In the News

Geldof 'sick of' G8 leaders

BBC News

Thursday, 27 June, 2002

Singer turned activist Bob Geldof has said he fears it is unlikely that world leaders meeting in Kananaskis, Canada, will deliver the aid and reform package Africa needs.

"We're already anticipating that we're not going to get that much out of Canada," he told BBC News on Thursday.

"I'm sick of them all, to be honest with you," he added.

We cannot allow an entire continent to die in front of us

Sir Bob Geldof, the one-time leader of pop group the Boomtown Rats also ruled out another Live Aid concert to raise consciousness of Africa's problems.

"I don't think it needs that - Live Aid was to do with a specific emergency," he said.

"What it actually did was take an issue that was nowhere on the agenda and put it right at the top - to the point now where it's consistently talked about at the highest government circles, as we see in Canada."

Rescue Plan

Geldof, 47, organised Live Aid in 1985 as a response to the Ethiopian famine of that year and has since campaigned for poverty relief in the continent.

He said he believed UK Prime Minster Tony Blair had tried to pursue a comprehensive rescue plan for Africa - but was unlikely to succeed.

"After the Genoa G8 last year we were told this was going to be the year of Africa and Tony Blair certainly pursued that.

"I was fairly optimistic up to about four or five weeks ago when we began to get intimations that things were unravelling fast.

Bob Geldof: "Deal with this situation now"

"What we're seeing now is a sort of management of expectations, of anticipation - but nothing very much will come out."

Geldof blamed what he called piecemeal solutions which were inadequate for the scale of the continent's problems.

"The problem is enormous and it gets worse - in 1990 Africa was receiving $19bn in aid, today it receives $12bn.

"The HIV problem - 28 million people with it, 6,000 die every day from HIV, $40m spent every day in dept in sub-Saharan Africa - it requires a comprehensive plan and that's what Nepad (New Partnership for Africa's Development), initiated by the Africans, was supposed to do.

"In exchange for sound governance, they would expect a comprehensive, almost Marshall Plan for Africa taking in aid, AIDS, education, health and trade.

"You can't do it piecemeal, you must do it as a totality.

"I personally believe Blair would like to see that, but I'm not sure the others have the same agenda."

'Big disconnect'

He said he thought domestic policy concerns were over-riding global ones.

"Implementing the farm bill in America, which will allow Mississippi cotton farmers to take on average $800,000 per annum for not growing cotton, to a Malian farmer making a dollar a week from his cotton - there's a big disconnect between the two.

"We cannot allow an entire continent to die in front of us and to drift further and further away economically, we can't do that.

"But they're fudging the issue to deal with other short-term issues.

"They must sit down and deal with this now because it is fairly terminal," he said.