The live 8 concerts: Hold on Africa - here we come!

With the global music extravaganza that is Live 8 just around the
corner, I am is nervous about the crocodile tears shed for
Africa by leaders like Tony Blair.

Everybody must be aware by now of the Bob Geldof Live 8 spectacular
coming at us next week. The media has been abuzz with burning
questions about where the concert will be held and who'll be
performing, with a sentence occasionally thrown in about saving poor
old Africa or ending poverty. This is a serious problem.

Getting it wrong about Africa is a venerable tradition in the rich
world, and music has played its role. Remember the great famine
concerts of 20 years ago and the giant hit "Do They Know It's
Christmas?" It's just been re-recorded, with its inane lyrics of
Africa as a land "underneath a burning sun...where nothing ever
grows" and "no rain nor river flows". Get it? Natural causes---bad
luck--are at the root of Africa's problems.

Television does its share. Who among us haven't seen inspiring
stories about young Canadians who decide to raise pennies for a well
or school in Africa? These efforts are invariably motivated by the
best of intentions. But I'm concerned with their unintended message.
I fear they reinforce wrong-headed stereotypes of both Africa and us.
To my eye, they show Africans as helpless, dependent, passive
victims, and we westerners as decent, selfless, compassionate,
resourceful missionaries.

Now Paul Wolfowitz's has added his explanation for Africa's plight.
Moving swiftly from being a maven about Iraq to becoming an authority
on Africa's 53 countries, the new head of the World Bank has just
completed a whirlwind learning tour of the continent--6 days, 4
countries. The problem in Africa, he announced at the end, is simple:
"corruption". Right. If only Africa's leaders were more like our own.

These views reflect a common theme: they leave the rich world
blameless for Africa's multitude of problems. I greatly fear that
Live 8 is inadvertently strengthening the notion that we in the rich
world must be missionaries to save Africans from themselves. The
truth is already being lost-- the deep, comprehensive responsibility
of western nations and western financial institutions for so much of
Africa's continuing underdevelopment and poverty. The real reason the
rich world should be racing to deal with African poverty is the
central role we have played in causing and perpetuating it. Has
anyone told Paul Wolfowitz that vastly more money pours out of Africa
each year back to rich countries than flows in? That's the key to
Africa's development crisis, and it's almost entirely unrecognized.

The responsibility of the rich world takes many forms. It includes
the indispensable support given over the decades to countless African
tyrants and to white racists. It includes the demonstrably retrograde
free market policies imposed on virtually every Africa government by
ideological extremists at the World Bank and International monetary
Fund (also known by African pediatricians as the Infant Mortality
Fund) and backed by almost all western governments, including Canada.
Across west Africa, it's cheaper to buy a subsidized frozen chicken
imported from Holland that to buy one from a local producer. Foreign
aid is always tied to buying goods and services in the rich country
or to sending consultants to Africa to make more in a day than the
vast majority of Africans do in a year. Rich countries drain off a
huge percentage of the professionals--doctors and nurses, especially--
who are trained in African universities. Western corporations plunder
Africa's natural resources, pay starvation wages and almost no local
taxes, bribe anyone in charge--corruption!--pollute hideously, and
leave conflict and human rights abuses in their wake. Western donors
demand that user fees be imposed on health services and tuition fees
on schooling. They demand that public services be slashed so that
health and school systems deteriorate. The US government and
fundamentalist western religious groups introduce unrealistic and
irrelevant moral dogmas to combat AIDS and undermine evidence-based
methods of prevention

Anyone who doesn't distrust the Group of 8 leaders who'll be meeting
next month hasn't been paying attention. They're the ones responsible
for the economic apartheid that characterizes rich-poor country
relations today. Every one of them has failed to live up to repeated
pledges about aid, debt relief and agricultural subsidies, solemnly
made and blithely ignored. The recent ballyhoo about debt relief for
14 African countries was wildly overblown; it was no more than a
modest first step. The more leaders like Tony Blair and Paul Martin
shed crocodile tears talk about their moral crusade for Africa, the
more liberal imperialist rhetoric they spin, the more nervous we
should be. The job of Bono and Bob Geldof and other Live 8 organizers
is to let their fans know that Africans need no more missionaries or
do-gooders. Instead, Africans have a right to justice and equity to
make up for the incalculable harm that we in the rich world have
inflicted on them for such a long, long time.