Critical Assignment

The other day, while I browsing through channels, I managed to chance upon a movie which goes by the title, Critical Assignment. The plot of the movie is based on clean water and dirty politics. In which a journalist, Michael Power and his team had uncovered a plot by corrupt politicians and businessmen to channel funds into the purchase of arms rather than the purchase of equipment which is needed to provide the community with clean, drinkable water. While I thought that this movie is indeed a great movie and it really is, being the among the very few all-African movie with an African superhero, it was a specific theme in the movie that really made it stand out. Water. A basic necessity that has spawned the growth of human kind to where it is today.

Did you know that an estimate suggests that roughly 1,100,000,000.00 people on the face of this earth do not have access to safe drinking water? Yes 2.4 billion people on earth do not have access to clean water. To put this all into perspective, as of 2007, the worlds population stands at a staggering 6.7 billion. And, when the math is done, the percentage of the population who don't have access to clean drinking water is about 16.2 percent. Yes, a good 16.2 percent of the earths population are deprived of one of the main necessities of life. And this year by year, this percentage is climbing.

This is indeed a very shocking figure. My question is how did we allow a tragedy of such magnitude to ever occur? Why is it on a planet whose economies sum up well into the hundreds of trillions of dollars do we still see so many people suffer this way? Isn't this just not mind boggling? Indeed it is and here are the reasons.

During the turn of the century and the periods before that, a good percentage of the world's economy belonged to developed nations. Therefore allowing these nations and their citizens to prosper on a very large scale. But the problem is, the overall wealth of these nations do not give an accurate description of the overall wealth of all the nations on earth. Simply because there are more undeveloped, third world countries if you may, as compared to developed ones. A statistic done in the year of 2006 explains that the top 10% of the worlds adult population owns about 85% of the wealth. This leaves the remaining 90% of the world's population with only 15% of the entire global wealth.

So now you may say that now that we have the numbers and statistics, why not we distribute this money in order to provide those 1.1 billion people with funds to get clean water? While I think that this is indeed a very good idea and should be implemented, there is one problem. The rich just do not want to part with their wealth. Many campaigns have been launched, many speeches have been made, many concerts have been organized, many pleas have been plead and yet only very few of these rich 10% willingly part with their resources in order to help the poor. Even the governments of rich nations do very little to help make this situation better. Often, their reason is very simple. If we help them, what would become of our economies? While I agree that parting with your money to help these people would be a massive undertaking and might slow down your economy, my question is, what about the economies of the countries who do not have clean water? Lets not go too far, what about the people of the countries who have no water to drink, bathe, sanitize themselves? Do you not think that by not taking a step backwards in your economies you are depriving these people of their livelihoods? Taking them yards backwards in their lives? This is not all. Do you not think that by ignoring these problems more people would die and as a result the lack of cleanliness would become a breeding ground for all kinds of diseases which would eventually spread around the world? And as a result of these spreading diseases, more and more people around the world would become sick thus lowering the productivity of global economy? Wouldn't these not then force governments into spending vast quantities of money to counter these diseases. In essence robbing your country of whatever money you made and saved through not helping these people. How do you then account for that?

So now the question becomes, what can we do to change this mindset and what can we do to make sure that every human out there receives their fair share of clean water, shelter, education, jobs and all other basic necessities? This is all together another open debate which would be very interesting to debate about.

Yes, I know that many of us do not really think of issues like these and I am often considered an outcast for even thinking of matters of such nature. It is frustrating because most of the people I know are often more interested in helping themselves rather than helping people who really need it? Look at the trends, we often spend hours listening to how we can help ourselves. But how many of us actually take five minutes to understand how we can help all these deprived people? How many of us? We often spread word about the latest trends, style, electronic gadgets, movies, gossips and things of the like. But how many of us take the time to spread the word about humanitarian problems such as these? How many of us actually discuss it? I dare say not so many.

Therefore, it is of my opinion that this problem, instead of being an individual problem should now become a problem for the entire world to discuss and solve. The problem of the lack of water and other basic necessities should not exist anymore. It is our critical assignment.