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Have Bono and Bob Changed the World?
James Button, London
IF THEY ever make the movie, they might call it Bob and Bono and Tony and Gordon. Last year two rock stars, and two Labour leaders fired by Christian faith, a sense of social justice and memory of British imperial burden, set out to, as their campaign slogan had it, Make Poverty History.
The rock stars, Bob Geldof and Bono, staged a concert in London's Hyde Park. The politicians, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, put Africa for the first time on top of the summit agenda of the G8 group of nations.
All four lobbied world leaders — Geldof studiously dishevelled, Bono with his baseball cap turned backwards — until, a year ago today, the G8 leaders stood together in Gleneagles, Scotland, and promised to wipe off the debts of the world's poorest countries, 15 of them in Africa.
They pledged to double their collective foreign aid budget — to $US50 billion ($A67 billion) a year for Africa by 2010 — and to redouble efforts to end subsidies to wealthy Western farmers that stymie African efforts to compete globally.
A year later, what has happened? Before answering the question, it is worth glancing back to that remarkable time in London just over a year ago.
Aid issues were on the front page of every newspaper; even a topless page-three girl in the tabloid Sun had a talk balloon urging the end of world hunger. Everyone seemed to be talking about the forgotten continent.
Amid it all, there was an intense debate about the value of aid. There were thoughtful challenges to the assumption that development aid was automatically good.
For too long, these arguments ran, the West had given aid while staying blind to African politics. Yet aid to endemically corrupt states could be worse than useless: it could help keep bad leaders in power and prevent Africans from standing on their own feet.
Richard Dowden of the Royal African Society notes that every African alive had, in theory, received $US5000 in aid, and the continent a sum equal to six Marshall plans. "If aid were the solution to Africa's problems it would be a rich continent by now," he wrote.
Is there, then, a new consensus on aid that takes account of the mistakes of the past? A year later, it could be a more important question than the scorecard from Gleneagles.
On that, most people seem to agree: the score on the G8's three core promises is at best 1½. The good news is that debt has been wiped out for the 19 neediest countries. Zambia, whose debt has shrivelled to $US500 million compared with $7.1 billion a year ago, used much of the money to build more schools and make basic health care free.
Tanzania was able to buy more food to counter its crippling drought. In Nigeria, debt relief is "putting real children into schools," says Simon Maxwell, director of the Overseas Development Institute, Britain's leading think-tank on aid issues.
On aid, though, only France has met its G8 commitments, according to DATA (Debt, Aids, Trade, Africa), the body Geldof and Bono set up to track the Gleneagles promises. Last week France introduced a tax on air passengers that it hopes will raise $A343 million a year to buy drugs for Africa to treat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
Britain and the US have increased aid to Africa, but below targets, though DATA says Britain has sums in the pipeline that should help it meet the UN goal of wealthy countries spending 0.7 per cent of national income on aid by 2013 (Australia spends 0.28 per cent and lags behind most wealthy nations, Oxfam says).
Yet as Mr Blair has acknowledged, much of the extra money is actually debt relief, a large part of it to Nigeria and Iraq. He accepts that many countries had a battle to make sure aid levels did not fall in 2007.
Trade is the big failure, with the Doha round of trade negotiations near collapse. To Mr Dowden of the Royal African Society, trade reform is the one G8 pledge that really matters to Africa's wellbeing. Yet "not a banana has been delivered, nothing has been achieved".
Worse yet, political reform in much of Africa — a central pre-condition for aid, according to the Commission for Africa report — has stalled or gone backwards. In an unhappy irony, Ethiopia's leader Meles Zenawi, who helped write the report, has in the past year arrested opposition leaders and his police have fired on and killed demonstrators.
In January, the Blair Government cut its funds to Ethiopia. In December, Britain and four other Western countries suspended aid to Uganda after alleged human rights abuses by President Yoweri Museveni.
Both were acts of courage by Mr Blair, especially as he saw Mr Zenawi as a friend. But it exposed the bleak state of African politics. The Ethiopian and Ugandan leaders had been seen as among the continent's best. "The West desperately needs an African success story," says Mr Dowden. Apart from perhaps Botswana and Tanzania, "at the moment there isn't one".
More stringent tests for corruption and human rights abuses aside, what else have we learnt about aid? A balanced assessment comes in a paper by David Booth, a researcher at the Overseas Development Institute.
He thinks the aid industry must "concede that elements of the sceptics' case are well-founded … Aid can be part of the problem because it takes the pressure off leaders who might otherwise be forced to perform better by market forces or their own taxpayers."
He is confident aid can work. But it must be predictable and focused on supporting countries with transparent policies.
Right now, for example, the fact that China is buying huge amounts of African raw materials is having a much bigger effect on Africa than aid, though it is not yet clear who is benefiting.
Mr Maxwell of the Overseas Development Institute says it is a great achievement that aid is now on the agenda of the West in a way it never has been before.
"I think Tony Blair and Gordon Brown really care about the subject. They were twisting arms 20 minutes before the end at Gleneagles in order to get more aid money," he says.
Can the momentum be maintained? "Instead of going for the big push, go for the long push," says Mr Dowden. That means less focus on big licks of money and more on unspectacular but sustained political and economic engagement with specific countries.
It won't make poverty history, it is less emotionally satisfying to the West, but Mr Dowden thinks leaders in the West need to understand Africa before trying to save it.
--The Age
James Button, London
IF THEY ever make the movie, they might call it Bob and Bono and Tony and Gordon. Last year two rock stars, and two Labour leaders fired by Christian faith, a sense of social justice and memory of British imperial burden, set out to, as their campaign slogan had it, Make Poverty History.
The rock stars, Bob Geldof and Bono, staged a concert in London's Hyde Park. The politicians, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, put Africa for the first time on top of the summit agenda of the G8 group of nations.
All four lobbied world leaders — Geldof studiously dishevelled, Bono with his baseball cap turned backwards — until, a year ago today, the G8 leaders stood together in Gleneagles, Scotland, and promised to wipe off the debts of the world's poorest countries, 15 of them in Africa.
They pledged to double their collective foreign aid budget — to $US50 billion ($A67 billion) a year for Africa by 2010 — and to redouble efforts to end subsidies to wealthy Western farmers that stymie African efforts to compete globally.
A year later, what has happened? Before answering the question, it is worth glancing back to that remarkable time in London just over a year ago.
Aid issues were on the front page of every newspaper; even a topless page-three girl in the tabloid Sun had a talk balloon urging the end of world hunger. Everyone seemed to be talking about the forgotten continent.
Amid it all, there was an intense debate about the value of aid. There were thoughtful challenges to the assumption that development aid was automatically good.
For too long, these arguments ran, the West had given aid while staying blind to African politics. Yet aid to endemically corrupt states could be worse than useless: it could help keep bad leaders in power and prevent Africans from standing on their own feet.
Richard Dowden of the Royal African Society notes that every African alive had, in theory, received $US5000 in aid, and the continent a sum equal to six Marshall plans. "If aid were the solution to Africa's problems it would be a rich continent by now," he wrote.
Is there, then, a new consensus on aid that takes account of the mistakes of the past? A year later, it could be a more important question than the scorecard from Gleneagles.
On that, most people seem to agree: the score on the G8's three core promises is at best 1½. The good news is that debt has been wiped out for the 19 neediest countries. Zambia, whose debt has shrivelled to $US500 million compared with $7.1 billion a year ago, used much of the money to build more schools and make basic health care free.
Tanzania was able to buy more food to counter its crippling drought. In Nigeria, debt relief is "putting real children into schools," says Simon Maxwell, director of the Overseas Development Institute, Britain's leading think-tank on aid issues.
On aid, though, only France has met its G8 commitments, according to DATA (Debt, Aids, Trade, Africa), the body Geldof and Bono set up to track the Gleneagles promises. Last week France introduced a tax on air passengers that it hopes will raise $A343 million a year to buy drugs for Africa to treat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
Britain and the US have increased aid to Africa, but below targets, though DATA says Britain has sums in the pipeline that should help it meet the UN goal of wealthy countries spending 0.7 per cent of national income on aid by 2013 (Australia spends 0.28 per cent and lags behind most wealthy nations, Oxfam says).
Yet as Mr Blair has acknowledged, much of the extra money is actually debt relief, a large part of it to Nigeria and Iraq. He accepts that many countries had a battle to make sure aid levels did not fall in 2007.
Trade is the big failure, with the Doha round of trade negotiations near collapse. To Mr Dowden of the Royal African Society, trade reform is the one G8 pledge that really matters to Africa's wellbeing. Yet "not a banana has been delivered, nothing has been achieved".
Worse yet, political reform in much of Africa — a central pre-condition for aid, according to the Commission for Africa report — has stalled or gone backwards. In an unhappy irony, Ethiopia's leader Meles Zenawi, who helped write the report, has in the past year arrested opposition leaders and his police have fired on and killed demonstrators.
In January, the Blair Government cut its funds to Ethiopia. In December, Britain and four other Western countries suspended aid to Uganda after alleged human rights abuses by President Yoweri Museveni.
Both were acts of courage by Mr Blair, especially as he saw Mr Zenawi as a friend. But it exposed the bleak state of African politics. The Ethiopian and Ugandan leaders had been seen as among the continent's best. "The West desperately needs an African success story," says Mr Dowden. Apart from perhaps Botswana and Tanzania, "at the moment there isn't one".
More stringent tests for corruption and human rights abuses aside, what else have we learnt about aid? A balanced assessment comes in a paper by David Booth, a researcher at the Overseas Development Institute.
He thinks the aid industry must "concede that elements of the sceptics' case are well-founded … Aid can be part of the problem because it takes the pressure off leaders who might otherwise be forced to perform better by market forces or their own taxpayers."
He is confident aid can work. But it must be predictable and focused on supporting countries with transparent policies.
Right now, for example, the fact that China is buying huge amounts of African raw materials is having a much bigger effect on Africa than aid, though it is not yet clear who is benefiting.
Mr Maxwell of the Overseas Development Institute says it is a great achievement that aid is now on the agenda of the West in a way it never has been before.
"I think Tony Blair and Gordon Brown really care about the subject. They were twisting arms 20 minutes before the end at Gleneagles in order to get more aid money," he says.
Can the momentum be maintained? "Instead of going for the big push, go for the long push," says Mr Dowden. That means less focus on big licks of money and more on unspectacular but sustained political and economic engagement with specific countries.
It won't make poverty history, it is less emotionally satisfying to the West, but Mr Dowden thinks leaders in the West need to understand Africa before trying to save it.
--The Age
