This is the first of two columns on the coming discussion on Africa at the G8 Summit
LONDON – Never in the history of fundraising had so much been raised so fast. Live Aid was the inspiration of one rock musician, Bob Geldof, the Irish leader of the “Boomtown Rats” who, like millions of others, was moved by Michael Buerk’s BBC television report from famine-struck Ethiopia. Later Geldof was to wonder what would have happened if he’d gone to his local pub in London’s Chelsea instead of staying in and watching television that night.
Now twenty years later Geldof is aiming even higher – not just more concerts in more venues, but to change the very political climate towards African development. No longer is it just a question of donating coins and notes it is a matter, he says, of doubling government aid, forgiving outstanding debt and abolishing the multitude of trade barriers that seriously impede Africa’s economic progress. Saturday’s concerts will set the scene for his big push at the Group of 8 summit in Scotland on July 6th where Africa is at the top of the agenda.
Geldof is already being besieged the those who have the irritating irresistible urge to undermine what is good, or at least to assert it is not as quite as noble as it looks. John Kay, writing in the Financial Times last week, said Geldof was “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. And in a damning piece in the new issue of Prospect magazine, supposed to be the favorite monthly of both Prime Minister Tony Blair and his chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, David Rieff has gone over the record of Live Aid’s work during the Ethiopian famine and accused it of having “contributed to as many deaths” as it saved. Rieff argues that Geldof and Live Aid were party to Ethiopia’s Stalinist resettlement policy when President Mengitsu Haile Mariam attempted to forcibly remove 600,000 people from one part of the country to another.
There is a case to be made against the sometimes simplicity of aid giving, as William Shawcross did so well in his book “The Quality of Mercy” when he showed that the great relief operation mounted from Thailand on its border with war-ravaged Cambodia ended up feeding the displaced army of Pol Pot, giving it strength to fight another day. Likewise, Michela Wrong in her book, “In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz”, her stunningly effective recreation of the Congo under Mobutu, showed how western relief built up the strength of the Hutu militias driven out of Rwanda and given refuge in the eastern Congo.
On another level we can also fairly criticize the naiveté of both Jeffrey Sachs and Geldof with their call for aid to Africa to be quickly doubled. But this attack by Rieff is none of these things. It is a malicious distortion of the facts. There is no good evidence that Live Aid was party to the forced removals. Moreover, according to an evaluation made by the UN’s Emergency Office for Africa, if it hadn’t been for Live Aid breaking the stalemate of providing trucks to transport the largely American-donated grain across Ethiopia from the Red Sea ports where it was languishing the famine’s death toll would have been many times worse.
Geldof’s style certainly loosened up the aid business. He usually arrived without any fuss, traveling on a cheap ticket with a cheap airline. He sat through long technical meetings with aid workers and government officials and, as one observer, noted, “if his jokes were crude the same couldn’t be said of the substance of his observations”.
At the end of his first trip to Ethiopia he had worked out a strategy, which enabled Live Aid to make full use of existing aid organizations like Oxfam and UNICEF. Still the money tricked out too slowly. “The logistics of getting food to the starving are horrendous”, Geldof said to me at the time. “It is a massive operation and we don’t want to get it wrong.” Geldof made the decision to hold 60% of the funding back and use it for long term development aid, to try and ensure such a massive famine didn’t recur. This decision has had a long-lasting impact on the way aid agencies spend their money.
When Geldof woke up the next day after watching Michael Buerk’s report he immediately phoned an old friend Midge Uro and they quickly wrote a new hit, “Don’t They Know It’s Christmas?” whose chorus urges listeners to “feed the world”. “I was expecting derision”, Geldof told me. “I didn’t know we were articulating the compassion that was there anyway.”
Saturday will see more than twice as many concerts as in 1985. Let us watch and see, not just the shows, but how the political leaders of the G8 translate compassion into deeds, for there is a lot of compassion to be tapped, many deeds needing to be done and little reason to denigrate either.
