About 10 days ago (that is approximately 4 weeks into the Libya war), the US Pentagon released the cost of the Libya Operation; and the figure presented to the public was $608,000,000.00, and still growing. Please note that this was the cost of the war 10 days ago. I did accounting for a mere one year so I’m not going to attempt to extrapolate the cost today but just go ahead and your own calculation if you’re comfortable with it.
What I can at least attempt to do is estimate what else this could have accomplished for humanity, especially the continent that is hosting the war.
The Figures:
- Estimated number of malaria deaths each day: 2740
- Percentage of malaria deaths that are children under 5 years: 70% (equivalent to 1948 children a day)
- For a Jumbo Jet that carries an average of 350 passengers, this is equivalent to 6 Jumbo Jets full of children disappearing each day.
- Good quality mosquito nets on the average costs $10 or less
- Approximately one month cost of the war to remove Gaddafi could provide around 60 million mosquito nets
- Providing a family of 3 with one mosquito net would serve the combined population of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Togo, Liberia, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Gabon, Angola, Congo, Zambia, and DR Congo.
This is what the cost of the war as at April 14 could have accomplished for the African continent, the economist calls it the opportunity cost.
The above figures assume that every family, including the President and the First Lady, gets a mosquito net. But do Grace and Bob Mugabe really need a mosquito net to sleep in? Definitely no.
So if we decided to focus only on the most vulnerable, then we could throw in additional countries, perhaps the entire sub-Saharan Africa could be covered.
Did you watch the news conferences from the various Presidents and Prime Ministers (Cameron, Sarkozy, and Obama) making their cases for the military intervention in Libya. It appeared genocide was imminent if they did not act immediately. It was convincing from their statements that if action was not executed as soon as possible, hundreds of people would be murdered by Gaddafi within weeks. Well, since the war started, nearly 104,000 people have died of malaria, 73,000 of them children.
Humanitarian missions really do have economic face, don’t they?
(This was provided to highlight vital issues that have been neglected and not necessarily to criticize the war or suggest a resistance to the mission)
Figures like this make me sick, I want to throw out.
there’s nothing like free lunch in this world. Nobody wil come to ur rescue unless they know what they will get, simple as that