It\u2019s now 17 years since Live Aid but Bob Geldof today returns to the subject of Africa and the need for a radical transformation in the West\u2019s relationship with the abandoned continent. Whatever happened to compassion fatigue?<\/p>\n
Over the last two decades Geldof has turned down hundreds of requests to help various bodies campaigning for the Third World and attempted to get on with the rest of his life \u2013 as a businessman, tv executive, internet entrepreneur, and father to the four girls left in his sole care by the death of their mother, his ex-wife Paula Yates. And he is still pursuing his unchanging determination that his chief satisfaction in life comes from his work as a rock musician.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never really stopped doing things for Africa,\u201d Geldof said, speaking after a gig in Foy in Cornwall on Friday. \u201cI\u2019m still Chair of Band Aid Trust. Money still comes in from covenants, wills, and the record keeps selling every Christmas. We distributed a third of a million pounds to projects in Africa in the last three weeks. And then there\u2019s all the lobbying in the background. But I haven\u2019t signed-up to a lot of up-front campaigning.\u201d<\/p>\n
This morning, however, he will be going to Downing Street to present the prime minister with a report being published to mark the start of Christian Aid week. The document, ‘Listen to Africa’, which is written as an open letter to Tony Blair, will be given to the prime minister by Geldof and three representatives from Christian Aid-funded organisations in Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Malawi. It addresses the three key concerns \u2013 on Conflict, Trade and Aid \u2013 which the organisation\u2019s many partner groups throughout Africa have highlighted as the chief concerns facing the continent.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith the G8 meeting next month in Canada it is a key time to push these issues,\u201d says Geldof. \u201cWe need to push Tony Blair to be as bold as he can be. At the risk of sounding complicit with the government both he and Gordon Brown have been incredibly brave and incredibly radical so far in what they have put before the G8.\u00a0 They got them, at Cologne, to cross the Rubicon of accepting that Third World Debt was, in terms of political reality, unpayable which required an entirely new approach from the rich world. And the Jubilee 2000 movement was a brilliant success in influencing that shift in agenda. But now is the time for the next big push.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is more than conviction or instinct behind his view. Geldof and the front man of U2, fellow Irish musician, Bono, have for several years now been working assiduously behind the scenes to change the thinking at the highest political level. They formed a little-publicised pressure group named DATA, which stands for Debt, Aid and Trade for Africa. The two rock stars, together with two full-time campaigners, draw on research by top academics in London and Harvard, in an office paid for by Bill Gates and George Soros, to engage in high-level but low-key lobbying. It has made the two men, who confer with their advisers at least weekly, highly-knowledgeable about the detail of Africa\u2019s economic plight and the West\u2019s attempts to relate to it.<\/p>\n
\u201cBono is the point man. He\u2019s got far more fame than me, particularly in the States where celebrity equals access,\u201d says Geldof. \u201cHe is a really smart person. Since Band Aid he has been interested in the issues, but he got involved at the time of Jubilee 2000. Bono is a Christian and jubilee 2020 was largely driven by the churches and the unions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lobbying has brought the two men into meetings with the senior figures in the Bush administration, including George Bush himself, as well as Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice and the US treasury secretary Paul O\u2019Neill, with whom Bono and DATA\u2019s two full-time officials, Lucy Matthews and Jamie Drummond, will travel on a fact-finding tour of Africa later this month. \u201cI\u2019ve got gigs, so I can\u2019t go,\u201d says Geldof, in a revealing illustration of the loyalties which now command his life, \u201cbut I\u2019ll join them in Canada for the G8.\u201d<\/p>\n
Their association with the right-wing US administration has not gone down well with many of the rock world\u2019s right-on thinkers. Bono\u2019s guitarist, Edge, argued that all this Third World stuff was ferociously uncool, and threatened to damage the band\u2019s street-cred, but he particularly pleaded with the pair not to \u201chang out with the conservatives\u201d. When they began to engage with one of America\u2019s most extreme right-wing senators, Jesse Helms, there were even some in music circles who stopped speaking to Bono and Geldof.<\/p>\n
Geldof is unrepentant. \u201cPeople go on about us supping with the devil,\u201d he says with exasperation, \u201cbut what\u2019s the point in supping with God; he\u2019s already on the side of the angels. If the devil wants to cool down the temperature in hell a little to make the lives of the world\u2019s poorest people more bearable, then I say: \u2018Pull up my chair to the table\u2019.\u00a0 It\u2019s a balancing act. We\u2019re constantly debating: \u2018should we do this, or that, or have our photo taken with this individual.\u2019 We do what we feel is right. I don\u2019t want be hubristic but our little lobbying group is proving to be quite potent. Attitudes in Washington are shifting.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Bush government, he discerns, is \u201can administration really in search of a foreign policy\u201d. This is particularly so post-September 11. \u201cThe Americans are asking: where did this come from? why do people not like us? why don\u2019t they see out point of view.\u00a0 But the key thing is they\u2019re open to persuasion so long as you\u2019re not asking them to do anything which hurts US interests. They\u2019re ruthless in ruthless in pursuit of that. When it comes to steel tariffs they just impose them. If Kyoto doesn\u2019t suit them they say: \u2018It\u2019s bollocks, we\u2019re off\u2019. But they are open to the idea that there are things which can be done which help the poor \u2013 and the people who they realise after September 11 see them as an enemy \u2013 that don\u2019t hurt the US. We can see that because we\u2019re very much far in there. And f you have the ear you whisper gently.\u201d<\/p>\n
Particular leverage has come from the fact that Bono talks to the American Right out of a shared Christian perspective. \u201cYour man Bono is persuasive. Bush has a wellspring in his own constituency who understand the language of moral obligation \u2013 that America the great, America the beautiful, has duties to the world,\u201d Geldof says. When Bono met Helms he said to him, directly, that 2103 verses of scripture pertain to the poor and Jesus speaks of judgment only once – and it’s not about being gay or sexual morality, but about poverty. He quoted a verse of Matthew chapter 25: ‘I was naked and you clothed me.’ Helms was really moved. He was in tears. Later he told Bono he was ashamed of what he used to think about Aids.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe said that he now knew that before he died he was obliged to do something about Aids,\u201d says Geldof. \u201cThat\u2019s a real shift, and from a man whose entire previous political life I would have abhorred. People like that want to talk to Bono – plus they get the autograph for their daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n
But moral outrage is not the only weapon in the duo\u2019s armoury. \u201cWe work on deep info, we make sure we\u2019re really across the detail so that we have the answers to whatever arguments the politicians civil servants come up with. And we start where they are, asking: \u2018Look, what\u2019s the downside for the US of doing this or that. We start from US self-interest and argue that keeping the Third World poor only feeds problems of immigration at home. We show that for the US and Europe to spend more than the entire GDP of Africa on farm subsidies makes no financial sense. We point out that even Adam Smith talks of the need for the protection of infant industries, which is what the World Trade Organisation should be nurturing in Africa, instead of undermining them.\u201d<\/p>\n
He and Bono, he says, have become \u201cthe Laurel and Hardy of Third World Debt\u201d. \u201cWe play soft cop, hard cop because in the end I always lose my patience and he\u2019s always eminently reasonable. You find that people like Condie Rice \u2013 who\u2019s a really smart person, very funny and a lovely woman \u2013 are wide open to coherent intellectual argument.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now the message to the White House and Downing St will be to Listen to Africa. \u201cEveryone in Africa knows that the only aid projects which didn\u2019t end as expensive white elephants are the ones that listened to local people.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now, the Christian Aid report says, the rich nations must commit more resources to finding a solution to the military conflicts in Africa, as well as to the massive damage which Aids is wreaking throughout the continent. They must talk not about free trade but about trade which discriminates in favour of the poorest to allow infant industries to grow there. And they should honour their commitments to raise overseas aid budgets to 0.7 per cent of the national wealth of the industrialised world. Much of this money must then be focused on community-based development initiatives which put Africans in the driving seat.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of every argument about Africa is the reality that nothing will improve if the basics – health, education and primary agriculture \u2013 aren\u2019t sorted out,\u201d says Geldof. \u201cNot that he agrees with everything in the report, such as its insistence that aid should not be tied to the requirement that African countries follow specified economic policies. \u201cYou have to lay down conditions, otherwise you have no counter to the argument that, without them, the Africans would just blow all the fucking money.\u201d With Geldof, the maverick, some things it seems do not change.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Independent, 13 May 2002<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s now 17 years since Live Aid but Bob Geldof today returns to the subject of Africa and the need for a radical transformation in the West\u2019s relationship with the abandoned continent. Whatever happened to compassion fatigue? Over the last two decades Geldof has turned down hundreds of requests to help various bodies campaigning for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[106,67,194],"class_list":["post-8485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-news","tag-bono","tag-geldof","tag-live-aid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8485"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8489,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8485\/revisions\/8489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}