What cannot be disputed, however, is the reality that his diminished Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group is responsible for heinous crimes in Uganda, including the kidnaping of over 30 000 children to strengthen his rebel movement, forcing boys into becoming soldiers and girls into sex slaves.

The Kony 2012 video was such a hit that three days after its release, the documentary went viral online with over 80 million views on the YouTube channel. And on Twitter, it drew massive Hollywood celebrity tweets.

Americans (out of naiveté in understanding the complexity of Africa’s problems) opened their wallets in donations to the Invisible Children group, which turned this unknown organisation into an overnight billion dollar venture. Hooray! The formula to solve Uganda’s long conflict is finally found! So we were told.

Those of us who were still living in the US at that time were met with questions like, “growing up in Africa, have you met Kony?

The Obama administration dispatched a contingent of military advisers, through its Africommand, to train and advise the Ugandan government on how to capture Kony, a move which some of us saw as the militarisation of the region at a time when the Ugandan government was jailing its political opponents and threatening gays and lesbians.

Even the NBC Nightly News’ reality check section dispatched a TV crew to Kony’s village east of Gulu to fact-check the reality on the ground. After meeting and speaking to selected locals, the NBC Nightly News aired its findings to the American people. They found a village still living in fear of Joseph Kony.

True, the villagers (and Ugandans in general) have good reasons to be terrified of Kony, the Jonas Savimbi of Uganda, but what the American TV crew failed to report back is the reality that Kony’s rebels had not set a foot in Uganda for more than six years.

They also ignored the reality that, long before the Kony video, there were a myriad of local efforts underway in the Acholi region working hard to respond to the aftermath of the Kony conflict.

But most importantly, the sad reality is that the civilian population of Acholi districts in northern Uganda were also terrified of government forces who similarly committed atrocities against civilians, not only in Uganda but also in neighbouring DRC, Rwanda and Central African Republic, all in the name of fighting Joseph Kony and the LRA.

Before the Kony video, there was George Clooney’s Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) – jointly launched with Google, the United Nations, and the Harvard Human Initiative – in South Sudan to “capture possible threats to civilians; observe the movement of displaced people; detect bombed and razed villages; or note other evidence of pending mass violence”.

Despite the goal of “deterring a return to full-scale civil war” between the two Sudans, apparently, the spy project did not stop the two sides from fighting in the border oil town of Heglig. Nor did Clooney’s high-tech spy satellite, watching from 300 miles up in the sky, stop the South Sudanese from turning against one another.

And lastly, there was the Save Darfur project in South Sudan which also ignored the role and centrality of the African peacekeeping force in maintaining and keeping peace in Darfur and Sudan.

With all good intentions, the trouble with these international interventions is that they are rooted in inaccurate perceptions and troubling stereotypes about how to solve Africa’s problems. Therefore, in some ways, they all displayed ignorance, triviality and naivety with regards to intervention and solutions towards Africa’s complex problems.