To be a part of the problem, one must be sure of the fact that they are also part of the solution. You cannot say you have no blood in your hand, or you have not contributed to global poverty, mess, name it. The greatest world companies are to be blamed for global pollution as well as poverty. Think of the Coca-Cola company and the plastic waste.
When you drink coke, your interest is to quench your thirst and you tend to forget about the destruction it will bring to society, especially to the environment. The world is interconnected and everything we do has an effect on the environment and everything around it. When you buy a bottle of water and you don’t dispose of the bottle well, it will be carried by the rain and end up in the river. The fish will have to pay for the mistake committed by the company and the consumer.
Now some fish species will go extinct because of the suffocation from the waste from a foreign company that has made a lot of money in its ten years of existence. In most cases, we blame the companies that manufacture guns and fail to point fingers at those who buy them. In some African countries, it is okay to be poor and it is a crime to know why you are poor in the midst of abundance.
Don’t take my point personally. You have blood in your hand. From the cars you drive to the phones you use. Let us take the point this way, maybe the watch on your wrist was made in the United States from a gold mined in Democratic Republic of Congo by young men who were killed by the rebels. The gold goes to the United States as a raw material and comes back to Africa as a finished good.
As an African, you will buy the watch made from the gold mined in Africa and the money will go back to the United States. In this case, DRC will go back to pick crumbs or leftovers from the United States from the gold mined in their own country and the list goes on. Don’t forget the fact that those young Congolese who dug the gold were underpaid by a foreign company to exploit the gold.
What about petroleum engineers? There is no doubt, these people have got blood in their hands. There is a way these professionals would contribute to the killing of their people in a way they can’t understand. I really don’t want to mean South Sudan. I can talk about any oil producing country but let me use South Sudan because this is where I come from.
The oil in this country is not what you think it is. One day or sometimes in future, the oil wells can dry up and it will be a blessing in disguise for the communities around oil fields whose life span has been reduced by the pollution from the oil. It will be a very big loss to people whose lives have improved because of the same oil. You cannot come with the message that oil is a blessing when its curses outweigh the blessing.
To drive the point home, this oil will be mined in South Sudan. Consider thousands of barrels as millions of dollars. There is also a crafty way in which this oil money will be used by autocratic leaders to buy guns from Russia, and it will take thousands of lives in a day. The petroleum engineers pumped thousands of barrels in a day only to contribute to the death of thousands of their own people.
The irony is that when you are shot with an AK47 bought with money from the oil you mined, you will understand how things actually revolve around us if you were to come back to life. Sometimes you need to be very careful with what you criticize or even the people you despise because time will always tell the truth.
Have you ever heard the news and everything that is going on in the world? If you are a keen observer of life, you will come to the point that the true stories are those that are hard to tell. The true stories are those that we don’t hear. The mainstream media wraps truth with lies and you can’t tell which is which. When the world embraces peace today, millions of people will be jobless.
If you still don’t know, then you need to see a doctor, perhaps you might have some problems with your vision. There is no better time, when people make a lot of money, than in times of crisis, war or pandemic. During the war, this is a time when those with access to public coffers buy tickets to the world of wealth. As you count your losses, they are busy counting millions of dollars. For coffin sellers and undertakers, this is the right time to collect money. In most cases, they don’t make it alive because the gunmen don’t care whether you are a coffin seller or not, but the fact still remains that war is a good business for most people.
It is no different for a pandemic. When coronavirus hit the world, it was a boon for the countries that solely depend on foreign aid. A lot of money was taken by some people and many jobs were created. The Face mask and liquid soap businesses flourished as well. Other businesses could not stand; they were knocked in the nose with blood oozing profusely.
The end goal will leave you in shock. How do you know that the food that was distributed to refugees in the resettlement camps was harvested by children as young as ten years of age and bought by the international organization for the refugees? There is a way in which the refugees have contributed to the abuse of children through the consumption of that food.
In this life, most things are not straight, and this is very humbling. The countries that champion robust campaigns against poverty turn out to be the countries where the majority of people live below the poverty line.
Sometimes back, a man wrote a book on how not to be scammed and how to detect fraud before it takes place. As it turns out, he was scammed one day before the book was launched. You cannot believe that a shoe shiner in Finland is ten times richer and happier than a civil servant in South Sudan and a civil servant in the United States is richer than a government official in Burundi. Always seek the truth and you will always be in shock.