We need an utterly new, holistic vision of Africa and its needs, and mustforge a new Marshall Plan for the continent, writes Bob Geldof
Among the southern peoples of Ethiopia last month I felt a newer despair. Of course, the old familiar one of tearing pity followed (always too quickly, in my case) by shaking anger and then the piercing shame. But this other one was new. What the fuck was I doing here?
Here, everthing was toweringly green, a riotous uncontrolled jungle verdancy, but about me the ruined people of a ruined land.
They were used to the irregular rainfalls, and would normally allow for the subsequent crop failures and food shortages by profitably selling their high-yield coffee cash crop on the world markets, thus buying in whatever food they needed to make up that year's shortfall.
Except that this year coffee prices had collapsed by 70 per cent because Vietnam, a country they had never heard of, had entered the market a continent away. They began to starve. So far, so normal.
What was weird this year was that they began to die quicker than before. Because of the relatively generous response from international food donors (except the EU), they could implement a policy of slowly- managed dying.
Of course, nobody called it that, but when you exist on government rations of only 68 per cent of what is required for a human to live, then what else do you call it? The government had no choice. There just wasn't enough grain committed to the country by the donor countries (in particular the EU).
But this year they began to fall quicker than before. Especially the young ones. Doctors were reporting 14 per cent incidences of AIDS in ante-natal testing of pregnant women. The children were getting it in exponential numbers. The large amounts of blood present at birth were passing on the killer virus, weakening the immune system before it ever even sees food - of which, of course, there is none.
The superhuman heroics of the few young African doctors and nurses in the ill-lit shed they call a hospital defies description. This shack served a million people, with no equipment or medicine of any note.
This, then, was a people in trauma. The old certainties - yes, even hunger - seemed hopelessly out of kilter. One was watching an entire society being destroyed. And it is all so beautiful. Them, their surroundings, the bucolic huts, smoke twirling through the thatch into the damp morning air, and, inside, the lassitude of death or imminent death, or possibility of death and all with the awful African fatalism.
There is a terrible natural metaphor to this place. You see it everywhere. It appears huge and green and bountiful and yet it is barren. They call it the "false banana". It looks like it, feels like it, grows like it, but produces nothing.
Like the pregnant women carrying life but giving birth to death. The fertile ground with nothing to eat. The cash crop that produces no money. The men making all the decisions and doing nothing. One big false banana.
In the years of hunger they strip the bark of the false banana, pound it into a stringy mass of inedible fibre and cellulose, then bury it for a year to soften it. Then they dig it up, clean it and grind it into a stringy flour. Then they eat it. It fills your stomach but another false banana. Food that doesn't feed you.
I'm sick of this bullshit. We want to stop this happening. We ask for it to be stopped, and, to mollify us, rather than to alleviate their plight, our institutions offer the false banana of "development". We toss them token aid that helps no one.
Yesterday in Ireland they released the latest report. That's good. These things need to be done. The great and the good assembled and held forth, sounded the bugle and charged once more into the breach.
And sometimes it kind of works. But I don't believe the Millennium Development Goals of 2015 have a cat's chance of being met, and certainly not on the current levels of commitment.
No doubt British Chancellor Gordon Brown's "International Financing Facility" is smart and cute and could raise the $50 billion needed annually to fund the MDC. It's the most plausible of several schemes doing the rounds, but despite its simplicity and ingenuity, it will get nowhere. Why? International political scepticism, lack of political will, jaundiced national prejudices etc.
The individual agencies with their local jealously-guarded initiatives are heroic and an invaluable help to the few communities they manage to help, and Band Aid will continue to support them.
The big guys, yer Red Crosses, IMFs and World Banks etc, have a place (what that is needs to be readdressed), yer multi- and bi-laterals, yer institutions, yer . . . IT'S NOT WORKING.
Where's the unified goal? Where's the coherence? The triumphs of the individual campaigns - debt, AIDS etc - have made differences, but they are not as profound as people suggest. I say this even though I am involved in all of them.
And yes, aid and debt-relief really do work. But the benefits would be immeasurably greater were all the remedies applied in a thought-through totality of measures. A holistic response to a single catastrophe. Instead, everything is piecemeal. But, before being implemented or having time to work through, a new unforeseen factor will have entered the field and knocked the benefits sideways.
It's time to think anew. An entire continent drifts further from us at exponential speed. As economies we can't afford it - as humans we can't allow it. The effect of the continental chaos that is Africa today is catastrophic to us all, but our remedies for dealing with it are as out of date as the almost medieval nature of the decline itself.
We are witnessing the fallout of the end of the Cold War on the weakest people. The conditions of this post-Cold-War world are wholly new and were entirely unpredictable. We need urgently to define these new forces to understand this different world.
The old certainties and securities of fear have gone, but the shibboleths of that age continue to be misapplied as remedies to entirely new concerns.
The trigger points of chaos - debt, trade, AIDS and aid, and their consequent bitch cousins of political instability, war and corruption, - are only symptoms of the giant roaring undertow that is the globalised, politically unipolar world of trading blocs on the 24/7 planet.
It is not the symptoms we must deal with, but the cause. That cause needs to be defined explicitly, for only then can the chaos of Africa be looked upon as a totality, and not its individual excrescences. Then there may be a single massive coherent response.
We couldn't afford to fight the Cold War. We had too much to lose. We were too rich. The Soviets on the other hand were too poor to fight and had too much to lose. The Hot War was in the south. In the proxy states where we let them do the dying for us. If they had Angola, we had Zaire. They had Ethiopia, we had Sudan . . .
Then it was over and we got rid of the tyrants we had paid to whip their populations into line, and then we asked for the money back from those same broken backs. Like yer man said "The rider changes/But the whip remains the same".
Simultaneously we entered the computer age. Machines talk uncomprehendingly to each other, moving money round a planet no longer made up of political blocs but solely of trading blocs. Presto Globalisation.
Plus we're talking to each other in real time. Except for those who don't have computers, phones, televisions, or anything to trade with us that we can't produce cheaper with our protective subsidies and tariffs. We won; we'll make the rules then. And if you can't afford the price of admission to the club your permanent position will be for ever behind the economic velvet rope.
I thought AIDS was a gay New York club thing until it impacted on me personally in 1986. We quickly learned otherwise and, being on the lucky side of the planet, found how to at least contain this horror and not victimise its sufferers. Not Africa. Hopelessly weak and exposed, they are undergoing a pandemic unknown since the Middle Ages.
None of this could have been foreseen by the Brandt Report, the seminal document of the 1970s that tried to define the world as it was then. The disparity between Us and Them. The North and South, the Rich and Poor. A disparity that 100 years age was 9- 1 in earnings is now 100-1. For all our supposed enlightenment, things get worse.
Most development models are predicated on "Brandt-plus". The plus being the discernible new factors discussed above. That's not enough. It is time now for a new Brandt Report. Literally a world-defining document. Brandt is only appropriate to another time, and that was a different age, long ago. It is time now to seek to define our age and how we intend it to work.
And we need to go back further than Brandt for our model.
Almost 60 years ago, on another ruined continent, our own, America, in what Churchill called "the greatest single act of human generosity", initiated the Marshall Plan. One per cent of GDP would be allocated to Europe for four years in an attempt to rebuild a viable continent.
It worked. That's why I'm here typing this and you're reading it. Pace Churchill, but it wasn't a wholly disinterested act. America needed a healthy people to build a stable, viable continent as a bulwark against Stalinism, and as a wealthy trading partner. America and Europe now have a similar interest in the long-term health of Africa.
The Marshall Plan came with conditions of accountability, transparency and elective representative governance - all the things that should be required of Africa today.
The Germans, Italians, Spanish Portuguese, and to an extent the French, had never truly experienced democracy prior to Marshall, and that is true of today's African states, which are hopeless, almost to a man. The acid test must be: were any of the current African politicians standing in your constituency, would you vote for them? If not - as it is in my case - why should an African be persuaded differently?
But it is still us who love les politiques du ventre. After all Berlusconni, though self-immune now, is still under investigation. Chirac likewise, Haughey, too, Kohl was caught. It's just that we can afford our corruption. We can take the hit. We buckle a bit, but we don't snap like the already plundered, stolen from ceaselessly by the power of the know-nothings over the have-nothings.
It is quite possible that a wholly African version of democracy will emerge, based on local tradition and culture. That again is true of us - French, British and American ideas are different but culturally appropriate.
But this is the minimum quid pro quo required for our new Marshall-type plan for Africa. Nor will it cost anything like America's 1 per cent of GDP in 1946. Estimates range around the 0.16 per cent figure for the wealthiest nations. This is nothing, and we can do it.
In two years' time it will be Britain's turn to host the G7 summit. It will also be the 20th anniversary of Live Aid. This could be Blair's moment. Not another predictable "world-defining" beanfest where a few cheques (watered down subsequently) are issued to everyone's favourite cause du jour, but a meeting of the Live Aid babies that quite literally seeks to define this newer world, underpinned intellectually by the publication of a new Brandt Report. The Blair Report? With a view to the immediate implementation of a holistic, coherent, rather than piecemeal rescue plan for the beleaguered billion of Africa.
The time to begin is now. Gather the economists, philosophers, policy wonks, and development geeks, the political scientists, and historians. Find the people who are seriously thinking in a different way to suit our time. They are out there and they must be harnessed to this end.
This is not naivety. It has long passed that point. Indeed, if all the sophistication in the world has got us to where we are now, then bring on the dreamers.
Anyway, what choice do we have? We are not prepared to accept these people dying in their hundreds of thousands, nor are we prepared to accept them to our shores. Our social cohesion is threatened and our social services strained.
They, in turn, don't want to leave their homelands. No one does. They want a life for themselves and their children and a future. And if they can't get it at home they will move. Who wouldn't? Africa is on the move now, and Italian Immigration Minister Bossi notwithstanding, they will not be stopped. To stay is to invite hopelessness, debt slavery, starvation, brutality, sickness and the utter nothing of infinite poverty.
Like Europe in 1946, it is directly in our interests to have a healthy, vibrant people who are free to build a vast viable continent. Naive, perhaps; impossible, no. This is a huge bursting continent of human intellectual capital. But, because of our own self-defeating, ridiculous and wrong imbalances in trade and finance, and the African politicians' refusal to accept responsible political leadership, we tumble together down this despairing vortex of terminal decline. We need not.
I, along with many, many more, am no longer prepared to witness Africa Agonistes, the crucifixion of a continent and its concomitant horrors, without every attempt to prevent it. And the appalling shameful truth is that it is preventable.
Give us anew the political will, the financial force, and, yes, the self-interest at the core of the Marshall Plan. An apocalyptic continent requires nothing less.