Bono (30 page)

How do you know I'm not planning my exit? That's what we should be talking about. Not my actual death—my fake death, Michka. I have to set it up: airplane crash, then up to Marlon Brando. I can be Marlon Bono. I can just lie on the sand, putting flowers into the hairs of my friends and the locals.
*
No, no. That's my kind of monastery. Look, I worship God at sunrise, whether I see it going to bed or getting up. I've seen some of the most extraordinary sunrises anyone's ever seen, all over the world. From the top of skyscrapers in Tokyo, or, with Liam and Noel Gallagher in San Francisco Bay, looking at the Golden Gate Bridge, or, in Africa, seeing through the mists of loss at a food station. I mean, crushing hangovers, and begging God for forgiveness. Sunrises, I love them. And as I told you, I get up early now. I don't stay up late, because I'm in a work mode rather than a carnival mode. These days, I meet the muse on her way home.
[laughs]
When I haven't been out with her, it's still nice to see her with clarity rather than with a sore head. I have an advantage.

There was something uncanny about Bono's route to Africa. Each time he had the opportunity, Bono would lay Africa on the table, whether I'd asked him about clinical depression or his impression of President Bush. My view was that since 1985, when he and Ali had spent three weeks in that refugee camp in the north of Ethiopia, Africa had more or less vanished from his field of vision. He certainly didn't set foot on that continent until the day the U2 PopMart tour stopped in Cape Town, i.e., March 16, 1998. The truth is, for twelve years, before he received a phone call from someone trying to find a worthy champion for the Jubilee 2000 campaign, Bono had very little to say or do about Africa publicly.

It's not really true in private,
he said when we discussed that.
I just hadn't found an innovating or inspirational solution to some of these problems, i.e., I didn't want to be a bore. I didn't want to go on and on, be a bleeding heart without a strategy.
But what was he ready to do in private?
My definition of charity is the old idea that the right hand should not know
what the left hand is doing. If it's public, it's not charity. It's PR. Unless it's taking a stand. And at that time, I hadn't a stand to take other than the sort of “Rock against bad things,” which is so banal. In the end, justice is more poignant than charity, which is so patronizing.
So when did he get a strategy?
1997–98 is when I re-entered the fray. Jubilee 2000 had a great strategy for canceling the debts of the poorest countries to the richest as part of the millennium celebrations.

In mid-2002, Bono accompanied former U.S. secretary of treasury Paul O'Neill for a tour of several African countries. I wanted to ask him how he accounted for all those “lost years” regarding Africa. Most of all, I thought I had to challenge his ideas about aid, which often contradicted some recent reports I'd read. Since I had no firsthand knowledge of any kind, I leaned on the work of Paul Theroux, whose
Dark Star Safari
I had just finished reading. The book is an account of his crossing the African continent, from Cairo to Cape Town. Rather dauntlessly, he'd traveled only either by bus or train, or on the back of a Jeep or a truck. About forty years later, he was revisiting the places and the people he knew as a young member of the U.S. Peace Corps. His conclusions were devastating: Africa is worse off at the beginning of the twenty-first century than it had been in the early sixties, when fledgling countries started to free themselves from the colonial powers, and that is the case not in spite of Western aid, but
because
of it, he stressed. Theroux's judgment on various aid organizations and representatives is a very harsh one. I wondered what Bono would make of it. The result turned out to be one of our most revealing conversations.

I'm afraid I'm going to be making some snide remarks this morning.

Oh boy!

Maybe what you said to me about your father's negative attitude encouraged me somehow.

OK. Go for it. I'm terrified.

I'm going to read out to you a few lines from a book called
Dark Star Safari,
by Paul Theroux.
*

Yeah, yeah. I've read it.

So you've read it. Then you know the story. There is a passage I wanted to discuss with you. Maybe you remember that part where Theroux is in Ethiopia in a place called Shashemene, which serves as a sort of haven for Rastafarians. There he meets with this seventy-one-year-old bona fide Rastafarian and a young zealot called Patrick, who tells him that the millennium is about to come to Ethiopia, but it's going to be slightly behind schedule because the Ethiopian calendar runs seven years and eight months late. And this guy tells him it's not going to be water this time, but fire. And that—luckily—the Rift Valley will be spared. So Patrick invites the author to join him: that way he and his family will be saved. This is how Theroux concludes his piece:
I thanked him and walking out to the main road I reflected on how Africa, being incomplete and so empty, was a place for people to create personal myths and indulge themselves in fantasies of atonement and redemption, melodramas of suffering, of strength—binding up wounds, feeding the hungry, looking after refugees, driving expensive Land Rovers, even living out a whole cosmology of creation and destruction, rewriting the Bible as an African epic of survival.
I wonder how you reacted to that passage. You know that Theroux was very critical of the work of a lot of humanitarian workers.

Yeah. It's a beautifully written book. There are passages I will never forget. A real love for Africa comes through as well as his frustration. But some of
his comments since it has been published about humanitarian relief efforts have been extremely unhelpful. He figured the debate could do with some brutal truths. He was right there, but some of his comments were not true. He wasn't really aware of the details of some of the proposals that were coming at the time. He was critical of aid propping up governments that should be let turn to dust. This has been true, and in some cases, it might still be. But to make that as an argument against aid per se is not credible. I think he's just being a crank. And I love cranks! I mean, my country is filled with them, and people should voice off. But when your lives are depending on those drugs, when the communities are depending on help to build schools, such comments are not helpful.

He gives specific examples of humanitarian projects turning to ruin, such as a school in Uganda financed by Canada or a flourmill financed by the U.S.

Such examples exist, and this is part of the reason the level of aid over the last twenty years has shrunk. We're trying to reverse that trend. It is not fair to point all the time to such exceptions. They are not the rule these days. I don't appreciate Theroux's comments, because they feed into the sort of ignorance about Africa and the continent—the “money down a rat hole” argument. I understand his frustration with corruption. Corruption is probably the biggest problem facing the continent, but it is not the only one. As I keep telling you, there are new ways to deliver aid, where it does not prop up a corrupt government, but it rewards governments that are tackling corruption and have poverty-reduction policies in place. That was the Millennium Challenge Account [MCA], which was the first major thing that we were involved in with the Bush administration [see Chapter 4]. Its concept was to reward good governance, transparency. Countries would get a special grant if they really were serious about tackling poverty, and were open to criticism, encouraging civil society, a free press, et cetera. If a government is doing the right thing by its people, they should be
fast-tracked in increases in aid.
[pause]
That said, I should be fair here. It might be interesting to talk about revisiting Ethiopia, just because in a way Ethiopia is the best case for Theroux's argument—and mine.

And why is that?

Because after years and years of aid, the country is still in deep crisis. And after all that stuff, all that attention on the famine in the eighties, in the nineties, when I got back, maybe three years ago [circa 2002], I was amazed, because Addis Ababa was a very different city. It was obvious that there'd been huge migration from the countryside, and so there were new ghettos everywhere, shocking ghettos. And I met prostitutes in the ghettos—no idea about using condoms, and were HIV-positive, but not telling their customers. All the degradation that poverty can bring to a people was present in Addis. And I had visited there when the Communists had it by the balls. Now I was meeting the guerrilla leader who fought against the Communists.

Meles Zenawi.

Yes. And he's a very impressive man. He's a brilliant macroeconomist. He taught himself whilst leading a guerrilla war. He taught himself on BBC's Open University. He studied economics, apparently the brightest student they ever had. He's a brilliant man. I spent some time with him, it was very interesting to hear his stories, about how he studied economics and political science. “In Ethiopia,” he said, “you learn everything by living with the farmers, because the farmers in Ethiopia are the smartest people in the country.” I said: “But why is that?” And he said: “Because if you aren't smart, you starve.” So you have the most innovative people. They can make something out of nothing. He'd learned an awful lot about the country from hiding out in this guerrilla war. But I could see that after the war, they really haven't recovered, and, still, though making great progress in a lot of respects, he wasn't really encouraging the civil society. He still had a little
bit of a Leftist control. For a guy who fought the Communists, he was not so committed to a free and open press as we would have expected. I think, though, in essence, he is a very, very good man, maybe even a great man. It's just fear of losing control of the country. Time will tell.

So what did you think of the regression in Ethiopia?

What I'm saying to you is that there's both: regression and progression. Two steps forward, one step back. Remember, it's a war- and famine-ravaged country. Still, hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved that would have been lost. But Theroux would argue that hundreds of thousands of other lives are in danger because the Ethiopians and our NGO communities failed to put the mechanisms in place to stop that happening again. A wasted opportunity.

So he was right, there.

Yes. But recently, that's changing, and let me give you a few examples on the micro and macro levels. Take Sister Jemba, who works in Addis at a very grassroots level with communities to improve their housing and sanitation in a sustainable way. It's a bottom-up approach, and as I say, sustainable. At the macro level, there's a group called REST: Relief Ethiopian Society of Tigre, this funded again by NGOs and donor governments in the north of Ethiopia. Their long-term integrated rural development programs working with communities and farmers try to improve the productivity of the land. For example, in Degua, stone dams have been constructed to prevent further erosion of gullies catching rainwater and building soil fertility. What was previously barren land is now producing 1,500 barrels of good quality hay for livestock every year. This is not insignificant. Save the Children have a program which will impact the lives of 150,000 people in the Amhara region. It's called Linking Relief to Development, where livestock is sold to buy food, protecting the assets of the
Woredas of Sekota and Gublafto for three years till they are self-sufficient, ganging up on local problems across many different areas: soil and water conservation, micro enterprise, et cetera. I know this stuff and these extraordinary tribal names because I've been working on this this morning. This is not the old top-down type of development, where you arrive in town like a bull in a china shop, trampling all over the people you're supposed to help.

But even effective aid is not the long-run solution, is it, Bono?

No. Commerce and good government. We should look at foreign assistance as kind of start-up money. Self-sufficiency is of course the goal. The funny thing was traveling with an “entrepreneur” like Paul O'Neill, who was the United States secretary of the treasury. All the time he'd been telling me the future of Africa is in the hands of business and commerce. And I knew that to be sort of true, but not as much as I needed to, and this opened my mind to subjects like unfair trade relationships. It's a shock to discover that for all our talk of the free market, the poorest people on Earth are not allowed to put their products on our shelves in an evenhanded way. They have to negotiate all kinds of tariffs and taxes. It's not a level playing field. We can sell to them, but they can't sell to us. I started to realize that even the most friendly faces to Africa would in Congress obstruct trade reform. It was the Left that sponsored the Farm Bill in the United States, which subsidizes American agriculture and makes it impossible for African farmers to compete. Imagine the shock of walking through the markets in Accra, Ghana, where ghettos have been swollen with out-of-work rice farmers, to find cheap American and Vietnamese rice on sale to people who used to produce their own.

You say commerce is the future. Is the future happening now?

Yes, but it's slow, agonizingly slow. I want you to understand, Michka, the free market unencumbered is not the solution either. All successful
economies have protected their seed industries until they were strong enough to compete. We cannot deny for others what we demand for ourselves. Successful economies in Southeast Asia had a very careful, gradual journey to competitiveness. They're the best example of how aid can work. Without it, they wouldn't be where they are.

So you're describing an increase in aid that's strategic and demanding of good government and in consultation with the people on the ground.

That's really it. As I already told you, a kind of Marshall Plan for Africa. Think back to the Second World War, think back to the United States that liberated Europe, but then rebuilt Europe, spending one percent GDP over four years. They were being strategic, it wasn't all out of the goodness of their hearts, though it was that too. The U.S. were rebuilding Europe as a bulwark against Sovietism in the Cold War. This is what we need in Africa and in some parts of the Middle East—a bulwark against the extremism of our age in what I call the Hot War. This makes sense, not just as a moral imperative, but a political and a strategic one. It's the right thing to do.

So you'd like to see the military spending into a Marshall Plan–type investment. Is it realistic?

What I'm saying is, one is bound up in the other. Might it not be cheaper to make friends of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later? When we started the century, people were still talking about Star Wars, they were talking about building space stations with nuclear capability . . . It's a joke! Commercial airliners can be used to take down countries. On September 11, one of those airplanes was headed for the United States Congress, packed with people I know and respect and now work with. The whole of the United States Congress could have been taken out by just one of those planes, were it not for the bravery of some of the people on board. Star Wars? What were they thinking? This is a new era. We
need tactical weapons in another sense. Take out hatred a different way. Destroy anti-American or anti-Western feeling by making sure they know who we are, working harder on the Middle East peace process, feeding people who are starving, bringing our pharmaceuticals to deal with the AIDS emergency. Africa is forty percent Muslim. For the price of the war in Iraq, the world could have been changed utterly, and people who now boo and hiss America and Europe would be applauding us. This is not fanciful, this is not Irish misty-eyed nonsense! This is realpolitik.