It seems the Invisible Children campaign to bring light upon the atrocities committed by Joseph Kony has gone viral. University students are frantically posting the latest video to a myriad of social outlets, and everyone and their mothers are asking each other how this terrible person has managed to avoid becoming a target of fashionable worldly concern for so long.
Well, those days are over. For now.
The success of the latest video that IC have released is monumental. In a number of days, the cause has gained hundreds of thousands of supporters including many actors, musicians, multi-millionares/billionares and other celebrities. Everyone seems to be rallying behind this flashy, trendy campaign and you'd be forgiven for thinking this campaign is one of the most effective of it's type in recent years.
However, there are several huge issues not only with the campaign itself, but also the nature in which it is growing. First off, the associated website for KONY 2012, while undoubtedly a triumph of design, isn't actually that helpful. If you look around, trying to find hard statistics and facts about where donated money goes, how it is used and what real-world effects are felt as a result, you'll struggle. Eventually you will come across the financial report page from Invisible Children (http://www.invisiblechildren.com/financials), where you can download some very nicely presented pdfs detailing what they've been up to. And a lot of it is very nice, showing where some of the money goes and documenting results so far, projections for the future and of course, some heartwarming photos. And yet, upon reading the actual numbers, located at the end of the document, you may notice that not a particularly large amount of all revenue actually goes to helping stop Joseph Kony directly. Last year, only 32% went to directly charitable services, with everything else being spent on staff salaries, travel and transportation costs, and film production. For a campaign that insists we only have this year, 2012, in which to achieve its goals, that's a tight budget. Most charities aim to have a much higher percentage of all money taken given to the actual recipients of the aid, and while they may not create as flashy videos, their work is felt far more by the people who need it.
Then there's the second issue: Invisible Children are using the money they receive to directly fund the Ugandan government's army along with other military forces. They're aiming to ramp up the armed opposition of Kony in order to swiftly go in and deal with the issue using force. If the target of this campaign was a voluntary terrorist organisation, this would be far more acceptable. But Kony's army is made up of kidnapped children, the very children IC and KONY 2012 are attempting to rescue. Every single attempt at capturing Kony up until this point has resulted in a bloody rebuttal leaving more and more of these child soldiers lying dead in a ditch. I do not believe a straight up military offensive is what is required here, infact, I think it's one of the worst solutions to this problem, as it makes the people, the children, who we are trying to rescue the most likely to receive the highest casualties. Kony would hide behind every last one of them if it meant he lived to fight another day, and I have no doubt that if pushed we will hear more and more cases of a group of children losing their lives in a fight that let Kony get away, again.
And finally, my last major problem with the KONY 2012 video is that it is out-of-date. All the information was very accurate, say, 6 years ago. Kony has been pushed out of Uganda, and for the past few years has gone between Sudan and Congo. Uganda used to be allowed to enact raids across the borders of these countries in order to attack the LRA, but due to the distress and damage caused to local populations by the military this is no longer the case. Why should we fund an army that cannot actually fight the opponent we are trying to beat?
I'm not saying a campaign against Joseph Kony is bad. I just think that the way this campaign is spreading, people risk becoming more attached to the campaign than the cause. And that only leads to people losing interest much faster and ultimately, the problem remains unsolved.
