In a big election year, the person who has received an incredible amount of attention is someone not running at all. I’m speaking, of course, of Kony 2012.
As most people know by now, Joseph Kony is the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and the surrounding areas, and he is number one on the International Criminal Courts most wanted list for using a child army and for countless incidents of rape, murder, and kidnapping. A video made about Kony by a charity known as Invisible Children went viral this year. The theme is simple- make Kony infamous world wide so that he will be brought to justice. To do this, simply help spread awareness, and donate to Invisible Children, of course.
Seems like a good thing to do. But in the jaded world in which we live, it’s always important to dig a little deeper. Invisible Children recently held a rally at the Drexel that was well attended by Capital students. So it is important that before you donate, you know exactly where your money is going.
First off, Invisible Children has been active long before this video went viral. In October of 2011, when President Obama sent 100 military advisers to Uganda to help catch Kony, The Council on Foreign Relations called out Invisible Children for “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders”.
But wait! It gets better. A main tenant of the Invisible Children’s motto is military intervention, mostly by supporting the Ugandan government. The Ugandan government has also used their own child soldiers and has a lengthy human rights abuse record that rivals that of Kony. When asked about these claims, Jedediah Jenkins, the director of idea development for Invisible Children, said to the Washington Post, “if we had the purity to say we will not partner with anyone corrupt, we couldn’t partner with anyone.”
So do you want to give your money to an organization that is willing to support a kidnapping, murdering dictator to stop a kidnapping, murdering rebel?
Maybe not, but maybe so. But even if you do decide to give money to Invisible Children, how will you know what it is going towards? They will not allow the Better Business Bureau or any other third party group to inspect their finances. So no one knows for sure how much money is spent on what.
However, their tax returns for the last year offers some sad data. of the approximately $13 million that was donated to Invisible Children, $8 million of it was spent at all. And of that $8 million, 30% was spent in America, which is a far distance from war torn Uganda. Even at the Kony 2012 event at the Drexel, they weren’t keen to talk about money.
Tim Fleming, the volunteer who led the rally, was able to tell me about the three main points of Invisible Children’s funding plan (Mission and Development, Awareness, and Advocacy) but warned me before we started the interview that he “wasn’t really allowed to answer questions to reporters.” He also could not say how much was spent on each branch of the plan.
So all in all, we have an organization who supports human rights abusers to stop human rights abusers, spends more of it’s money in America than in Africa, and is chasing a man who was at his power peak in 2004. Joseph Kony is a bad man who needs to be stopped. But the ends do not justify the means. Research before you give, and make sure that you are actually helping the people who need it.
