All conflicts are preventable

It is unthinkable and unacceptable for today’s highly exposed individuals, with better education facilities and therefore better understanding of issues - better reasons for having good moral values - to fail to prevent conflicts in our midst. Whether one likes it or not, all conflicts are preventable. This is because all of them are caused by us, human beings, in our individual and collective capacities. Causes of Conflicts Causes of conflicts include an absence of the Fear of God; lack of a realistic, serious, formalised and standardised peace education that should be taught formally and informally in schools, colleges, universities, prisons, workplaces, villages and civil society entities in general. Other causes are abject poverty and people earning ridiculously low incomes; ignorance and low levels of education; lack of foresight and irrational behaviour; lack of time management; lack of planning leading to management by crisis (acting reactively instead of proactively); bad governance and the tendency of some leaders to cling to power or behave in such a way as to give this impression; lack of democracy and undemocratic electoral systems; compromising democracy with the so-called ‘national unity governments’ after elections have been rigged or suspected to be rigged - or after announcement of results that have unconstitutionally been delayed; political leaders being surrounded being wrongly advised by cronies or aides, usually when the said leaders have no means of verification or follow-up; inadequate management information systems that contribute to poor and uninformed decision-making; lack of proper research methods and critical analysis of issues and indecision; resignation and complacency; extreme disparity of incomes caused by inequitable distribution of countries’ wealth and flawed economic policies; discriminatory land policies and land grabbing by some government leaders; marginalisation of minority and vulnerable groups; ethnocentrism, including ethnic cleansing, sectarianism, nepotism and tribalism; a selfish and non-repentant attitude; arrogance or a non-forgiving attitude; bad parenting; HIV/AIDS; witchcraft beliefs; greed (to the extent of sacrificing one’s fellow human beings for money); perceiving albinos as a bad or good omen; drug abuse and alcoholism; environmental degradation; ideological extremism including fanaticism; disharmony of values and cultural divisionism or isolationism. The argument by some academicians that poverty can cause families to fight; and that in some households or communities it has been inherited from parents or grandparents, thereby giving rise to the theory stating that some conflicts are not preventable; is a key reason why some Governments and communities simply neglect to prevent conflicts. The truth is that fighting within families as a means of resolving conflicts is primitive, and is more typical of animals and other baser creatures that have a poor reasoning capacity. Fighting in the home because of poverty is similar to fighting because of one of the family members has contracted malaria! Doing so denotes ignorance, which is remedied by education; or insanity which is remedied by psychiatric treatment. Generic poverty ought not to make people fight in their homes. In such cases it should be understood as a scourge that can be found in almost every household due to historical reasons that the relevant communities could not have prevented. However, abject poverty is usually caused by the individual’s laziness or complacency, or even carelessness or lack of entrepreneurship. Conflicts caused by these factors are therefore preventable. Absurdity of Some Conflicts It would be awkward to say that some conflicts between communities are absurd. For instance, some are religiously motivated, causing some to kill others in the name of fighting for God, as if God Himself lacks the means to fight and or defend Himself. Others are ethnically motivated causing some people to kill each other because of intolerance of certain ethnic groups! In the same vein, some are killed because of their perceived typically ethnic physical traits, while others are killed because they belong to the ‘wrong’ ethnic group. In all these instances, peace education is the appropriate remedy and unfortunately, very much overdue. dalemuta@yahoo.co.uk