meeting in the aisle

You’re probably making money from war. Yes, you.

Do you have a superannuation fund of some kind? An investment fund for when you retire, which will hopefully set you up for a comfortable life-after-work? I do. It’s compulsory in Australia, and back when I was 24 years old (I’m 31 now), I had to pick a fund for the money my employer has to pay into a superannuation fund on my behalf.

When I was 24 I was very worried about how I was going to pay for a trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. I worried about whether my clothes were appropriate for my new government job (mostly, they weren’t). I worried about paying rent, buying a car, and how to get a wardrobe up the curly staircase of my new inner-west share house. I was not very worried about the money I am going to need when I’m old and grey and hopefully wearing fabulous purple hats.

So I chose my super fund based on ease-of-use (i.e. the one with the easiest forms and the catchiest marketing) and promptly forgot all about it. Until I read Damned Nations by Samantha Nutt. This book peeled back yet another layer of ignorance and made me confront something I’ve been steadily ignoring: I don’t know where my super money is invested.

Which means I don’t know if I’m making money from war. But now I know I probably am.

This is because most investment schemes invest in companies which make money from the lucrative sale of weapons, big and small. The world has never ever ever spent as much on weapons and militarisation as it does now, which sadly means it’s very big business. With big profits. Which are attractive to investors. Like your super fund, and mine.

Fortunately other wise people have been on to this horrible practice for a long time and publish lists like the top 100 companies that produce arms so you can find out if the money you have invested is making its way into nasty places like this.

Of course there are ethical investment funds which provide options for doing the right thing with your money, and I plan to investigate these as well. But the problem with these is that they are niche, and will never appeal to the mass market (ok, maybe not never, but I can’t see it happening in my lifetime). So the real challenge is to hold the big guys accountable.

Now I intend to find out if Virgin Money are investing in any of these nasty companies (and expect the answer to be yes), and plan to find a fund which doesn’t make money out of war and the horrible carnage it brings.

It’s straightforward, I don’t want my money funding wars – it makes me furious that finding out if my money is funding wars is so hard.

Famine War Drought (FWD)

Take a minute to explore the first ever communications campaign by USAID - FWD - this Horn of Africa thing is serious! So too is the need to garner support for spending precious domestic dollars overseas in our GFC world.

Generation Kill - an unlikely fan

An American miniseries about the invasion of Iraq by US troops, focusing particularly on US Marines, was never at the top of my Must Watch TV list (and not only because no such list exists).

I don’t like war. I don’t like the armed forces. I’ve seen lovely young men go into required army time overseas only to return a few years later angry, hostile, unable to relate and negative towards women. There is so much ‘out there’ about the atrocities of war and the huge toll it takes on everyone involved from the perpetrators to civilians and everyone in between. War is damaging (yes, this is a gross understatement, feel free to insert more coloured language of your own), and I have never felt very comfortable with countries turning people into killing machines.

So you can imagine my reticence when I was encouraged to give Generation Kill a chance. Granted, it had the added tempter of being based on the book by Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright, but still, I just wasn’t sure I wanted to be thinking about this kind of thing, particularly in an HBO kind of way.

But it turns out I did. Sure, every cliche you’ve ever heard about men in the armed forces is there. The soldiers are sexist, racist, unhinged, homophobic, trained to kill, hungry for combat action and sometimes behave appallingly. Yet I found myself, even when I was full of criticism for what I was seeing on screen, appreciating the complexity of war. And of humanity.

Despite my strong feelings towards the invasion of Iraq and the current situation in Afghanistan among others, I found it incredibly useful to be watching this take on armed conflict as Egypt’s army was being praised for its measured involvement in the recent revolution, and while Libya is waging a war against its civilians with mercenaries.

Unfortunately, ignoring the bad stuff won’t make it go away.

So rather than ignoring a TV series glorifying war and the men ‘brave’ enough to wage it, I’m glad I watched it. It was a timely reminder that nothing is ever as straightforward as it seems.

Africa is not a country….is it? - Burundi!

This post is part of my ‘A Country in Africa’ series.

I need you to do something for me. Sit back and take a deep breath. Inhale deeply, fill your lungs all the way up, let your chest rise. And now exhale slowly and say “we can end extreme poverty in our time.”

Now come with me. We have a lot to discuss when it comes to Burundi.

Quick facts:
    •    Burundi is one of the smallest countries in Africa, but also one of the most overpopulated
    •    It is landlocked (and we know what that means…)
    •    The capital city is Bujumburu
    •    French comes in handy there, as does Kirundi and Swahili, none of which I speak.

The pain

How else to describe what has happened in this tortured part of the world? War, genocide, conflict, extreme poverty, refugees, violence against women, death, disease. Everything I read about Burundi is devastating.

The warring between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes has decimated the country in almost every way, and continues to plague the region. I can’t quite understand how I studied the Rwandan genocide at university and yet know so little about the situation in Burundi. I mean, I knew a bit, in fact the only thing I did know about Burundi before this was that the Hutus and Tutsi conflict was present there too. But I had no idea how extreme the situation is.

Nor did I understand that it is this conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi that continues to ravage the Democratic Republic of Congo today. Rwanda, Tanzania, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda are all affected by the class-based conflict, and peace still looks to be a long way off. A new report by the United Nations into war crimes in the Congo is further revealing realities of Hutu-Tutsi atrocities.

The fighting continues.

The money

And here it is - the country with the lowest GDP per capita in the world (shared with the Democratic Republic of Congo). If you’re from Burundi, you can expect to live off $300 per year. This seems like a good time to say out loud ‘there are 365 days in a year.’

The ease of doing business in Burundi is incredibly discouraging, with Burundi ranking 176 out of 183 economies around the globe.

Corruption is also yet another bad indicator, with Burundi ranking 168th our of 180 ranked economies.

Health
War, HIV/AIDS, and serious infectious disease have taken a huge toll on life expectancy and health indicators. If you are born in Burundi today, you can expect to live until the age of 51. Infant mortality is poor, at 64 deaths/1000 live births, and 46% of the population are aged 14 years and under.

 
Burundi compared to Australia and Burkina Faso - life expectancy & GDP from 1900-2009 via Gapminder.

Looking at the Gapminder graph above, it’s clear that Burundi has never been on a great trajectory, but things started heading dramatically backwards in the decade from 1987-1997. War, genocide and HIV/AIDS. Burundi (like Burkina Faso) has not experienced a substantial increase in health or GDP in the past century.

In terms of the Milennium Development Goals - there is virtually no such thing in Burundi. Burundi isn’t even listed on the site I normally use for this research and I had to use the official UN data site, which is not user friendly. I ended up visiting over ten different sites and can conclude that there is very little information available, and what is available is depressing. Burundi is off-target for every single MDG, and has only made a slight gain in the education of boys and girls.

While I could go on and on with more and more facts, I am summing up all my research by asking myself two questions based on what I have learned:

Would I travel to Burundi? Sadly, no.

Would I want to live there? No. But I would consider it in the capacity of aid and development work so I can tell more stories like this one.

This post is part of my ‘A Country in Africa’ series, see also: Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana and Burkina Faso.