Live 8 was held one year ago. Sir Bob Geldof, Bono, and their crew of aging hippy-rockers played the old songs one more time, raised money for aid, pressured the G8 nations meeting at Gleneagles, Scotland, to promise more help for Africa; and everyone felt good about the whole thing. “Make Poverty History”, they all said; and many seemed to believe it was really about to happen.
A year on, however, many Africans maintain that Live 8 has had little, if any, effect. Indeed, some are speaking out strongly against foreign aid as an impediment to dealing with the real underlying issues.
One bright spot on the African horizon is the growing realisation that the continent's problems are of its own making and that only Africans can solve them.
In a blistering attack on the thinking behind Live 8, Moeletsi Mbeki, the deputy chairman of South Africa's Institute of African Affairs and the brother of the South African president, warned Geldof of "a real danger that far from combating poverty in Africa you are making things worse".
He said: "You do not understand the core problem. If you want to end poverty in Africa, you must treat the disease, not the symptoms. That disease is the shocking lack of accountability afforded toward the African people by those who rule them. The truth of Western aid is that for every pound, dollar and euro that finds its way to the needy, another is propping up corrupt governments such as Robert Mugabe's in Zimbabwe."
Mr Mbeki's is far from a lone voice.
The idea that aid does not help, and may even make conditions worse, is spreading. Greg Mills, director of a South African economic think tank, acknowledges that Live 8 heightened Western awareness of the situation of Africa, then goes on to say:
“There is a new generation of Africans who are uncomfortable with foreign aid. They see that it undermines self-respect, saps initiative, encourages dependency, and creates many of the problems that it is supposed to alleviate."
Another Africa expert downplays the value of foreign aid as a distraction from policies designed to encourage economic production and trade with developed nations.
"I don't think that Live 8 itself changed anything," says Tom Cargill, the Africa programme manager of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. "First there is the question of whether the money will actually appear, and, if it does, the bigger question is over what good it will do.
Aid is not a solution. It works, to a very limited degree, as an emergency support system, but even in doing that it creates other problems. The important part of the Gleneagles deal was the agreement to change trade regulations, and absolutely nothing has happened on that."
The most important positive economic development in Africa during the past year had nothing to do with Live 8 or Gleneagles. Nigeria earned its first international credit rating, largely due to the government’s determined effort to fight mismanagement and corruption.
Two articles available online at New Statesman suggest that, in words from the title of one, Africa may be “better off without us”. Writer Robert Calderisi argues that Western policy should be directed away from foreign aid and toward a new approach to improving the lives of ordinary Africans.
A year on from the Live 8 concerts, energies should be aimed at other causes - for instance, barring western arms sales to unrepresentative governments, quarantining any state that imprisons journalists for expressing personal opinions, abolishing laws that make it a crime to criticise African presidents, focusing aid on the few countries that have used it properly, or seizing illicit African holdings in western banks, the way the British navy intercepted slaving ships on the high seas once the abominable trade in human beings was outlawed. Few African leaders would understand that parallel, but most of their citizens would.
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