9-11-05

Geldof 8 - Africa nil: how rock stars betrayed the poor
So, finally, what became of the Gleneagles G8 gathering and Live8 concerts in July? Detailed investigation and careful analysis by Stuart Hodkinson show that the smoke and mirrors favoured by celebrity egos at the time concealed a terrible void where effective action on Africa was claimed to be. Instead, the experience may mark another turning point in the campaign for global justice.

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‘This has been the most important summit there ever has been for Africa. There are no equivocations. Africa and the poor of that continent have got more from the last three days than they have ever got at any previous summit.’ When a disheveled but defiant Bob Geldof, flanked by U2 frontman Bono, delivered this ringing endorsement of the G8’s deal for Africa at July’s post-summit press conference in Gleneagles, representatives from African civil society and the Make Poverty History (MPH) coalition could be seen shaking their heads in angry disbelief.

‘People must not be fooled by the celebrities,’ complained Senegalese economist Demba Moussa Dembele of the African Forum on Alternatives. ‘Africa got nothing.’ British development NGOs were also furious, some immediately distancing themselves from the Live 8 stars. ‘By offering such unwarranted praise for the dismal deal signed by world leaders [Geldof] has done a disservice to the hundreds of thousands of people who marched in Edinburgh,’ said the World Development Movement’s (WDM) Peter Hardstaff in a joint-statement with War on Want.

Their anger was understandable. The previous night, members of MPH’s co-ordinating team had successfully faced down a desperate last-ditch effort led by Oxfam, Britain’s most powerful development NGO and key ally of the Labour Government, to secure a positive reaction to the G8 communiqué. Kumi Naidoo, the veteran South African anti-apartheid campaigner and now chair of MPH’s international umbrella, the Global Call to Action against Poverty (G-CAP), summed up the coalition’s official verdict. ‘The people have roared but the G8 has whispered,’ he told the hundred or so assembled international journalists. ‘The promise to deliver [more aid] by 2010 is like waiting five years before responding to the tsunami.’

Coming from a campaign whose megastar celebrity backers had made it the darling of the British media for the past year, such legitimate criticism was potentially devastating to New Labour’s attempts to spin Blair’s G8 chairmanship as an ‘historic result for Africa’. The pressure appears to have been particularly felt by Justin Forsyth, Oxfam’s former policy chief turned Downing Street special advisor, who it is alleged had to be ‘physically separated’ from Naidoo later backstage. Insiders allege that in the weeks leading up to the summit, Forsyth had been trying without success to intimidate leading NGO officials into sticking to the pro-government line.

But in Blair and the G8’s moment of crisis, it was Geldof who came riding furiously to their rescue. Casting off his MPH hat in favour of his official role in Blair’s Commission for Africa and Live 8, the former rock star branded his fellow anti-poverty campaigners ‘a disgrace’ to the world’s media before gushing euphoric about the G8’s offerings. ‘On aid, ten out of ten. On debt, eight out of ten. On trade… it is quite clear that this summit, uniquely, decided that enforced liberalization must no longer take place,’ he said before finishing with a flourish. ‘That is a serious, excellent result on trade.’ His intervention ensured that the next day’s media coverage was dominated by an unwarranted ‘job done’ spin that let the G8 off the hook and left campaigners with an uphill struggle to regain popular interest in the issues.

Aid, trade and debt: the Gleneagles deception

Civil society’s disappointment with both the G8 outcome and the celebrities’ positive portrayal of it can be understood by contrasting MPH’s demands – previously criticized by Southern campaigners as too conservative and compromising to G8 policies – with the Gleneagles communiqué.

In line with the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agreed in 2000, MPH had wanted an immediate increase of $50 billion a year in international aid from rich countries. It had also called on the G8 countries – Canada, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Russia, Britain and the US – to meet by 2010 a 35-year promise to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on overseas development; prior to Gleneagles, the average across the G8 was less than 0.2 per cent. These demands were not just inspired by aid agency self-interest: the UN argues such financing is required to meet the 2015 targets to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, and reduce by two-thirds the 11 million 0-5 year-old children who die each year mainly from preventable diseases.

More aid also had to be ‘better aid’, untied from policies and purchases dictated by Western governments. As Yifat Susskind, associate director of Madre, the US-based women’s human rights organization, argues, this ‘conditionality’ goes beyond privatization and trade liberalization: ‘Nearly 70 per cent of US aid money is “tied” to purchases from US-based corporations, including HIV/AIDS drugs, which cost up to $15,000 a year per patient, compared to $350 for generics.’ She explains how Bush’s Millennium Challenge Account, praised by Bono and Geldof for boosting aid flows to Africa, ‘explicitly ties aid to co-operation in the US’s “war on terror” and favours Christian organizations that promote abstinence over proven “safer sex” approaches to prevention and violate internationally agreed-upon sexual and reproductive rights.’

So when the G8 announced with great fanfare that they had agreed to ‘double aid’ by 2010 to $50 billion a year, with $25 billion going to Africa, and that ‘poor countries should be free to determine their own economic policies’, Bono’s emotional endorsement would no doubt have satisfied the 200,000 demonstrators who flocked to Edinburgh on 2 July to ‘Make Poverty History’, and the hundreds of millions who had watched Live 8. ‘We are talking about $25 billion of new money,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘The world spoke and the politicians listened.’

But MPH insiders claim Bono the rockstar was putting on the acting performance of his life, as they had already briefed him that the aid deal was in fact bogus. Over half of the $50 billion wasn’t ‘new money’ at all but came from either old pledges or future aid budgets, meaning less assistance after 2010. Only EU countries had agreed to meet the 0.7 per cent aid target and even this would not happen until 2015 – 45 years after the original commitment was made. Britain, meanwhile, was alone in announcing it would no longer tie overseas aid to free market reforms, while the US made it clear that aid increases would require ‘reciprocal liberalization’.

Campaigners argue that the G8 debt deal was a similar pop-star-veiled deception. MPH had demanded immediate and unconditional 100 per cent debt cancellation for the 62 poorest countries through a ‘fair and transparent international process’ that used new money, not slashed aid budgets. Despite MPH’s rhetoric of ‘unpayability’ and ‘human need’, this wasn’t about Western charity or ‘forgiveness’ but righting an historic wrong. Between 1970 and 2002 African countries alone received a total of $540 billion in loans and paid back $550 billion in interest – yet today the continent still has a staggering $295 billion official debt stock. Much of the original debt was a hangover from colonialism that was then hugely inflated by the massive hike in interest rates during the 1970s and 1980s. The human cost has been devastating: during the 1980s, tens of millions of Africans needlessly died from starvation and disease at the same time as debt service repayments averaged 16 per cent of African government expenditure, compared to 12 per cent on education and 4 per cent on health.

When British Chancellor Gordon Brown emerged from June’s G7 (minus Russia) Finance Ministers meeting in London to announce that 18 countries – 14 of which were African – would receive ‘100 per cent multilateral debt cancellation’, with another 20 countries to follow, the British media led the plaudits. ‘$55 billion Africa debt deal “a victory for millions’’’, ran the front page of The Observer, citing an ecstatic Geldof who said: ‘Tomorrow, 280 million Africans will wake up for the first time in their lives without owing you or me a penny from the burden of debt that has crippled them and their countries for so long.’

However, NGOs are adamant that Geldof once again knowingly misled the public. The G7 had not in fact agreed to cancel the debts of 14 African countries, or of any other country for that matter. Instead, they had agreed a ‘proposal’ – still to be ratified by the relevant bodies, with leaked documents revealing major political obstacles in the way – to take over the debt repayments of those countries to just three of world’s 19 multilateral creditors – the IMF, World Bank and the African Development Bank (ADB). This meant that African countries would continue to be saddled with crippling debts owed to the other 16. Moreover, the $55 billion figure would in reality be worth little more than $1 billion a year – the amount of annual interest payments to the IMF, World Bank and ADB by the 18 countries as a whole. This will hardly put a dent in the $23.6 billion paid out in 2003 in debt servicing by developing countries.

Campaigners from Jubilee South, a global network of more than 80 debt campaigns across Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia/Pacific, argue that despite promises to the contrary, it is no coincidence that the 18 selected countries have just completed nine years of neoliberal structural adjustment under the IMF/World Bank’s Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) scheme. This has typically increased poverty and inequality at the same time as privatizing and liberalizing large swathes of their economies. ‘The 20 countries additionally earmarked for debt cancellation must now also submit to the HIPC process,’ explains Eric Toussaint of the Belgium-based Committee for the Abolition of the Third World Debt (CADTM). ‘And for every dollar received in debt relief, poor countries will receive an equivalent dollar reduction in aid, precious funding that will only be returned if they meet “specific policy criteria” – more long years of privatization and liberalization that increases school fees, health-care costs and tax, removes subsidies for basic products and creates unfair competition between local producers and transnational corporations, all of which hurts the poor. For Geldof to stand there and say that conditionality is over was a complete lie.’ 1

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the summit’s deliberations centred on trade. MPH had demanded the G8 set binding dates for the abolition of subsidies and other support to their farmers – worth some $300 billion a year – that destroys rural communities across the global South, and stop forcing through liberalization and privatization on poor countries in multilateral, regional and bilateral trade negotiations. ‘The G8 summit did not indicate any change of heart from the aggressive campaign their negotiators are pursuing at the WTO talks to rapidly open up the developing countries’ agricultural, industrial and services sectors,’ says Martin Khor of Third World Network, the influential international research and advocacy body based in Malaysia, citing the G8 communiqué’s stated intention to pursue an ‘ambitious and balanced outcome in negotiations’ at the Hong Kong WTO Ministerial in December. Even Oxfam’s director, Barbara Stocking, was forced to admit that ‘Gleneagles failed on trade, offering less to developing countries even than has been promised in the WTO’.

New Labour, Oxfam and the celebrity set

So why did Geldof and Bono, two men renowned for their 20-year commitment to helping Africa’s poor, deliberately misrepresent the G8 deal? The most obvious explanation would appear to lie in Bono and Geldof’s personal closeness to Blair and Brown, along with film director and writer Richard Curtis, who founded the Britain’s powerful celebrity-led Africa charity, Comic Relief. For WDM’s Peter Hardstaff, a key member of MPH, the answer lies in a mixture of egomania and ignorance. ‘I got the impression that Bob Geldof wanted to justify Live 8 and his involvement in Blair’s Commission for Africa,’ he explains. ‘Anyone involved in trade campaigning for the past couple of years would recognize the G8 came up with nothing new, so how he could come up with such effusive praise is beyond me.’

But leading figures in African civil society believe that the rock star philanthropists are part of a wider conspiracy of Western corporate profiteering on the back of Africa. ‘The highly publicized exclusion of African artists from the main Live 8 stage in Hyde Park helped us to finally understand the real objectives behind the Blair-Geldof axis,’ argues Aminata Traore, Mali’s former Minister for Culture and Tourism and co-initiator of the African Social Forum. ‘It wasn’t just about putting us firmly in our place as recipients of charity, not actors in our own right. Africa’s misery is a great product to sell, above all for companies, consultants and certain cultural actors and celebrities. Having African artists on the stage would have reduced the profit margins of promoters.’

Charles Abugre, the Ghanaian activist currently heading Christian Aid’s policy team, is in no doubt that a broader ideological game is in play. ‘I actually see Live 8 as part of a carefully orchestrated strategy by huge TNCs to divert attention away from their own culpability in Africa’s poverty,’ he says.

However, Kofi Mawuli Klu, chair of the Pan-Afrikan Task Force for Internationalist Dialogue (PATFID), is far more scathing of the celebrities. ‘They are part of the age-old set of white supremacy racists seeking Cecil Rhodes-style personal hero status,’ he asserts angrily. ‘By playing at “Tarzan saving Africa”, Geldof is simply following Blair in veiling the capitalist super-exploitation of African people all over the world, including refugees and descendants of enslaved Africans in the West, while profiteering from the continuing genocidal rape of Africa.’

At first glance, such claims would seem a little far-fetched. Bono and Geldof may be multi-millionaire businessmen with large egos, but over the years they have campaigned for 100 per cent debt cancellation, the international regulation of multinational companies and the end to forced liberalization and privatization – all to major public acclaim. In contrast to the Live Aid concerts 20 years ago, which were designed to raise awareness and money for the Ethiopian famine, the aim of Live 8 was openly political: to create a huge global media spectacle involving billions of people in order to bring unstoppable pressure on the G8 to cancel debt, boost aid and change trade rules to eradicate African poverty. Geldof had made this clear at the press launch of Live 8: ‘We don’t want your money. We want you.’

But the attitude of African civil society towards the Commission for Africa in which Geldof played a prominent role, and details about how he made Live 8 a reality, appear to tell a very different story about his motives. Writing in July’s Red Pepper magazine, Yao Graham, co-ordinator of Third World Network-Africa, described the Commission as ‘a new tool in the West’s age-old scramble for Africa’s natural wealth’ with its blueprint to open up the continent’s economies to further unregulated exploitation by multinational corporations under IMF and World Bank control. Such a business-friendly outcome had been ensured by Blair’s decision to grant huge input into the report from Western mining and oil multinationals like Anglo American, De Beers, Shell, Chevron Texaco and ExxonMobil, along with former IMF and World Bank officials. Unsurprisingly, the Commission’s proposals were unreservedly rejected by a host of high-profile African organizations who launched their own ‘Alternatives Commission for Africa’ in Edinburgh on the eve of the Gleneagles G8. Geldof, however, took a different view, telling the Guardian newspaper: ‘I don’t know how much more radical or correct the report could get.’

Geldof’s silencing of African voices did not stop there. Amid accusations of ‘musical apartheid’, he excluded African artists from the main London concert, saying Live 8 was ‘not a cultural event’ and only musicians with more than four million record sales could play, otherwise people in China would ‘switch off’. After huge public criticism led by Blur’s Damon Albarn and respected disc jockey Andy Kershaw, Geldof eventually gave his blessing to ‘Africa Calling’, a hastily arranged low-key Live 8 concert in Cornwall featuring African artists that was attended by just 5,000 people. One of these artists, Emmanuel Jal, the former Sudanese child soldier turned global hip-hop star, later told the Guardian that by silencing African self-representation, he and many other Africans had lost all respect for Geldof, adding ‘it looks like he is making history by using the poor people’.

Jal’s criticism is supported by members of the African coalition of G-CAP. ‘When Bob Geldof and Richard Curtis announced that Live 8 was organizing a concert in Johannesburg and that Mandela was appearing, the news came as a demoralizing blow to us’, explains Firoze Manji, the co-director of Fahamu, an African social justice network. Manji recounts how the African coalition had already planned a concert in Johannesburg in early July to be held in one of the townships to encourage maximum participation of the people who suffer the greatest effects of globalization and neoliberal policies: ‘It would not have featured Geldof and Comic Relief’s paternalistic pity-based slogans.’

However, Manji claims that a private meeting in London of Kumi Naidoo, Director of Civicus, the South African-based global alliance for citizen participation, and chair of G-CAP, Oxfam GB, Curtis and Geldof, unilaterally cancelled the original concert in favour of the Live 8 event, throwing the African coalition into disarray. When a number of member organizations spoke out against the decision, a compromise was agreed that any new concert would not be branded as a Live 8 initiative and that the African campaign’s slogans would be retained. However, Manji argues that a press release denying Geldof’s claim to the Johannesburg concert was blocked at the last minute by Oxfam GB and Civicus, who then announced that Live 8 would go ahead, despite opposition of half the G-CAP membership, because this ‘was what Richard Curtis and Live 8 wanted’. The concert, which cost some $500,000 to stage, was attended by just 4,000 people and it has since emerged that Oxfam and Action Aid, who together invested around $150,000 in the event, have now refused to support September’s follow-up concert in Accra, Ghana, which had been planned long before Live 8.

Many African members of MPH are now convinced that the exclusion of African artists from the main Hyde Park concert, and the cancelling of African-owned music concerts that didn’t fit Geldof and Curtis’s Live 8 vision, were designed to ensure that the British Government and its allies among the Northern aid agencies and celebrity campaigners, like Oxfam, Comic Relief, Richard Curtis and Geldof, could control the transmission of a single global message on 2 July in advance of the G8 summit: that the solutions to African poverty lay, not in the hands of Africans themselves, but the charitable acts of Western governments, NGOs and the rich and famous. ‘A serious occasion was turned into a celebration of celebrities,’ sighs Christian Aid’s Charles Abugre. ‘There were millions of people watching the concerts, but what was the analysis? What was the message? It was of handouts and charity, not one of liberation defined by Africans themselves or the reality that we are actually resisting neo-colonialism and neoliberalism ourselves.’

Live 8’s corporate bonanza

The misrepresentation of the G8 summit and the silencing of African voices were apparently not the only contradictions in the anti-poverty campaign. ‘The British music industry went out of its way to create the impression it was donating its services for free to the cause of Africa,’ says John Beecher, director of Rollercoaster Records. ‘The reality, of course, is very different. Everyone, from U2 and Madonna to the record companies and promoters, made a lot of money out of Live 8.’

In the first week following the concerts, almost every musical act appearing on the Live 8 stage enjoyed phenomenal rises in album sales. Pink Floyd’s much-hyped reunification with former frontman Roger Waters after a bitter 20 year feud was a particularly big money-spinner – shop sales of their ‘best of’ album, Echoes, went up by 1,343 per cent. Others who did well included The Who (up by 863 per cent), Dido (412 per cent), Robbie Williams (320 per cent), Sting (300 per cent), Madonna (200 per cent), U2 (116 per cent) and Elton John (111 per cent). Corporate sponsors showered performers at Live 8 Philadelphia with expensive gifts totalling around $12,000, including designer clothes and jewellery.

Doubtless embarrassed by the hypocrisy of having his $120 million fortune enhanced from a charity concert, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour immediately called on his fellow Live 8 artists and their record companies to give away any related royalties and profits. British music group EMI, who paid a $7 million advance for the highly lucrative exclusive DVD rights to 6 of the 10 concerts, has since made vague promises to pay a ‘percentage’ of any profits to charity. But only a handful of artists have followed suit, while most music companies and shops have been even less charitable.

Also profiting were the events companies contracted to re-sell corporate hospitality tickets for around $2,000 each. Previously describing all those re-selling free Live 8 tickets on Internet auction site E-Bay as ‘sick profiteers’, and forcing the online company to ban the practice, Geldof was happy for companies like AOK Events to earn a 10 per cent commission for each hospitality ticket sold. His decision to allow Clear Channel to organize Live 8 also angered campaigners. The US’s largest radio chain has strong links to the Bush Administration, promoting the pro-war ‘Rallies for America’ in 2003 and accused of censoring anti-war music acts like the Dixie Chicks, REM and Radiohead. It is rumoured that Geldof even sent an email to every Live 8 performer forbidding them to mention the Iraq war or criticize George Bush, a claim he later denied.

Then there are the individual corporate missionaries like multibillionaire Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates, introduced by Geldof to the millions watching Live 8 as ‘the world’s greatest philanthropist’. While Gates has donated billions of dollars worth of Microsoft computer operating systems and software to resource-poor African schools, charities and NGOs, critics argue that this is far from charitable in the context of the fierce competitive challenge to Microsoft from open source providers on the continent. Nor is Gates’s funding of GM technology and research in Africa seen as a ‘solution to food insecurity’. GM science is renowned for allowing corporations to patent, privatize and thus profit from indigenous food knowledge and is ‘overwhelmingly rejected’ by Africans as unsafe and unnecessary, according to Amadou Kanoute, Director of Consumers International Regional Office for Africa.

Yet media analysts believe that artist and record company profits will eventually be dwarfed by those accruing to the global corporations who won multimillion dollar contracts to broadcast exclusively or sponsor the free concerts, and help fund the estimated $40 million cost of staging them. Some, like AOL-Time Warner, have done particularly well. The world’s largest media company paid just under $5 million for the exclusive online and US broadcast rights to screen what turned out to be the biggest Internet event in history, with a record five-million-plus hits. The advertising windfall was immediate: in the 48 hours following Live 8, 70 per cent of AOL’s music traffic was reportedly coming from non-subscribers, compared with roughly 30 per cent before the event. And having proved the commercial value of online video streaming, just days after the concerts AOL launched Network Live, a new online, on-demand live entertainment joint venture that it is predicted will transform the web into a mass entertainment medium.

Another big winner was Nokia. Splashing out around $7.5 million to become Live 8’s global sponsor, Nokia used the event to consolidate its position as the world’s biggest mobile phone company with 30 per cent of the global market and annual phone sales of over 200 million. Nokia’s Tim Sexton told reporters: ‘I think it’s safe to say this is really one of the most ambitious and well-conceived global marketing efforts, where we’re threading the needle between content and brand extensions.’ Yet while Nokia’s accountants are smiling, African refugees living in London see Geldof’s decision to allow the Swedish mobile phone company to associate itself with a political campaign for trade justice in Africa as a sick joke. ‘Mobile phone companies like Nokia are fuelling the Civil War in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,’ says Muzemba Kukwikila, the Congolese chair of the London-based All-Afrikan People’s Community Consultative Commission. ‘Their voracious demand for the precious metals found in the Congo has pushed prices to crazy levels, encouraging those of the warring sides who use forced labour, rape and murder to extract and sell the resources to help finance their criminal operations.’

It is for this reason, and the decades of Western corporate exploitation and corruption in Africa that were reluctantly acknowledged by even Blair’s Commission for Africa, that one of the key demands of the MPH campaign is the international regulation of multinational corporations. Live 8 organizers, however, appear to have had a very different agenda. PATFID’s Kofi Mawuli Klu asserts that the sponsors assembled by Geldof ‘form a roll-call of some of the most hated transnational corporations involved in the neocolonialist domination of Africa today’.

Companies like Nestlé, accused of promoting baby milk substitutes in violation of the World Health Organization’s guidelines and more recently exploiting the HIV/Aids epidemic in Africa to sell more milk substitute products to infected mothers; Rio Tinto, the world’s largest mining corporation, widely condemned for its longstanding record of human rights and environmental abuses across the global South, and particularly well known to Africans for consistently defying international sanctions against apartheid in former Rhodesia in the 1970s; and Britain biggest arms manufacturer, BAE Systems, whose export-led agenda, according to Mike Lewis of Britain’s Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), is ‘fuelling conflicts across Africa, with catastrophic impacts on development, and diverting spending away from health and education’. In 2001, the British Government promoted the sale of a BAE military air traffic control system to Tanzania, at a cost of $46.8m to a country where half the population lacks access to clean water. ‘Live 8 and BAE whitewashed an unwelcome message,’ argues Lewis. ‘That the British arms industry sustains African poverty, with the support of our government.’

Time to ‘Make Geldof History’

Other members of the Make Poverty History campaign are furious. ‘You wouldn’t believe the battles we’ve had to fight over corporate involvement in the campaign,’ explains a senior trade policy-maker in one of the larger development NGOs. ‘As you can see, we lost’. NGOs’ anger towards Geldof is exacerbated by the fact that while corporations were given free reign to advertise their brand names and logos at the 2 July concerts, charities were barred from hosting information booths or soliciting donations on the now dubious grounds that he wanted spectators to concentrate only on the MPH campaign.

But accusations are now starting to fly that the former rock star, worth an estimated $70 million, not only encouraged corporate profiteering but has himself personally profited from the G8’s focus on Africa through his high-profile role in Blair’s Commission for Africa and Live 8. In February of this year, Universal Music released a greatest hits album of Geldof’s former band, Boomtown Rats, and digitally re-mastered versions of their six studio albums (ex-members of the Boomtown Rats are currently taking legal action against Geldof over alleged unpaid royalties on recording, publishing and merchandising income). In June, as the build-up to the G8 reached fever-pitch, he fronted a six-part BBC1 documentary series, Geldof in Africa, produced by his television company, Ten Alps. In the same month he launched a new bestselling book with the same title, retailing at $35, and announced the Autumn re-release of his 1986 autobiography, Is that it?. As part of the deal, publisher Century/Random House won the exclusive world rights to the ‘official’ Live 8 book, agreeing to pay $9 of every $28 book sold to Live 8.

According to a BBC insider, Geldof’s philanthropic self-portrait hides a hard-nosed businessman who never misses an opportunity to make money. ‘Geldof has been very keen to tell anyone who’ll listen that he never wanted to do the Geldof in Africa documentary series and it was the BBC who begged him to do it. The opposite was in fact true – Bob begged us to pay his company to do it.’ Ten Alps is rapidly positioning itself as one of the key independent television companies in Britain, enjoying a 400 per cent increase in pre-tax profits last year. Its future growth will have been undoubtedly helped by the international exposure provided by Live 8 and Geldof’s exploits, from which it is uniquely well-placed to profit. For instance, Ten Alps’s events division provided two of the big screens for the Hyde Park concert, while its factual TV company, Brook Lapping, is becoming a specialist in African affairs and produced July’s BBC2 three-hour documentary Live Aid Remembered that commemorated the 20th anniversary of the concerts. The company’s success is especially good news for Geldof. He has an 8.3 per cent stake in the company and doubles up as an occasional presenter. Last year, he and his family received an additional $220,000 for their services on specific television productions, augmenting his annual salary of around $140,000 as a non-executive director.

Faced with these facts, many African campaigners now believe it is time for Geldof either to stand down or be toppled from the African solidarity movement. ‘Those in the West who have a genuine concern about abject poverty in Africa and other parts of the world must finally listen to what Pan-African liberation activists have been saying for so long: most of these millionaire celebrities like Geldof are crocodile-tear-shedding poverty pimps trading in the distorted images of our impoverished African masses,’ argues an angry Kofi Mawuli Klu. While Christian Aid’s Charles Abugre does not use this language, he believes the coalition set the tone for the Live 8 whitewash and must now toughen its politics. ‘So far, the campaign has been too superficial. Numbers have been more important than politics and we have placed too much emphasis on celebrities with strong connections to those in power. Consequently, we have not pursued a campaign of struggle against power.’

Interestingly, public criticism of Geldof, Bono and Richard Curtis is known to have deeply angered Oxfam and could be the pretext the aid agency uses to lead a break-away split from MPH. Given Oxfam’s avowedly free-trade solutions to Third World poverty, and its leadership’s uncomfortably close relationship to New Labour – as recently exposed by both the New Statesman and Red Pepper2 – this scenario could be an encouraging development for efforts to realign MPH in the direction of the ‘global justice movement’. But it will not be enough, for the spectacular failure of MPH cannot be laid at the door of Oxfam, Geldof and company alone. By being too dependent on corridor-lobbying, celebrities and the media, by failing to give voice and ownership of the campaign to Southern social movements, by watering down the radical consensus agreed by hundreds of grassroots movements both South and North at the World Social Forum and by politically legitimizing the G8 summit, the campaign was doomed from the beginning. In the end, MPH proved little more than a convenient election-time distraction from the Iraq war for some of Labour’s alienated middle-class voters.

Kofi Mawuli Klu argues that if MPH is to have any sort of future, it must radically reassess its political objectives and methods. ‘If progressive NGOs are serious about radicalising the MPH campaign, they must now finally listen to what Pan-African community voices of resistance have been saying for decades: forget about lobbying the authors of our poverty and instead prioritize freedom-fighting against neo-colonialism and the demand for reparations as the basis for making poverty history.’ Whether a radical anti-imperialist political agenda can be realistically pursued within the compromised world of development NGOs, however, remains to be seen.

Stuart Hodkinson is a former associate editor of Red Pepper magazine and an activist-researcher studying the politics of the global justice movement. He can be contacted at stuart.hodkinson@gmx.net

1 Thirty-eight countries are eligible for debt relief under the HIPC. The 18 to have reached completion point, and therefore qualify for immediate debt relief, are in bold: Angola, Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Guyana, Honduras, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Myanmar Nicaragua, Niger, Rwanda, Sao Tome, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Togo, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.
2 See Stuart Hodkinson, ‘Inside the murky world of Make Poverty History’, Znet, July 2005; Katherine Quarmby, ‘Why Oxfam is failing Africa’, New Statesman, 30 May 2005

This is a longer version of an article published in October’s Z-Magazine. ‘How rock stars betrayed the poor’ can be found at http://zmagsite.zmag.org

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