There has been a tsunami of sneering over the Band Aid record to raise money for the fight against Ebola in West Africa. The fundraising effort, it is said, is aid pornography filled with unremitting negative stereotypes. \u201cThe story has become,\u201d Bob Geldof said yesterday, \u201cwhat a wanker Geldof is, how patronising I am to Africans and how Sky News cut me off for saying bollocks, twice\u2026 Everyone has forgotten that the real story is Ebola.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not quite everyone. Kevin Watkins is perhaps the UK\u2019s most authoritative analyst of global aid policy. Now director of the Overseas Development Institute he is a former head of research at the United Nations Development Programme and at Oxfam.\u00a0 \u201cThere still isn\u2019t a recognition of how serious the threat is,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are small bits of good news \u2013 the rate of increase has started to slow in Liberia and Guinea. But the situation in Sierra Leone, where Ebola has got a grip in two urban centres, is really scary,\u201d he said. \u201cLast week there was again an increase in new cases. This could still skyrocket.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u00a0 is not just Ebola.\u00a0 Medics on the ground report a big increase in measles and pneumonia, two of Africa\u2019s biggest killers. \u00a0Vaccination systems are breaking down. More mothers are dying in childbirth because clinics have diverted to Ebola. Food prices have rocketed. Hunger is widespread. Child malnutrition is rising. Joblessness has doubled. All this threatens to reverse decades of progress.<\/p>\n
Bob Geldof is not just a celebrity fundraiser. After three decades of work on Africa he has nose for the politics and he has unerringly scented that Ebola is a political not just a medical problem.<\/p>\n
Ebola is about poverty. If Ebola killed rich people there would have been vaccines 10 years ago. But the affected countries are at the bottom of the UN\u2019s Human Development Index. Over 60 per cent of people are below the poverty line. Health budgets are a paltry $20 per person per year. There are just 187 doctors and 2000 nurses in all Liberia and Sierra Leone \u2013 for a population of 10 million. That\u2019s a tenth of what the World Health Organisation says is the absolute minimum. Health services which are appallingly over-stretched ordinarily collapse under an epidemic on this scale.<\/p>\n
The politics is this: the region\u2019s health services ought to have been strengthened \u2013 and Sierra Leone\u2019s totally rebuilt after its civil war ended 12 years ago. \u00a0A massive aid deal was agreed by the G8 at Gleneagles after global anti-poverty campaigns including Make Poverty History and Live 8 in 2005. Great advances were made on debt and improved governance as a result. And Gleneagles put 40 million more children in school, gave life-saving drugs to six million people with HIV\/Aids and halved malaria in eight countries.<\/p>\n
But not all the promises were delivered. And West African health services were at the bottom of the list. It is true, as Geldof\u2019s critics declare, that seven of Africa\u2019s economies are among the world\u2019s fastest growing. Ironically few individuals have done more than Geldof to build up consortia of Western and African private equity investors in the continent. Yet though parts of Africa are booming it still has the highest child mortality in the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the promises made in 2005 had been kept these health care systems would\u2019ve been more effective and might have been able to contain the disease as has been done in Nigeria and Uganda,\u201d said Adrian Lovett, a leading campaigner with Jubilee 2000, Make Poverty History, Save the Children and now with the global aid advocacy lobby One which has 6m members around the world. \u201cGeldof is putting those broken promises back on the political agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n
You will not hear much of that in the UK since Britain has honoured its Gleneagles pledges. But Geldof was in France on Friday and in Germany earlier in the week launching Band Aid records there. In Berlin he caused a huge stir by publicly lambasting Chancellor Angela Merkel. Germany has no right to think of itself as the leader of the G7 when it cannot fulfil its promises to the world\u2019s poor; German spending on Ebola is less than half\u00a0 what it spent on one football stadium during the World Cup, Geldof\u00a0 blasted. \u201cHe was firing straight at the political target,\u201d said Lovett.<\/p>\n
No doubt it would have helped had Geldof displayed a bit more cultural sensitivity with the tweaked lyrics of the Band Aid 30 record, and if he had included more African artists in the line-up. But, he countered yesterday: \u201cIt\u2019s not about culture, it\u2019s about politics. It\u2019s not about being representative, or including artists I personally like, it\u2019s about getting the biggest names to maximise sales which maximises pressure on the politicians in each place.\u201d<\/p>\n
He is happy to endorse the dozen or more Ebola records by African artists with their various messages to maintain good hygiene, change traditional funeral practices and trust doctors. \u201cEach is aimed at their own market, which is right,\u201d Geldof said, \u201cas our record is aimed at ours.\u201d Unlike most of his critics Geldof understands that market, which is why the single made \u00a31m from downloads within five minutes of its release on primetime UK television.<\/p>\n
But it is not about money. Even the most successful record will raise only a tiny fraction of the substantial amounts needed from the world\u2019s governments to control Ebola. \u201cBut the record has a halo effect,\u201d says Lovett. \u201cIt puts the issue of the chronic underfunding of these African health services in the news.\u201d The music is incidental to Geldof. His real task is to hold the politicians\u2019 feet to the fire.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Paul Vallely was co-author of the report of the Commission for Africa<\/i><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
from The Independent on Sunday<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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