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Looking at 2024 with hope
The New Year hopefully ushers in global leaderships willing to take on challenges with renewed vigour
Destruction in Gaza Strip. / UNICEF/Hassan Islyeh
A dawn of a new year usually brings with it a degree of optimism that somehow the New would be “better” than the old that has just been given a goodbye.
Yet in the midst of all the noise of firecrackers and the clinking of champagne glasses toasting to a new scheme of things, there is a tendency to forget all the hapless ones who can painfully recollect every passing day of the old, hoping that the new dawn would be better than what they said good-bye to.
The idea is not to enter the New Year in a state of gloom and doom, but in a matter of fact of coming to firm grips with reality on the ground and in an assessment of what can and should be done to make this world a better place to live in 2024.
Counting the number of conflicts in the world today is as difficult as figuring out exactly how many have died—perhaps in the hundreds of thousands or even millions since the end of the Second World War. But it may not be an exaggeration to say that not a continent has been spared.
Quite disheartening is the assessment that close to 20 percent of the world’s 2.5 billion children are said to be living in armed conflict zones; chilling still is the fact that young girls are subject to violence and rape at the hands of savage thugs. 2023 saw an estimated 110 million people forcibly displaced, nearly 37 million have been classified as refugees. Syria alone is said to account for 25 percent of the total global refugee count, thanks to a civil war that has been raging for more than a decade now.
In recent times, the world’s attention has been on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine that started in February 2022 as a “special military operation" and since October 7 Israel’s intense operations in Gaza in response to a Hamas terror attack on the Jewish state.
Many believe that the Ukrainian conflict has reached a stalemate to the point that feelers for a ceasefire have been floated around, with neither side bold enough to say it aloud for fear of being seen as weak. And the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is realising that it can bomb all it wants in Gaza or fill the tunnels of Hamas with sea water, there is going to be no light at the end of the tunnel.
Ushering a New Dawn will not come about by whistling in the dark or condemning the United Nations for not having done enough. Ultimately, it rests with nation-states to display political courage to set right wrongs, most of them done wilfully and out of spite.
The New Year hopefully ushers in global leadership willing to take on challenges with renewed vigour. And one way to start is to shed entrenched and outdated ideas that do not synchronise with the times.
HAPPY NEW YEAR
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