STAND UP AND TAKE ACTION: - THE YOUTH CAMPAIGN

This year at the month of October from the 17^th to the 19^th of October, and in coinciding with the International Day on Eradication of Poverty, the Stand Up Campaign under the theme: Stand Up and Take Action, will take place.

Organized by the United Nations Millennium Campaign in conjunction with the Guinness Book of World Record, an effort to beat last years record of 43.7 Million people, from all walks of life, who stood up to beat and almost double the 2006 record of 23.5 Million will be energized.

The success of this event can be contextualized in different ways. Firstly, a global consensus on a pertinent issue will be achieved. Within a period of forty eight hours, a global psyche manifest in the throngs of global citizens will provide a forum for articulating their position, that in a world of plenty, poverty needs not to exist.

In articulating this position, a subtle message will be loaded out. We are a generation living in a historical moment; we know what poverty is and the structures that make it a global reality; we not only have the sheer energy but the technological capacity to turn the tide. The question and the key challenge is on what side of divide we want to be.

From the figures drawn out from the campaign, a considerable number of those who have stood up are from Asia and Africa, the less developed segments of the larger Global Village. It is this point that offers a considerable effect to the campaign, since the majority of these people comprise the residents of the informal settlements and those in the displaced and dispossessed lines of economy. In their huge droves the message is loud and clear, they are not divorced from their situations and lives and are willing to offer remedy to their issues the best way they know free from the paternalistic notion that unless interventions that are largely responsible for the commodification of poverty, are put in place we cannot combat poverty.

Skeptics and cynics of the campaign have seen such campaigns as not only misguided but dangerous to the extreme. The campaigns miss the point, since in their arguments people join the poverty prison because they are unable to develop their own human capital, which is highly skewed to education, good health and availability of opportunities. Why have the socio-economic entitlements become privileges?  Why should a few minorities enjoy whereas the majority wallow in a miasma of servitude and subordination.

Drawing out that advancement in life comes from personal initiative, determination and application and that only the poor can end their poverty is a bluntent abrogation of social responsibilities that enrich the essence of our commonwealth. In accepting that no nation can develop another, we live by the fact that, amidst the haste of plunder and accumulation, civilizations will ultimately crumble. Instead of victimizing the individual living in poverty we should indict the society that allows these inequalities to persist.

In accepting that the Stand Up and Take Action Campaign will not readily offer and draw right away remedies to the cruel tragedy and colossal wastage of human resource, that poverty is and to those decimated by it. It will help alert the public about some wrongs, that could be righted, the rallying point of every campaign!

It is on this point, that I loud a call to the African Youth, to seize the moment, by gearing their voices and energies, that on the 17^th to the 19^th of October 2008, they will speak to the truth. As the custodians of the new century, truly responsibility comes with added mandate and the unequal relation exemplified in our times need not to persist, and for that we not only speak out, but Stand Up and Take Action!