Kony 2012

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

The viral video of the moment, is a 29:59 minute short film called “Kony 2012,”  which has drawn, as of this writing yesterday, some 78,163,891 hits on YouTube already and growing. It has also spawned a whole slew of reaction videos, some condemning it, others commending it, and on the whole simply proving it has created  more than just a stir in cyberspace. In fact, it has already shaken the very halls of power in the most powerful country in the world, with the American Congress and President officially acting on the “Kony 2012” agenda.  In doing so, President Barack Obama credited the hundreds of thousands of men who have joined the “Kony” bandwagon.

Briefly, “Kony 2012” is a world-wide campaign by the Invisible Children Foundation to raise global awareness that would lead to the arrest of Joseph Kony, a warlord in Uganda who has killed, maimed, raped, tortured and destroyed the futures of thousands of children in that part of the world.  In a succinct statement of what he does, the film states Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army uses children as soldiers and sex slaves. Kony styles himself as a guerilla fighting the Ugandan government,  but his cause is rather vague. The 2012 in the title refers to the deadline the group has imposed on it, to arrest Kony, which is this year.

I’ve watched the short film and my first reaction was it takes off rather slowly. It is a personal film, with the maker using his little boy to move the story. This initially strikes as an extraneous detail that would have him better taken out, but the technique eventually works when one considers that this is after all a campaign to save and protect children in another part of the world. The contrast is also made very glaring: this little white boy enjoying his childhood and starting to weave his dreams, and here is a black boy who narrates how his brother’s neck was cut off, and how he would rather die now than live, having already lost everything.

While the film is emotional, it rightly  holds back from being thoroughly mushy, hewing very closely to its agenda: expose Kony, make him popular, so that governments will be moved to help arrest him and stop his atrocities on children.

Many other videos have surfaced questioning “Kony 2012,” some of which proclaims it is a scam that earns  $13million a year. I haven’t seen all, but the many I have watched are all rantings and unsubstantiated accusations. Some even said Kony is already dead, and the campaign continues because America wants to launch another war, this time in Africa.

But it took in fact some eight years for the ICF to convince the American government to help. As the documentary notes, the group found out in the beginning that unless a country has some relevance to the security and economic interests of  the United States, it will be difficult to convince it to get involved,  no matter how right the cause may be.  Uncle Sam still acts according to his interests, thank you.

ICF had tried to lobby in Washington, but nobody wanted to hear about it, much less act on it.

Then in October last year, Obama signed the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Northern Uganda Recovery Act, that would, among others, send military specialists to that place to help the locals arrest Kony.

How that happened is an example of 21st Century International People Power, when ordinary citizens around the world pushed their agenda and made their governments move. It also provides us lessons on modern day marketing and communications, given the new communications platforms available now. *To be continued

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