July 4, 2005
Africa, poverty and Live8
I enjoyed watching parts of the Live8 concert on MTV, especially the generally superior lineup from London. Seeing Pink Floyd looking way older than even the Rolling Stones -- that's David Gilmour and Roger Waters, above, but playing brilliantly, was a highlight.
Madonna, who strikes me as a very confused person straining to achieve predictable sacrilegiousness in her videos, did well to perform holding the hand of a beautiful Ethiopian woman, Birhan Woldu, below, who had been on the brink of starvation as a 3-year-old and now attends college, due to efforts to combat the effects of famine.
In Philadelphia, Linkin Park teamed with Jay-Z, and like many of the other artists, seemed to put their all in the performance.
Their call to eliminate poverty in Africa, and prevent 30,000 deaths a day from its effect, is a worthy, noble and necessary one. Let's just hope the musicians and concert organizers fail in their attempt to get the G8 to increase aid to the continent. MTV interviewed plenty of 20-something, dreamy kids who said essentially how jazzed they were that by watching U2 play for free, world poverty would end.
Here's what I envision when Bob Geldof, Bono and others call for debt relief in Africa: More money for the kleptocrats who already steal most of the so-called Western aid.
More aid = more Mercedes tooling around Lusaka, Kampala, Windhoek and other capitals.
For a brilliant article on what Africa, and most of the developing world, really needs -- a crackdown on corruption, private property rights, the rule of law -- see this terrific article, Live8: a triumph for sentiment, not for results, by Allister Heath, in the BusinessOnline:
The history of Africa since the 1960s is the history of groups of elites seeking the political kingdom with the primary purpose of enriching themselves, Mbeki says. To rectify this situation, he believes that Africa's poorest people must be empowered through the institutions of the free society: property rights and markets: It is necessary that peasants who constitute the core of the private sector in sub-Saharan Africa become the real owners of their primary asset: land. To enable such ownership, freehold must be introduced and the so-called communal land tenure system, which is really state ownership of land, ought to be abolished.
Heath notes that "Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from the highest average customs delays in the world; Estonia requires one day for customs clearance versus 30 days on average for Ethiopia."
Some additional excellent reading on this topic:
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, by David Landes. Could something as simple as cultural attitudes toward thrift, honesty and persistance, as well as a systematic approach to science, explain the gulf in rich and poor nations that grew after the Industrial Revolution?
Dark Star Safari, by Paul Theroux.
Theroux returned to Africa after serving in the 1960s in Malawi to find backsliding everywhere. He lambastes the professional anti-poverty workers in their gleaming, air-conditioned Land Rovers playing CDs on state-of-the-art sound systems. He returns to the school where he taught to find it decrepit and his former house in disrepair. Where are the Africans stepping forward to teach their own children, to build, to repair, he wonders, as he concludes that many aid efforts are futile, doomed until Africans themselves decide it is time to have good government, good schools and decent housing.
The solution to Africa's poverty must come from Africans, Heath also concludes:
There is an urgent need for Africans to boost their inter-regional trade, partly to reduce their dependency on commodity exports to the West. Ask an African business person what needs to be done and chances are that very high on their list will be facilitating internal African trade by sweeping away bureaucracy and taxes. The facts speak for themselves: it costs the same to clear a 20-foot container through the ports of Abidjan or Dakar as it does to ship it all the way to a north European port.... The West can help by tearing up its trade barriers and scrapping its deadly export subsidies; but not by handing out cash. If only those demonstrating in Edinburgh this weekend were to accept this, they would actually be helping to make poverty history. Instead, despite their good intentions, they may inadvertently be helping to prolong Africas misery.
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