Bono: Friend of Poverty, not the Poor

By: Charles Johnson

Posted: 10/14/07

Like all children of the 1990s, I danced to Bono's songs and never questioned the wisdom of his policies. Many, including those who brought him to speak at Bridges Auditorium, seem stuck on his celebrity and unwilling to explore the net effect of his various programs.This cult of celebrity lends itself to failed policy. While the problems facing Africa cannot be summed up with Bono-esque sound bytes or state-style planning, they can and must be solved from the ground up.

First, we need to explore his celebrity. When I was younger, I loved Bono. As a then-Christian, Bono said all the right things and couched them in the cadence of Scripture. My ministers loved him. At the behest of my minister, I even read Bono's introduction to Jeffrey Saches (flawed) End of Poverty, hoping that Bono and his rock star professor could solve the problems of the world, just as he could climb the pop charts. They can't.

Like his song "Stuck on A Moment," many are stuck on Bono's perceived goodness. (Indeed, his very stage name comes from latin: Bono means "good". Bono cultivates this cult of celebrity by encouraging his followers to dream big. And who doesn't want to dream big? He meets with heads of state and academics who share his capacity for imagination. The Boston Globe reported that he even met with bankers at Mortgage Bankers Association, who, smitten with him, promptly forgot subprime mortgage concerns as Bono waxed elegant about the plight of Ethiopians.

Bono thinks grand because he suffers from grandeur. He established Edun, a high end clothing line sewn in developing nations. His Inspi(RED) campaign purports to tackle the scourge of A.I.D.S. with mass consumption. (Just how exactly it can make that claim, when it spends $100 million on advertising and brings in $18 million, remains a source of contention, according to Advertising Age.) He advocates debt relief for Liberia - $800 million from the IMF, $4.5 billion all told - in front of the International Monetary Fund. He even wants to build the tallest tower in Ireland, complete with socially affordable housing, surrounded by million dollar condos without concern for the surrounding area's complaints.

Beneath all these programs remain subtle flaws that, once examined, become so large that they threaten to undo all of their good. Like all good con artists, Bono understands the power of names. His clothing line "Edun" plays on Eden, from the book of Genesis. Unlike Eden, Edun's fashion line carefully (and paternalistically) selects the locale for producing the clothing.

Bono never considers the real barrier to Africans establishing their own business: government and the absence of the rule of law. Edun does little to empower them. They're not encouraged to start their own businesses addressing their own market concerns, or to put profits into expanding business and improving their tax basis. Bono's Edun makes Africans little more than workers in his scheme,

Africa is poor because Africa's governance is poor. For instance, the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the most resource rich countries on the planet, has its resources mismanaged by a capricious government, more intent on using their own country's resources as a personal piggy bank than on expanding opportunities through the rule of law. In so doing, Bono avoids the real issue: regime uncertainty - the fear that government will not only make life harder for you through red tape, but kill you if you rock the boat.

Bono will never challenge the actions of these governments because he doesn't want to incite their ire. Bono, ever the cultural relativist, is unwilling to upset those directly responsible for African poverty. By angering them, he will end up denying his own access - and that of his many businesses - and so he picks an easy target. Recently, he has gone after such groups like as International Monetary Fund for failing to eliminate Liberian debt. Bono knows full well that that kind of "mau mau"-ing pressures them to acquiesce to his demands and the cycle continues.

Implicitly, Bono's support for debt relief permits countries to experiment with systems of government-socialist, kleptocratic, or Islamic-historically known to fail. In turn, this deviance will hurt everyone even after the dictators have been removed from power.

In particular, in post-Charles Taylor Liberia governments prefer to spend uncontrollably. The proper course establishes legal and social mechanisms - impartial courts, opposition parties, and independent assessors - that monitor and prevent that debt in the first place. When these governments default on their loans, however, they can always count on Bono-figures to advocate debt forgiveness.

It's not like Bono doesn't understand the issue of legal maneuvering. As The Chronicle of Higher Education notes, U2 recently relocated its music-publishing company from Ireland to the Netherlands to lower its tax burden. Slate columnist Timothy Noah points out Bono's hypocrisy. By relocating to the Netherlands, Bono denied the government of Ireland, one of the poorest developed nations in the world, its necessary tax revenue.

Bono, who fights for "justice issues" governing tax policy and supports progressive taxation hurts the Irish. His very hypocrisy sends a powerful message to those who support his goal, but disagree with his means: progressive taxation is for thee and not for me. What's more, he encourages the very tax cheats in his beloved Africa. According to the African Union, Africans lose $150 billion dollars in taxes every year due to tax evasion - three times its total foreign aid. Those who see Bono's hypocrisy will wonder: If Bono does it, why can't I?

Unfortunately, though he can evade the tax man, Bono cannot stand shoulder to shoulder with the tireless reformers who bring real results to Africa. In fact, many of those thinkers are against him. Kenyan economist James Skikwati begged us to stop giving money to the poor. He argues that every time the West subsidizes the social services of African states it robs Africans of an opportunity for constructive engagement with their government.

Unfortunately, his claim has fallen of deaf ears. This subsidization widens the chasm between government and people and hinders the creation of a middle class. Government's and the people's interests will diverge and the country will become either a failed state or a stolen state. Sooner or later, that aid money will dry up and the already dependent Africa will be without any means of government redress. Why not? We've encouraged that disconnect.

(If anything, aid aids dictators. The money, otherwise spent on social services, usually goes to protect instable regimes via militarism. In turn, the military's growth allows the possibility of coups, which further isolate the people from their government and encourage war.)

Skikwati's sentiments echo those of NYU professor William Easterly, author of The White Man's Burden. Easterly, an economist dedicated to examining poverty, wonders to what effect our aid has gone. Out of the 2.3 trillion dollars we've invested in foreign aid to Africa, we've still achieved pitiful results: a zero growth rate and a rising infant mortality rate, for instance. What makes us any more certain that more money is the answer?

The arguments against Bono continue, but perhaps the most damning is one written by Paul Theroux, a writer famous for his books about Africa and former Peace Corps worker in Malawi. He writes in the appropriately titled, The Rock Star's Burden, about Bono's master plan:

"When Malawi's minister of education was accused of stealing millions of dollars from the education budget in 2000, and the Zambian president was charged with stealing from the treasury, and Nigeria squandered its oil wealth, what happened? The simplifiers of Africa's problems kept calling for debt relief and more aid. …Donors enable embezzlement by turning a blind eye to bad governance, rigged elections and the deeper reasons these countries are failing."

In a December 14, 2005 New York Times op-ed, Theroux writes,

"Africa has no real shortage of capable people - or even of money. The patronizing attention of donors has done violence to Africa's belief in itself, but even in the absence of responsible leadership, Africans themselves have proven how resilient they can be - something they never get credit for. Again, Ireland may be the model for an answer. After centuries of wishing themselves onto other countries, the Irish found that education, rational government, people staying put, and simple diligence could turn Ireland from an economic basket case into a prosperous nation. In a word - are you listening, Mr. Hewson? - the Irish have proved that there is something to be said for staying home."

But Bono's insistence on peddling the myth of the African sick man harms the very progress of nations like Botswana, where the fledgling democracy and economic powerhouse could use all the trade it could get. And yet, those very bankers he spoke to in Boston might think twice about investing in Botswana. You can almost read their minds: Bono said Africa sucked. How can Botswana boast burgeoning economic power?

Bono has shown his reluctance to constructively help Africans help themselves. At the TED conference in Tanzania, Bono showed his ignorance of the issues before a room full of the innovators of Africa: African businessmen, scientists, engineers, and designers. According to Jennifer Brea, a blogger and contributor for The American, Bono made the ridiculous assertion that aid could solve Africa's ills in the way it saved postwar Germany and Ireland from their own economic ruin. For Bono to compare industrial Germany and Ireland to pre-industrial Africa belies his ignorance. With aid dollars, it's easier to restore institutions in Germany or Ireland than it is to create them from scratch in Africa. What's more, many of the programs that Bono and his ilk propose are too costly and too ineffective.

Brea explains the options before us:

"We can spend billions importing medication, or you can invest in local farms that grow the Artemisinin, a Chinese herb with potent anti-malarial properties, and the factories that process it. We can continue the endless cycle of need and dependency, or you can create jobs, develop indigenous capacity, and build a sustainable future."
As Brea tells it, when the African audience questioned Bono's and the development industry's success record, he responded,

"Africans are the "most regal people on earth" and music is their DNA, he told the room of mostly doctors, engineers, and businessmen. He then began singing a traditional Irish dirge to show us how Celtic music has Coptic roots, and so is fundamentally African. I wasn't the only one giggling in the back row."

Bono's real calling is in a pop band, not before the IMF or a conference like TED. That his only response to the development question was to reflexively start singing testifies to his ignorance of the issues at hand. Maybe, instead of lecturing, he should listen to the Africans. Maybe he should just shut up and sing.