© Rex FeaturesBob Geldof in Ethiopia in 1985
Geldof, the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, sprung to global prominence with his role in Band Aid to raise money for the Ethiopian famine. The single sold nearly 12 million copies; the Live Aid concerts raised £150m. For these efforts Geldof received an honorary knighthood and was elevated to a spokesman for African development.
But the reason for the famine that catapulted him to prominence had less to do with the weather than the Ethiopian government's policy to withhold food shipments to rebel areas and to spend nearly half of its gross domestic product on the military. Aid became a tool of the counter-insurgency strategy, being left to rot or distributed according to political objectives. The same political issues shape African development choices today and these, not external activism on aid, are key to the continent's future.
Regardless, Geldof still fails to understand that African development solutions, like the problems themselves, are principally domestic, and have to be founded in sustainable business logic not political gestures or NGO activism. Writing in the Observer last week, he praised Tony Blair (and Gordon Brown) for the 2005 Gleneagles G8 summit for shaping "not only our politics but that of the world" by cancelling debt and doubling aid.
This act, he claims, released "tens of millions of children into schooling, setting off an intellectual stampede in the continent with the fastest-growing middle-class in the world. Aid sent money into basic health, education and agriculture, providing stability at a fundamental community level and allowing stretched societies a moment to pause ... while helping governments acquire the capacity they needed to govern."
The timing, he says, was critical since it was exactly at this moment the Chinese became interested in Africa and a digital take-off occurred. What aid had to do with Chinese investment and its demand for natural resources is beyond me and I suspect most other Africans. Nor has aid infused government capacity allowing cellphones to revolutionise communications and business. Indeed the latter has occurred precisely because governments are out of the way for once. It has absolutely nothing, nada, zilch to do with the western aid industry, as difficult as that is for them to accept.
Regardless, Geldof claims that "I have no doubt that it is because of Gleneagles that I and colleagues were able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in Africa and create jobs". It is precisely in spite of Gleneagles and its reinforcement of a helpless continent deserving charity that private investment has been raised. Beijing's needs, not the proselytising of Geldof or Blair, has transformed Africa from a problem to be solved through aid to a commercial opportunity to be entertained through investment.
What Geldof does not realise is that, while there is a role for humanitarian spending in emergencies, using aid as a tool for development is at best dubious. This is why aid agencies continually shift their methods and focus from agriculture and infrastructure to governance and back again.
Such inefficiencies, along with the premium on administering aid through Byzantine bureaucracies (not for nothing has the World Bank's staffing increased from 650 people in 1960 to 10,000 today, two-thirds of whom are based in the centre of the poverty-stricken world, Washington DC) help to explain why, as the economist Bill Easterly points out, donor countries have absurdly argued to spend $3,500 annually to lift a poor person's income to above $365 a year. This is why remittances from Africans abroad, which have trebled in a decade to an estimated $60bn annually (just under double the donor flow), are a more efficient source of external financing than aid.
Yet Geldof argues that "surely now the [aid] model has been proved". Nowhere does he mention the aspect of widening democracy, key to Africa's developmental and growth success and to improving governance. Little wonder. The record of development spending is that it can distort accountability of governments more than it improves governance, underwriting the very bad governance practices which are at the heart of underdevelopment.
It can also discourage the development of the sectors where Africa has distinct advantages. For example aside from oil, South Sudan is pinning its hopes on what its officials say is "its virgin agriculture potential". But what inducement is there for this when international agencies say they will aid the "at least four million people" likely to experience "food insecurity" in that country in 2013?
Africans themselves realise this. Which is one reason why the debate in and about the continent has shifted from perennial questions of what others can do for Africa, to one where Africa helps itself. Short-term band aids have given way to longer-term development plans, at the heart of which are local political challenges, arguments and compromises.
Of course there is much to do in Africa, which Geldof glosses over in his Gleneagles glow. While the Irishman lauds the continent as the "coming economic giant", it's still a very poor place, with per capita income around a tenth of the global average, and its middle-class little more than 10% of its one billion people. Rapid population growth means that education is critical, as is providing the governance context to attract investment to create the jobs so necessary for political stability and, in a virtuous cycle, for the right policy choices to be made.
For this reason Gleneagles was important. Not for being the moment that aid was doubled and debt relieved, but the moment when external largesse as the solution for African development was taken off the table. Not by Blair, Brown or Geldof, for that matter, but by Africans.
Dr Greg Mills heads the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation
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