Bob Geldof urges leaders to keep Africa aid promises

Lifting half of the world’s poorest people out of poverty could unleash the creativity, dynamism, and intellectualism of hundreds of millions of people. This would not only save people’s lives in Africa but would also contribute to the world’s economy and cultures on an unprecedented scale.

That is the message that musician and activist Bob Geldof, a member of Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa and a former Georgia Straight music editor, is planning on taking to the United Nations on Thursday (September 25).

Speaking to the Straight from London, Geldof made an impassioned argument for an increase in aid to the world’s poorest continent.

“In principle, aid should work; in actuality, it does work,” Geldof said. “I’m constantly doing questions about whether aid works. Yes, it does. Do you want figures? We’ve got figures coming out of our fucking ass.”

The 2008 report of the Africa Progress Panel—a monitoring agency that grew out of the Commission for Africa and of which Geldof is a member—notes that Africa has received consistently higher levels of aid since 2002. In that same time, the report states, government revenues in Africa have steadily increased and African governments have committed more resources to tackling poverty.

In 2000, UN member states signed on to the Millennium Development Goals and pledged to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by 2015. Almost eight years later, the UN is convening a high-level conference in New York City to focus on Africa’s “special development needs”.

Geldof said he plans to work the corridors at the UN meeting to hold world leaders accountable for the promises they have made in the past. In one Millennium Development goal, the world’s richest nations promised to allocate 0.7 percent of their gross national incomes to foreign aid. According to statistics published by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, only five countries—Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—reached or exceeded that target in 2007. Canada allocated only 0.28 percent of its GNI to aid, and the U.S. only 0.16 percent.

“It is very frustrating to have to, every year, re-argue with them [leaders] and insist that they didn’t sign their personal names on this,” Geldof said. “They signed the dignity and honour of their country. And they seem to forget that.”

But not everybody agrees that more aid is the key to freeing Africa from the constraints of poverty.

Aweis Issa, a Somali-born UBC graduate who has helped expose Somali war criminals living in Canada, said that the number-one item for the UN’s meeting on Africa should be a conversation on how to hold Africa’s leaders accountable for their actions.

“Africa is not a poor continent; Africa has a lot of natural resources,” Issa told the Straight in an interview. “The continent of Africa is poor because we don’t have good leaders, we don’t have good education systems, we have too many people committed to the wrong things.”

As an example of the UN’s inefficiencies, Issa recalled watching the UN’s World Food Programme deliver food aid to Somalia during the country’s 1986 harvest. At a time when farmers were preparing to sell their crops, the market was flooded with food aid and prices dropped below market value.

“Africans really have to understand that dependency and food aid does not help,” Issa said. “It sounds very harsh, but if we are waiting for handouts, that is not a responsible society.”¦Begging for food is a lost cause, for human dignity and for human civilization.”

Her medical chart, Kitgum, Uganda. Bob Geldof photo.

Geldof has never said that aid should come unconditionally. Asked if the people of Zimbabwe—who have suffered under the brutal rule of President Robert Mugabe since 1980—can be helped by aid, Geldof replied, “It is impossible.”¦All you can do is sit by and watch this crazed old thug destroy a once-thriving and beautiful country.”

Geldof listed a military invasion of Zimbabwe as a possible solution to the country’s seemingly endless woes, if such an action was not “politically impossible and inappropriate”.

Only hours after Geldof’s interview with the Straight, Mugabe’s ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party and Zimbabwe’s opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change, reached a power-sharing agreement aimed at ending months of political deadlock and violence. A text message from Geldof followed the news: “Zim wl hv 2 find its own solutions.”

In Robert Calderisi’s 2006 book, The Trouble With Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn’t Working (Palgrave Macmillan), the former World Bank international spokesperson for Africa openly admits to years of frustration over so many African countries’ “self-imposed” misfortunes, Zimbabwe being a prime example.

Speaking to the Straight from his home in Montreal, Calderisi said that he disagrees with the notion that more money is going to make “much of a difference” for Africa.

“Countries in Latin America and South Asia have progressed largely on the basis of internal growth and investment and effort,” Calderisi said. “And I don’t see why it should be different for Africa.”

Having also worked in Africa for the Canadian International Development Agency from 1975 to 1978, Calderisi said that he is not opposed to aid but argued that aid to that continent should be used differently, “given the experience that we have had with it”.

“There are countries in Africa that have shown that they can use it properly, once they have put themselves on the right track and see aid as an addition rather than the answer to their problems,” Calderisi explained. He pointed to Botswana and Mauritius as examples of “staggering success”.

Central to Calderisi’s book is the argument that aid should be highly conditional, only to be delivered to governments that have demonstrated commitments to transparency and minimizing corruption.

Discussing the potential benefits for Africa of a transcontinental highway system, Calderisi cautioned that such a venture would require international supervision to ensure that money was not misspent. If that condition were met, he said, aid could be used to establish a trust fund that would ensure that roads were properly maintained and operated.

“[That] would be the kind of aid project that I would believe in,” Calderisi added.

In recent years, Africa’s geography has emerged as an argument in itself for why development on the continent has historically been such a challenge.

“Africa has 15 landlocked countries,” Geldof noted emphatically, “more than the rest of the world put together.” As a result, land transportation is crucial to trade. Geldof explained that when one of these 15 countries does produce something, there is no easy way for it to move products to international markets.

Roads from one country to the next are often in disrepair, washed out by floods, or dotted with costly checkpoints, Geldof said. The result is a long and often expensive journey in which each border crossing leaves both producer and transporter with a diminished profit margin. “By the time you get to your ports with your goods, they’ve been outpriced by the market, and the price that you have to charge isn’t worth it,” Geldof concluded.

Stick fighting. Bob Geldof photo.

Like Geldof, Clement Abas Apaak told the Straight that at the UN’s upcoming meeting on Africa, wealthy donor nations must be made to follow through on their promises. “We are very much aware that there is always a lot of talk but no action,” he said.

Since immigrating from Ghana to Canada in 1996, Apaak has served as the president of the Simon Fraser Student Society and founded Canadian Students for Darfur. He also hosts a radio program on the SFU campus station CJSF 90.1 FM called African Connections.

Apaak said that the whereabouts of promised aid is a big question. But he argued that a more important issue is the conditions under which poverty-reduction programs should be implemented.

Apaak maintained that he is not opposed to conditional aid. “But when those conditions make it impossible for African leaders to implement policies in a way that is acceptable to them and their people,” he said, “then it is unfortunate.

“We need to continue to provide aid but we also need to ensure that there is fair trade for African produce and products,” he said. To this end, he added, domestic subsidies in North America and Europe should be significantly reduced so that the products of African farmers can be sold on world markets at a competitive price.

For Apaak, the solutions to Africa’s problems ultimately lie in the hands of its people.

“I think that we overemphasize the leaders,” he said. “We take their opinions way more seriously than we should when, in fact, we should be bypassing them wherever
we can.”

Geldof remembers watching TV in October 1984 when he realized that 30 million Ethiopians were unnecessarily dying of starvation. “To die of want in a world of surplus is not only intellectually absurd, it is morally repulsive,” he said. “I just thought, ”˜That doesn’t have to be like that.’ ”

The result of Geldof’s epiphany was a string of benefit concerts collectively called Live Aid. The world was made aware of Ethiopia’s plight and it eventually responded with a massive humanitarian effort that largely bypassed the country’s ineffective government.

Today, challenges just as great still exist. “To Bob Geldof and Bono, I say good work,” Issa commented. “But still it continues.”