Dermot 1 Geldof 0

One of my favourite things to complain about is Bob Geldof and specifically the whole Live 8 phenomena a few years back. At the time I did an interview with Jonathan Edgar from Goal where he said the drop the debt campaigners were missing the point. And yesterday I was interested to come across an article on spiked by a Ghanian teacher who is currently touring the UK to promote the new WORLDwrite documentary Damned By Debt Relief. Here is what De Roy Kwesi Andrew reckons:

"I had a memorable discussion at a sixth-form college where Bob Geldof had given a talk just a week earlier. Most of the students who attended had participated in Live8 and Make Poverty History, so they were shocked at my uncompromising swipe at such campaigns."

"When I said that the only ‘mission accomplished’ by Live8 and the G8 meetings in Gleneagles in summer 2005 was to promote and entrench survivalism, interference and low horizons, they were rattled. I outlined the facts about the insidious strings attached to the debt-relief initiative: for example, debt-relief programmes forbid poor countries from investing in the industrial base of their societies, instead demanding that they set up small-scale ‘poverty reduction’ initiatives. This is not only deplorable Western interference in our affairs; it also prevents us from taking leaps forward."

So it turns out I was right all along. Which is nice. The main gist of the article (entitled You hate being affluent? Then swap with us'), is that people in the 'developed world' protesting about climate change, low cost air travel and increasing industrialisation are doing more harm than good to African countries who need more development, more factories, roads, airports etc if they are to make decent lives for themselves.

Andrew reckons that we should be concentrating on using our brains to discover clever solutions to the problems associated with progress and developments and not sitting in fancy apartments or coffee shops discussing our carbon footprint. Makes sense to me.

The full article is here: