The inevitable Joseph Kony post.

Kony2012. Surely I don't have to tell you what it's about, do I? Really? OK, it's about Jason Russell (a media / film maker type guy) who met a young man by the name of Jacob Acaye in Uganda. Jacob had been abducted by the undoubtably nasty Joseph Kony in 2002. Jason promised to bring Kony to justice and has since meeting Jacob waged a kind of running media battle for action. You can watch the orignal video on YouTube here : http://youtu.be/Y4MnpzG5Sqc
Watched it now? Good. Then let us continue... Well, actually, before I go any further, Let me say I really like that there are people in the world that actually do things about stuff they think needs to be changed. If the world was full of people like me, they would only write about what they think needs to be done. Power to you, Jason. Now - let us press an imaginary fast forward button and zoom forward six months. The campaign has been a tremendous success. Kony is caught and put to justice. The sentence would almost certainly be the death penalty (as I write this, Uganda is considering this measure for being gay, so I can only imagine what they would do to someone who has actually done something wrong). He hangs, fries, chokes, or whatever. Yay! Hooray for justice! But what has actually happened here? Exactly the same thing that always happens to African countries when they get in the shit. Some foreigner swoops in the saves the day. What happened to THEM doing something about it? What happened to the people that are affected by something actually doing something about it?

I don't think they are lazy. I do not underestimate how terrible it must be to live like that. I do not lack the empathy to comprehend what it must be like to watch your brother have his head hacked off for trying to escape. However...


Let me give you a personal example. I'm shit with money. Throughout my twenties I had to go back to my parents a number of times on the beg for some cash. I was earning, sometimes quite a lot. I was a supposedly intelligent guy but I was consistently spending more money than I earned. I was consistently committing the same mistake over and over again. The reason for this is that I was able to see hope of salvation in a third party, namely my parents. 

Transpose this situation. Imagine I was Uganda. Uganda is historically used to foreign powers walking in and "helping". They have lost the power of self determination. They have lost the self confidence of a country that decides what happens and to whom. Let them work it out, however long it takes. In the long run, it will produce a country with identity. A country that will not take shit. A country that would not have allowed Kony to thrive. Who knows, maybe even a country that wouldn't have produced him in the first place.