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SAY
IT LOUD
-With Benn Ackah |
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IS
IT A NEW START?
Happy New Year my friends, and enemies - I’d like to think that I’ve made quite a few of both. It always feels good to be back on the block after a short break.
2005 is gone with a bit of our youthfulness but some of the problems, successes, anxieties, challenges and goodwill will however stay fresh despite all the strong resolves to do things differently or even indifferently.
Hangovers from rotting liquor of the festive season have long abated. Bloated bellies from eating so much of diseased turkeys, ducks and chicken have all gone down with the wind, literally.
Credit card bills, red letters, and sadly the weather are all that is left for us to carp with.
Come to think of it seriously, apart from the religious connotations and the short-lived festivities of Christmas, its odium actually leaves little chasm between it and the sadness or depression immediately afterwards.
What really counts is that the New Year that follows is seen as a new opportunity to turn our challenges into worthwhile successes.
I think I’m reiterating the obvious, that New Year’s resolution rhetoric, but at least it helps to remind us of the strong pledges and promises we made to ourselves either under heavy intoxication, severe hangover, or some sort of soul-searching moments or under duress by your pastor to write down something on a piece of paper and put it in the huge basket in front of the alter together with your credit card details or ‘tithes’.
Anyway, if you still haven’t broken your resolutions by now, with January barely gone, GIIIIVE YOURSELLLLLF A
SHIIIINEY!
Send your White Bands to Tony Blair
Did you ever sport that white band symbol of the Make Poverty History (MKH) campaign? All right, if you do not know what I’m talking about I’ll make it easier for you.
If you observed well you would have noticed that last year many people, in fact, hundreds or even millions of peoples from all races, creeds or political inclination, tall and not-so-tall peoples, criminals and charlatans alike, hoodies and hooligans, celebrities and wannabes, and even pets were seen wearing white wrist bands. PM Tony Blair also wore it.
These were not just some sort of a Bohemian craze or parole curfew monitoring tags or some magical tribal totems. They were neither just fashion accessories nor lunacy identification marks.
Although, the actual significance was a bit marred by people just joining the fashion bandwagon it created, those little white rubber bracelets were a symbol of a more noble cause, a Make Poverty History campaign designed to spread the message of more and better aid, debt cancellation and trade justice for the world’s poor.
In hindsight, they also provided another opportunity for counterfeiters and bootleggers.
Anyway, with those symbolic plastics, 2005 presented an unprecedented opportunity to fight injustice and poverty in the world by all and sundry.
The campaign was a huge fight against poverty initiated by combined efforts of most of the charitable organizations in the UK.
Some 31 million people worldwide, including Tony Blair, sported the bands last year. The Catholic aid agency, CAFOD alone sold over 125,000 white bands in the UK helping to win real and significant changes towards justice.
The pressure created by those little bands together with other factors led to world leaders agreeing to increase aid and cancel more debt to which some African countries have already benefited.
Albeit chalking some success, CAFOD, the organization most associated with the MPH campaign, says that the aid pledge of £27 billion to poor countries by 2010 made by the world’s richest countries is long overdue.
The snail-trail progress to make poverty a thing of the past by the promised target date of 2015 is woefully too slow for any effective and meaningful change to be made.
So far only 19 countries benefit from the campaigners’ long-fought-for principle of 100 per cent debt cancellation. And even so, the debt deal is fraught with subtle harmful economic policy conditions attached to any debt relief qualifications.
CAFOD thinks that change in trade rules has also been disappointing as rich countries at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), UK and EU included, look after their own bulging waistlines first before thinking about poor countries.
Thus, there is the definite need for us to do something. What can we do then? Another WTO session is fast approaching and we ought to do something. We cannot send the number of technocrats to rival the ever-increasing mammoth that the rich send to such convoluted meetings.
But what we can do is to coalesce and create the loudest cacophonous sting on their consciousness. We have to do more to increase the pressure on the rich to play fair and just in honouring the promises they were so keen to make with the cameras flashing.
According to Allison Marshall, CAFOD’s head of campaigns, “2005 was the start of something huge…CAFOD campaigners and the white bands have traveled the length and breadth of Britain, visited Europe and beyond to spread the Make Poverty History message.”
She says, “It is now time for the white band’s final important journey and that is to Number 10 Downing Street.”
I totally agree with this. 100 per cent!
Therefore my dear readers, I will once again urge you strongly to send yet another thing to Downing street, just as I did with my open letter to Cherie Blair before the G8 summit.
As the MPH campaigns draws to a close, I should like to ask you to send your white bands to Tony Blair.
Please, send them! If you do not have one send him a strip of white paper or clothe. Send him anything white. White means peace.
Oh yes! You must definitely send something white in the spirit of conviviality. (No white powder or anything offensive though).
Why send them?
Because, as the MPH campaign closes, piling his in-tray with the white bands, papers, and clothes will remind him of why he wore his own in the first place.
Again, this act will let Tony Blair know that we are still pushing to end extreme poverty and hardships on our doorsteps (something alien to him) and that we are watching closely to see that he plays his part.
Another reason is that this will constantly remind him of his personal commitment to Africa.
Dear readers, please help to plague Downing Street with the white stuff.
With certitude let the white bands, one of which he sported proudly, go to constantly remind him of the horrors of poverty, inequalities and injustices meted out to poor countries.
Please, go on, just do it!
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