is visible already in various stages of its construction on other mapping sites. Nokia & Yahoo! carry this picture, for example, while Apple carries the one below.

nkandla nokia
Nokia & Yahoo!
apple
Nkandla on Apple Maps

If you really want to see Nkandla, though, City Press’ annotated image from last week is still probably the most illuminating.

City Press' hillside shot from last week.
City Press’ hillside shot from last week.

(Main pic CC GovernmentZA – Zuma handing over houses in Nkandla from Flickr.)

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