Ros Wynne-Jones
The Mirror (UK)
May 5, 2004
On the afternoon of July 13, 1985, Bob Geldof sat backstage at Live Aid, imploring TV viewers to feed the starving in Africa.

“Give us your money,” he shouted at the camera. “Give us your f***ing money.”

Yesterday, nearly two decades and a knighthood later, Sir Bob Geldof went to Downing Street with much the same demand.

Nearly 20 years after Live Aid’s dream of feeding the world, Africa is the only continent that is sinking deeper into poverty.

“Why is Africa the lone continent that is getting poorer?” Geldof asked, after attending the first meeting of the Prime Minister’s Commission for Africa.

“The Live Aid generation, who responded to the famine in Ethiopia, have every right to ask that question. It is no longer an issue of charity but an issue of justice.”

300 million people live on less than 60 pence a day

Today, half of Africa’s 600 million people live on less than $1 – around 60 pence – a day, yet aid payments have fallen in real terms from £20 per head to £12 per head since the mid-90s.

Speaking to the Daily Mirror yesterday, Geldof said a whole new way of thinking about Africa was required. “We need to start from the assumption that all our old assumptions are wrong,” he said.

“Globalisation has affected poor countries negatively. This is a new world, one we weren’t prepared for, and one we haven’t got right. Africa is being ruined by odious debts for money squandered by old dictators, by conflict and instability.

“It is being crippled by Aids. It’s different for us when we can afford the retroviral drugs to treat it.

“I want this to be an honest attempt – in time for Britain’s G8 and the 20th anniversary of Live Aid and Britain’s presidency of the EU – to keep this debate in the forefront of the media.

“If that involves having to kick up a pop star fuss and stamp my foot a bit, then it’s not a problem for me. I want to examine everything, root and branch, to make sure that the totality of decline, the absolute poverty that defines Africa, is alleviated.”

1,400 babies born with HIV every day

Geldof was delighted with the initial results of yesterday’s summit.

“Tony Blair was very passionate today. He really went for it. He has stamped the word Africa all over the face of Britain for next year, and that’s where the issue belongs.”

Africa is a landmass being slowly left behind, its potential squandered by past and present rulers, strangled by unfair trade laws, starved by poverty and sickened by Aids.

In the new millennium, once held out by the West as a beacon of hope for African nations, the continent risks drifting to the margins of the world economy and international organisations, excluded from a future it has every right to.

28 million live with HIV/AIDS

Tony Blair has said: “Africa is the scar on the conscience of the world.” The Commission is his personal initiative to save a continent from destruction. Members will look at Africa’s economy, education and health issues, and report next spring and present their findings to the G8 summit in July 2005.

And action is needed on a dangerous number of fronts. More than 28 million Africans are living with HIV/Aids, a desperate toll of lost life and lost workers that is devastating sections of its economy even as it tears families apart.

The continent now has around 12 million Aids orphans, meaning many households are headed by children for whom there is no possibility of childhood. Malaria, a disease that makes fewer headlines, kills more than a million Africans every year, most of them children.

More than 40 per cent of the continent’s children – 50 million – do not go to school and that number is rising even as on every other continent education reaches more and more of the population.

Africa’s education crisis is stunting its development. Aid agencies point out that education – especially for girls – has the potential to be a “stealth weapon” in the war against poverty, opening doors to better health, income and independence.

But the West has had other priorities. Oxfam estimates 100 schools could be built in Africa for the cost of just one of the Cruise missiles fired on Baghdad.

34 of the 49 world’s poorest countries

UN figures suggest the total amount of Western aid needed each year to put every child in the world into school is £3billion.

Shamefully, this is equivalent to around three days’ global military spending. G8 countries currently spend £370m a year on basic education, about half the cost of one Stealth bomber.

Africa receives £7bn a year in aid but the UN estimates Africa will need at least £15-20bn a year if it is to meet the Millennium Development Goals, targets agreed by the international community and aimed at halving world poverty by 2015.

But as the West gives with one hand, it takes away with the other – through crippling debt repayments and unfair trade laws.

African countries still owe almost £175bn in external debt – so that countries are still struggling to make repayments at the expense of their health and education systems.

50 million children do not go to school

Meanwhile, according to Oxfam, more and more unfair trade laws have cost Africa more than seven times the amount it has gained in development aid since the 1970s.

The United States gives more in subsidies to its own 25,000 cotton farmers than it spends on aid for the whole of Africa.

The effect of these subsidies is to drive down world cotton prices, which have fallen by half in the last decade. The net result is that African farmers receive even less for their crops and face an even tougher struggle to survive.

“The Africa Commission will only succeed if it results in real action from rich countries,” said Oxfam’s Phil Bloomer yesterday.

“That means doubling aid to Africa to fight HIV/Aids and get kids into school, plus serious reform of unfair world trade rules that stop African farmers making a living.”

40% aid down in real terms

Tackling all these issues, from Aids to debt relief, from trade laws to getting children into education, is essential to building a new, more prosperous Africa.

If Western leaders fail to do all they can for the continent, the scar on the world’s conscience may not just be a metaphorical one but one that severs the continent leaving it drifting dangerously out of reach.

Africa must be the architect of its own survival. But for it to succeed, Tony Blair and George Bush must be as dedicated to the War on Poverty as they are to the War on Terror.