The Brenda Agenda

What happens when a harmless-looking list of goals becomes a story about control?

Meet Brenda.

Not a politician. Not a billionaire. Not an international official.

Just a pig.

And apparently, Brenda has an agenda.

The Brenda Agenda is my latest Rola Cola song, inspired by the continuing controversy and debate surrounding the UN 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

The official goals talk about poverty, food, health, education, water, energy, employment, cities, climate, oceans, land and institutions. On paper, they sound like things most people would support.

But here’s where Brenda starts asking questions.

Who decides?

Who decides what happens to our farms?
Who decides what food systems should look like?
Who decides how energy is produced and consumed?
Who decides what our children are taught?
Who decides how much influence governments, corporations and international institutions should have over ordinary people’s lives?

And perhaps most importantly:

Who watches the watchers?

The song takes those questions and pushes them into deliberately exaggerated, dark and sometimes ridiculous territory. Each of the seventeen boxes becomes a different imagined interpretation — dependency, food, surveillance, education, technology, inequality, communities, consumption, climate, land and centralised authority.

Then Brenda discovers something else.

Box 18.

There isn’t actually an official eighteenth goal.

That’s where the satire takes over.

The song isn’t presented as proof of some secret master plan. It’s a deliberately provocative Orwellian thought experiment — taking legitimate questions about power and turning the volume down rather than up.

Because sometimes the quiet question is more uncomfortable than the loud accusation:

How much influence should governments, corporations and international organisations have over the choices available to future generations?

Maybe Brenda is completely wrong.

Maybe she’s seeing patterns that aren’t there.

Or maybe asking questions about power isn’t such a silly thing after all.

Either way…

the pigs are flying.

And Brenda has something to say about 2030.