So, the vague figure of "more than" 30 000 has been bandied around as the number of children that have been abducted and enslaved in Uganda by the Joseph Kony led LRA. I feel it is important to note that this occurred over a period of approximately 26 years. So that works out to a tad over one thousand abductions a year on average. Also important to note are reports that Joseph Kony has not been active in Uganda since 2006, this fact confirmed with a very brief mention in KONY2012. Kony is believed to be in nearby Sudan or Congo now.
So let me get this straight, the plan is to help fund the Ugandan army and put pressure on the US government to assist an incredibly corrupt (another story for another time) Ugandan government capture a man who hasnt been in the country for the last 6 years???
I feel like now is as good a time as ever to bring up the fact that according to data gathered and reported by the United Nations (UN) in their annual Human Development Report in 2007 that 51.5% of the then 31 million Ugandans lived below the internationally recognised poverty line of LESS THAN $1.25 A DAY!!!
For those who are not so good with numbers let me put it straight for you.
In 2007 approximately:
0 Ugandans were abducted by Josesph Kony and the LRA
however,
15.5 million Ugandans were considered to be living in poverty
- This picture shows the % of populations living in poverty (on less than $1.25 per day)
For those who dont know how to interpret or cant see the legend, red = real bad
and for those with poor geography knowledge more than half of Africa = red
If my memory of the principles of simultaneous equations is correct then i get,
more than half of Africa = real bad
- This picture was taken at a Darfur refugee camp in the neighboring Sudan, one of Joseph Kony's potential countries of occupancy. Darfur refugee camps are estimated to have a population totaling 2-3 million all of whom are living in poverty
In case you are not questioning the premise of the KONY2012 campaign yet here's a quote from a Ugandan Journalist by the name of Angelo Izama,
"To call the campaign a misrepresentation is an understatement. While it draws attention to the fact that Kony, indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in 2005, is still on the loose, its portrayal of his alleged crimes in Northern Uganda are from a bygone era. At the height of the war, especially between 1999 and 2004, large hordes of children took refuge on the streets of Gulu town to escape the horrors of abduction and brutal conscriptions to the ranks of the LRA. Today most of these children are semi adults. Many are still on the streets unemployed. Gulu has the highest number of child prostitutes in Uganda, It also has one of the higest rates of HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis."
So,
I'm asking you to reconsider the facts, maybe research some facts yourself and then decide,
Are you just jumping on another pop culture bandwagon without really knowing what youre doing?
Or is this cause truly the single greatest issue the world is currently facing and that we should all be uniting behind it and putting all our dollars, efforts and energies into?
Or should we simply be buying stoves?
