World Affairs
World view - Michela Wrong doubts Bob Geldof can help Africa
Published 07 June 2004
Since the planes crashed into the twin towers, African countries have known that to receive western aid, they must be seen as furthering western security interests
You would be excused for missing it in the furore over Iraq's slow-motion implosion, but a radical initiative is under way to find an answer to Africa's woes. It's called the Commission for Africa. The brainchild of Bob Geldof, it was launched in February by Tony Blair, who gave its experts a year to tackle a continent he described as "a scar on the conscience of the world".
I went to the launch. I also attended the Downing Street press conference at which Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi and Tanzania's Benjamin Mkapa made guest appearances. Occasionally people ask me what I think of the commission. At this point, I become uncharacteristically inarticulate, usually fending off the question with a flippant remark about Sir Bob's hair.
But I know I'm only allowing myself to be distracted by such trivia, because my heart's not in it. I listen to the ambitious promises - the commission, we are told, will produce a new Brandt report, coming up with a holistic approach to problems - and I try to get excited. I really do. But hopelessness has me locked in its grip.
Among London-based development experts, aid workers and journalists who follow Africa, I am not the only sceptic. Some fret over the likely size of the commission budget. Some fear the commission is fast being taken over by Whitehall civil servants. Others argue that theories on Africa have never been lacking, only the political will to act on them. Quite a few query the wisdom of adopting as figureheads one African leader with a shameful record of rigged elections (Mkapa, in Zanzibar) and another whose illegal occupation of his neighbour's land poses the biggest threat to peace in the Horn today (Meles, in Eritrea).
My own despair has different roots. Although it was launched only a few months ago, the Commission for Africa, I sense, is already a worthy has-been. The values that led to its establishment belong to a different era, a period that we will come to look back on as a blessed golden age: the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 11 September 2001.
The cold war screwed Africa up as thoroughly as colonialism or the slave trade ever did. Aid granted on purely strategic grounds, the philosophy of "he may be a bastard, but he's our bastard", lavish military deliveries to presidents with appalling human rights records and bloated bank accounts - they all ensured that a generation of psychopaths remained in power long after their peoples wished them gone.
It took the collapse of the Soviet Union for the superpowers to rein in this vandalism. Favourites such as Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko and Ethiopia's Mengistu Haile Mariam were allowed to fall by the wayside, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund started making lending conditional on "governance issues" and donors began to ask awkward questions about creamed-off funds. The realisation dawned that humanity as a whole might benefit if the developing world was lifted out of abject poverty.
But that moment passed when the planes crashed into the twin towers and George Bush told watching nations they were "either with us or against us". Whatever fine words are pronounced, we can expect aid to be allotted in future on the basis of whether it is perceived to further or weaken western security interests.
Scratch at any African nation's recent dealings with the west and the new priorities swiftly emerge. Take Uganda. In a recent report*, Christian Aid examines Yoweri Museveni's handling of a long-running rebel campaign in the north. Many experts believe there can be only a political solution to the blight that is the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Instead Museveni, pumped up by his new role as an ally in the "war on terror", has placed the LRA on the Terrorist Exclusion List, stepped up - with American support - an ineffective military campaign and largely abandoned attempts to coax rebels in from the cold.
We can expect much more of this kind of thing. African presidents are already learning to play the "war on terrorism" game with the consummate skill they once applied to the cold war one, feeding off western anxieties to secure weapons and no-questions-asked funding. It will be decades before western donors notice how little they get in return. For the irony is that cold war patronage usually blew up in the superpowers' faces, turning angry nations against their leaders' protectors, slowing the emergence of accountable government and ensuring Africa remained a bubbling source of instability.
The first Brandt report changed very little because its proposals on bridging the north-south divide did not gel with the Reaganite times. The second Brandt report may be doomed to suffer a similar fate. Self-obsessed and afraid, the west is in no mood for enlightened altruism.
* The Politics of Poverty: aid in the new cold war (Christian Aid)
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