Bono in Africa

Bono is clearly in Jeffrey Sach's camp as opposed to the writer referenced in the previous blog entry from the L.A. Times...

Limits and potential of aid in Africa

May 25th, 2006, filed by Lesley Wroughton

(Ed. note: Reuters correspondent Lesley Wroughton has been traveling with Bono on a six-nation tour in Africa. She interviewed Bono at the end of the trip. Here is what he said.)

On working in Africa… There are multi-dimensional problems. You have to fight a war on at least three fronts and I would call them health, education and the interface with commerce. I couldn’t point you to a single time when these pennies, or dollars, or euros dropped on me and I’m not sure it fully came into focus until this trip.

I’ve moved a distance. We’re all seeing something. We’re more evolved than we were. We used to only see despair and we wanted to help and we wanted to make the funds available to ease that despair. For what was once called foreign assistance, we now need two names: one you can call mercy and response to pandemic-type aid and you can’t hold people ransom to their governments on that. Then there is other aid called investment.

On aid strategies… We have to be very careful where that (investment) aid goes and that is going to be unpopular with some of our activists and it is going to be very unpopular if you’re in a country where your government is not deserving of this new investment and you’re left carrying the can. Oddly enough, it is the activists here on the continent of Africa who are doubly hard on this point. We have to listen to them. They are saying, do not invest in our countries while we have crooked leadership. They’re saying it and I think we have to listen to them. That is hard. That is depressing.

We didn’t go to those countries, so in one sense, this one trip is being skewed in the direction of promise.

On aid limits… We are coming out of the adolescence of optimism, where we thought just putting on our marching boots and pulling a big number could transform the lives on the continent of Africa. You can’t.

There were people campaigning alongside without any conditionality. I don’t agree with them. I don’t agree with the burdensome conditionality that forces liberalization but I do agree with conditionality of tackling of corruption. I think we are growing up.

For somebody who by my trade should be more suited to barricades than the negotiating table, that is part of growing up. The problems are much more complex than we thought they were and I think Africans must have been smiling and cringing at times when they saw us just thinking that money could solve their problems.

To think when we started Live Aid, it was the first kind of aid, the response to famine in Ethiopia. Look how a whole generation has educated itself off the back of that to move from charity to justice and then to move from justice to debt and trade. It’s quite an arc and I think I’ve gone through that. That is the arc of my whole involvement.

The depressing thing again is there are still so many on the continent being held ransom.

(Pictures: (R) Bono visits a market in Ghana’s capital Accra, (L) Bono kisses Hajia Alima Mahama, Ghana’s Women and Children’s Affairs Minister. REUTERS/Yaw-Bibini)