When Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof organised Live Aid in 1985 it catapulted him into a second, high profile career in global activism – marked by straight talking and a fierce anger at global poverty. He talks to Developments about Africa, China and the journey from charity to justice.

Africa is always on the point of some sort of lift off, or it’s going to step further back into something. All we know is that the figures seem set fair for some sort of resurgence. We’re all worried about South Africa at the current point in time and South Africa must succeed. It must succeed. We look at what Nigeria is going through and we see great strength emerging from there. We look at the growth of infrastructure, and the banking systems and at the Chinese and what they are doing with regard to infrastructure… I welcome the Chinese interventions all over Africa. I don’t think they have a political agenda – I think its mercantilism. I’m not an Afro-optimist, I’m not an Afro-pessimist, I’m not an Afrorealist, I’m a pragmatist. And some part of me, 25 years down the road, thinks there’s something weird and essential happening in Africa which is very different to any previous period. The arguments are changing. There’s possibility. I was in a room in Hong Kong five months ago with these equity fund, these hedge fund guys, and 500 Chinese companies. In that room, of about a thousand people, was $10 trillion, more or less the GDP of the Euro-zone, and they were looking to invest in Africa. This has never happened before, but the truth is, it’s the last continent to be built. What we have to ensure, is that it’s built properly, and that it’s built in the name of the people who inhabit that gorgeous, gorgeous place.

“In 20 years, the news will be full of stories from Africa…”

What I find is that the media agenda is rooted in an argument from 12 years ago. They are not up to speed on the conditions on the continent of Africa and they really need to be. (This is) simply because, conceivably, in this asymmetric century, where a guy with a bomb strapped to himself can destroy armies, economies in an unexpected part of the world now hold the power over the supposedly developed part. I guarantee you in 20 years, the news will be full of stories from Africa and they’ll all be to do with economic giants, politicking and positioning – and the ones most affected by all of that are in Europe. Eight miles from Africa. Whatever the Chinese and Americans and Africans are playing at, we’ll feel the impact first. If we are not to be dependent on Putin’s Russia – and it’s still Putin’s Russia – for our energy sources, we’re going to have to go to Libya, Algeria, Angola, Nigeria and the rest to ensure our supplies. This is serious resource politics and big power stuff, and I think that’s a really interesting story, and I just wish that the media would engage in that.

For development to take place, you need stability. In the last 15 years, you’ve seen more-or-less democracy south of the Sahara in 23 states. You’ve seen consistent growth of 6%. You’ve seen even the non-extractive African countries – 17 or 18 of them – enjoying growth of 5 or 6%. You’ve seen 10 to 12% in the more stable democratic states: Mozambique, Botswana. So clearly this stuff somehow or somewhere works. And I personally think it will come about through normal means and that is investment in a country because it has something you want. That country gets rich and starts using its own mechanisms and solutions for its own internal problems. That finally is beginning to happen.

"The number of wars and conflicts has decreased massively. as a result of development..."

The number of wars and conflicts has decreased massively. That’s as a result of development. The politics are proper – they’re understandable. They’re not nonsense. If you just take what’s happening in the South, which we’re worried about, if you look at the politics, they’re proper. If you look at Darfur which seems incomprehensible, it’s perfectly comprehensible in a 21st century way of viewing things… Now that the ethnic groups are split into political parties with names like CDU and SDP and you think, oh, that’s proper politics. They become factionalised, so it’s into warlordism and it spills over into other states. You can see it. You can unpick it. You can begin to start negotiating this. I think that’s very much of our time. Before, you just had a thug who beat up his own people and we paid for it.

"I’m very glad that I did the Commission for Africa..."

Gleneagles agreed to implement something like 50 of the 93 proposals from the Commission. A lot of those have been agreed to and a lot implemented. In order to try and keep the toes to the fire. Tony Blair set up the Africa Progress Panel. I’m on that because I tend to see things through to the end… and Kofi Annan is the chair and he’s a brilliantly effective man and we are very, very serious people. We have access, but do we use that enough? The answer is no. Essentially, ‘diplomatese’ wins the day and they think I’m a bit of a hot head. “Bob, great, he’s a great guy. His passion, you know, drives us on...”. It’s absolute shite – they just want me off the thing, you know! So, it could do more and I think it’s the instrument whereby we get the Commission, and therefore Gleneagles, which is the politicisation of the Commission, forward. And now there’s the DATA Report. DATA is the group that I work with – which is empirical, it is essentially the third party audit of Gleneagles and its commitments. So, that comes out every year and it’s ruthlessly honest, but it’s not as bad as you would imagine, and I think it’s becoming like, to the developmental world, what the Amnesty Report is to the human rights world. I think people are embarrassed by it… it’s very clear what’s in it and we do a big, whizzbang sort of launch every year. This year it’ll probably be in Tokyo, and we bring all the local stars and politicos along to it, so it gets a big-up. So, we’re trying to implement the Commission for Africa. I spent a year of my life on this thing. I really did not want it disappearing onto a dusty Whitehall shelf and that was why Live8 happened. And the deal with Tony Blair was, and this is a literal conversation: “Will you achieve this at Gleneagles?” And he said, “Can you do the public thing?”, and I said, “I don’t know”. He said, “I can’t do the politics if you don’t do the public”. That’s what he said. And so Live8. And we brought out the paperback edition (of the Commission Report), which was sold at Safeways and ASDA. We brought out the schools edition. It’s looked at as a benchmark around the world. In my life, I’m proud of very, very, very few things, in fact I never use the word, but I’m very glad that I did the Commission for Africa. It sought for the first time to analyse, coherently and properly, the empirical condition of poverty and why it should pertain in one singular continent.

“Africa won’t reach the MDGs – that’s a Gleneagles failure…”

I think Africa will not get to the MDGs. I think Asia will probably meet them because nobody anticipated the massive economic growth but I think we’re going to miss them in Africa, and that would be a Gleneagles failure. Nevertheless Gleneagles was great. I well remember (Nigerian President) Obasanjo at the UN at the last Millennium Development Emergency, saying that it was the rubicon moment, and it was. And I think people try and live up to it and we have to not let them forget it.

“We have to encourage China, they’re a major player…”

China is new to the world. Famously, whenever the world has intruded upon them, they’ve shut the curtain. And they’ve suddenly found, with this enormous wealth, that they have responsibilities, which they hadn’t taken on board. They are entirely internally focused. How do they manage this vast growth? How do they push it out to the at least 800 million extremely poor people in their provinces? How do they bring them in to the loop so there isn’t revolution? There was something like 1800 major riots in China last year. They are so remote that it doesn’t get outside, but there is an incredible domestic strain. So, when they go and get their resources outside of their country, they’re simply getting stuff to try and keep a level playing field for what’s happening in their own country. Maybe I’m naive here, but they didn’t understand what the consequence of this vast investment would be on vulnerable countries, weak countries, in Africa. But, having said that, they’re learning rapidly, because they have to. I’ll give you a case of Zambia, where they wouldn’t have unionisation. Instead they fly in their own labourers, put them in their own compounds, fly in their own nails to make the compounds, have no relationships with the Africans, and so there were riots and the Chinese shot two Zambians. A week later, there was trade union recognition. Suddenly the things they’d been told made sense. If you just go along with accepted international norms and practices, it is better for you. They understand that if they’re overt, and clumsy, then political parties take an anti-China stand, which gets votes. They’re beginning to understand that through Zambia. They are beginning to understand that economic power also has responsibilities, vis Darfur. They don’t quite understand this thing called civil society. For all their sophistication they are incredibly naive on the international stage. But I think it’s all there to be negotiated. Remember that there are 800 Chinese companies in Africa and behind them are tens of thousands of entrepreneurs. And they don’t mind the conditions of Africa, they think they’re great, far better than North East China. We have to negotiate with them, we have to encourage them, they’re a major player.

“Charity won’t work until you get the economics and politics right…”

I think it’s a journey all of us went on. Tony Blair was six months in Parliament when he sat and watched Live Aid, and don’t forget that Tony was a sort of bad Mick Jagger impersonator around this stage, so of course he liked the rock’n’roll. Gordon watched it… Clinton watched it. Schroeder watched it. So this generation that came to power are Live Aid babies. I think it’s been a long curve of understanding that’s gone into this. My response to the news, which you saw as well, was that this is absolutely unacceptable in the modern world. This impulse to help another is to reach out over and above the often impenetrable roar of political discourse and just help the other human on the other side. And when you put your quid in the Oxfam box, it is a political act. In many ways, it’s the political equivalent of the butterfly theory; you know the chaos effect – a butterfly flaps its wings in a Malaysian jungle and six months later, Wall Street collapses. You put your quid into the Oxfam box and, if enough of us do it, policy changes in Whitehall. So it is that equivalent, but I rapidly learned, because I was beaten over the head by the NGOs, that it’s nothing to do with emergency aid, which it is, and which is not threatened by commodity prices, but it’s also to do with long term development. But, at that time, we were constrained by global politics, which was the Cold War. There was this ideological stasis, this political deadlock which didn’t allow for political fluidity. They had their tyrants in Ethiopia, we had ours in Zaire, and that wasn’t going to change. Suddenly the Cold War ends, and a new political flux came into the whole thing, so we could deal finally with the politics and economics of the situation, which I understood was at the bottom of this; that we could keep giving charity, but that eventually would end, because people would become cynical and say it’s not working. It couldn’t work until you got the economics and politics right. So, when there was a new flux in the world, we could sit down and analyse precisely what was going on – that was the Commission for Africa – and finally agree together we could maybe do something about it. And that’s when you had that change. So, I went from the impulse to help, to $200 million later with Band Aid and Live Aid, etc. Live Aid – give me your money. Live8 – it’s not about money, it’s about change and your voice demanding change. “The long walk to justice”, we called it, echoing Mandela, and that was a long walk – it was 20 years of understanding and waiting, and waiting for the political moment to change – understanding that you had to have a coherent, agreedupon policy. Basically, I just set up with Tony Blair a political Band Aid. That’s what I called it. It was called the Commission for Africa, but it was to get the stars who could actually have the hits together and implement a policy for change – just like we did with the little Christmas song. That’s what happened.

“I’m for nuclear energy… and solar power…”

Growth is what it’s about. I hope it happens in the 21st century because it was supposed to happen in the 20th century. That’s what everyone was going on about. It’s a very simple thing. You sell me something and I sell you something and everyone gets rich. Thanks very much. It’s what happened to us. I don’t think we’re conscious of our dependence on producers in poor countries. That’s the first thing. I think if we want geegaws from China, that’s fine, we will become increasingly dependent on them. What we’re dependent on is international trade in all its manifestations. I think that we will be dependent on resources from emerging markets. That’s for sure. In fact, not “we will be”, we are. And that will come home to roost at some point, big time, unless we develop alternative means rapidly, which is why I’m for nuclear development in this country. But what I’m mainly for is concentrated solar power plants around Africa and Europe. They are highly efficient. They are already, with existing technology, powering Seville and parts of California. We could build them now. I’ve already seen the proposed map for Europe. One kilometre of desert, one kilometer, provides the equivalent of 1.5 million barrels of oil. So an area of 170 kilometres by 170 kilometres of desert will provide all of Europe with its energy. And that’s just concentrated solar power, heating water which turns the turbines. Absolutely zero carbon emissions. So we should be looking very seriously at that. And Africa could get rich from that. I think we should look at GM crops. It’s going to happen. We’ve just got to limit it. We’ve got to try and watch it. Indeed we need it because in our search for energy, biofuels have made food crops into a huge and vast commodity. So the whole notion of subsidies in the WTO now becomes kind of redundant, but whole new other areas come in.

“Is GM the answer to everything? No, but it is part of one…”

I just find hunger the worst, most anomalous, unnecessary death. AIDS is a misery but not being able to give your children something to eat on a daily basis... and most children will go to bed tonight – like they did last night, like they will tomorrow night – hungry in Africa. It’s extraordinary, and yet we sit on vast surpluses still. So I’m a big GM guy and part of that is the notion that we can’t allow Africans to have genetically modified foods, despite the fact that the science has come on a lot, that there are safeguards. Is it the answer to everything? No, of course not, but it’s partially an answer when crops can grow in arid conditions. I also believe that we’ve got to develop industries where people can buy their food from other sources outside of their immediate area. But, if Africa is to grow at all, it will be through agriculture, so I believe it to be the primary aspect that we should look at. Crops that grow in arid or semi-arid conditions that are fairly resistant to pests, to insects and disease. Africa is peculiar. Man developed in Africa. Therefore, all the diseases that prey on man developed in Africa and are particularly persistent there due to geography, climate and lack of resistance, because of lousy economies, etc. So if you develop something that’s a net boon to vulnerable people, give it to them. Give it to them.

This interview is an edited version of Bob Geldof’s address to DFID staff and a conversation with Developments’ editors.