This Kony 2012 Buisness

As many of you may know unless you live under a rock, a new fad has risen because of a certain KONY 2012 video. One thing I have to say before I begin is for those of you who are now think your social activist just because you tweet/facebook the video, your not all your doing is annoying people and possibly hurting the cause. There are now many people who think this is now the worst thing world but if you actually cared you would probably have known about this before as it has been going on for years.

 

While I was looking at this topic on the interwebs I stumbled upon this article. What this article does is point out how the charity Invisible Children is one of the shadiest charities I have ever seen. The first thing is they are only spending a very small portion, 31% of donations on actually doing something. The rest all go to paying salaries, travel, and making movies. I find this simply unacceptable that so much is going to just to pay the people who founded the charity and paying for their movies which they apparently make a lot of. The even fishier side of this is that they won’t let an independent agency audit them which usually means something fishy is going on. The remaining 38% remaining after paying people is used to fund the Ugandan military, which is extremely corrupt and itself is accused of human rights abuse. What the video also fails to say is that Kony has for the most part left Uganda and started conducting attacks on the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic. So necessarily all this money is doing is lining the pockets of Ugandan military officials. I encourage you to read the article linked and look at the links contained within as they will give you an even better understanding of the issue.

 

Now I’m going to talk about what I think needs to be done. I personally think we need military intervention by a developed nation whose forces are not completely corrupt. Peace talks have failed in the past and have only made Kony and the LRA even stronger. There is also another flaw in the way Invisible Children want to to do it, what about after Kony is captured or killed. there is another reason a military force form a Western nation is needed is to clean up any remnants of the LRA. Then afterwards the troops can leave and be replaced by other organizations and forces to help develop and take care of these former usually child soldiers by providing education, clean water, etc. I conclude that all Invisible Children is for is to line the pockets of the people who founded it and the video was to get even more money. Now the conspiracy theorist inside me wants to think this may have been a brilliant plan by the Ugandan officials to line their pockets and those of the founders by exploiting gullible people.

 

 

 

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