When Irish musician Bob Geldof saw starving Ethiopians in a 1984 BBC documentary, he was so moved that he recruited dozens of the era’s most popular musicians to create a charity single that raised £8 million (Dh50m at current exchange rates) to ease the Ethiopians’ plight. That in turn led to Live Aid, a fund-raising concert held in both the UK and the US that was watched by nearly 2 billion people, raising £150 million more for the cause. Live Aid, a defining feel-good moment of the modern era, was 29 years ago this week, spurring the question of what difference this money made?
The 1984 famine was caused as much by human factors as by the failure of seasonal rains. Half of the 400,000 death toll has been attributed to government policies designed to counter insurgencies in the drought-affected areas, which exacerbated the food shortages.
As Geldof discovered, delivering aid can be an opaque business in which some of the money donated to help those in need may end up in the wrong pockets. It also had the unintended effect of prolonging the communist military government of Mengistu Haile Mariam, whose policies had helped lead to the famine in the first place. Bono, one of the musicians who performed at Live Aid, said the experience of distributing the money convinced him that corruption is a bigger threat to Africans than famine and disease.
In 2014, Ethiopia has mostly moved beyond its political troubles – the second most populous country in Africa now has the ninth biggest economy. But even though nearly half of its $44bn GDP is based on agriculture, more than four million of its citizens rely on food assistance.
It is outpaced by other African countries that have adopted western models of good governance and left behind the cronyism that characterised so many postcolonial governments. Those countries, rather than the ones that receive millions in aid money, are best placed to benefit from an economy that, across the continent, is growing at a fast rate. Nearly 30 years after Live Aid, the lesson is that self help is better than the best intentions of foreign donors.
