The rage of a crusader

from The Khaleej Times

VIJAY DANDIGE (Staff Reporter)

Sir Bob Geldof. The name may not mean much to the iPod generation. Actually, he was awarded an honorary K.B.E. - Knight of the Order of the British Empire – by the Queen, so he can’t be technically called Sir. But the media has been calling him Sir... and he’s been variously dubbed: pop star, actor, poet, open-plan politician, living saint. He started as the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats, an Irish ‘new wave’ band of the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1984, he shot to international prominence. Legend has it that he was watching a BBC television news report on famine-stricken Ethiopia, and was so moved by the plight of starving children that he decided to try and raise money using his contacts in pop music.

He rounded up 40 British pop musicians (including Sting, Bono and Paul McCartney) to record the tune "Do They Know It's Christmas" under the name Band Aid. The song was a tremendous hit and led to the largest televised concerts known as Live Aid, held in London and Philadelphia on 13 July 1985. In 2005 he helped organise another day of mega-concerts, called Live 8, urging leaders of the G8 nations to forgive African debt and increase aid to the continent. Live 8, with concerts in 10 cities around the world, was held on 2 July 2005. His name has been synonymous with Africa, charity and poverty eradication.

Sir Bob was in Dubai recently, his second visit, for a live show at the Irish Village that he gave on Friday, organised by the Transguard Group and the Irish Village. Last year, he made a guest appearance at a charity auction, helping raise Dh 500,000 for the children of the Rashid Paediatric Therapy Centre in Dubai.

Meeting the legendary Sir Bob is a pleasantly jarring experience. No pomposity. No grave airs. None of the dour demeanor of a recipient of Royal honours. He’s the absolute pinnacle of informality. In the hotel suit, multimillionaire Sir Bob is sitting on a sofa, his long legs crossed, wearing a broad-striped cotton shirt, jeans and scuffed brown shoes.

A silver chain dangles from the neck, and a thick mane of uncombed, unruly white-gray hair frame his face. A rocker’s look. He was 33 when millions saw him on TV during Live Aid, making a pitch for Ethiopia’s starving children. Today at 56, his 6’1” frame has hardly put on any flab. He’s lanky, sinewy, almost lean. And in his informal chat with City Times, he shows that he has lost none of his sting, nor his barb, nor his fluency, nor his colourful profane language.

You have done tremendous work in your life. What has kept you going?

If it wasn’t entirely working, I’d have stopped. No point in flogging dead horses as they say, you know. And you become even more boring than you actually are if you keep talking about something that isn’t moving. At the same time, the more you talk about it, the more you learn, the more people say, ‘why not.’ So, things do move…maybe too slow for where people want it go, because politics is incremental.

What’s happening with the political effort against poverty eradication?

The reality of the issue I deal with is that even if Britain said we are going to eradicate African poverty, that’s not going to happen. There isn’t enough money in the UK to do that. And besides, the Africans have to do it themselves. But at least we got a consensus. All the group, whether it’s European union or United States, or China and India now with their great poverty problems themselves, were beginning to focus on the fact that actually this is a function of globalisation and can be addressed in that fashion. And the Arab League who got a great responsibility in this, but they failed. Like most of the other states, they failed - to acknowledge their responsibility or to do anything. And that’s a scandal, you know.

Looking back, how much of your effort in Africa helped….and is there a solution to the poverty problem?

I don’t know…I don’t know…how much it helped. Of course, there’s a solution to it. Look at what’s happening in China. Four years ago, China was dependent on foreign aid. This year it will take one per cent of its people out of extreme poverty. One per cent! And of course, the bigger factor is that trade pulls people out of poverty because you need to suck people into the growing economy. You need to have them producing. The tragedy of poverty is that everyday you see people not eating, not going to school. You don’t want to see that happening to individuals.

The reality is that, one definition of poverty is that it denies people the right to exploit themselves, and their creativity and their intelligence. That’s what it does. And that’s what we use to produce and to grow economies. Grow an economy and you build hospitals and schools. Once you build them you can put people into that, and people then contribute to the overall wealth of the planet. Right now we exclude half the world from contributing to this. That makes no sense whatsoever, in the moral sense obviously, bit in the other sense, political sense, economic sense. So, I don’t understand why there isn’t more effort made towards this.

And there is small effort and we helped produce that effort. And if it didn’t work at some level, I’d stop. But it does work; it is just very incremental. And within the next 50 years of course, Africa will explode, you know, dynamically, economically…I mean. And it’s beginning to happen now, but not quick enough for the millions of people who have died this year, unnecessarily.

Long back, in explaining your motivation for taking up causes, you had once said, “I'm enraged by the world. I want to punch its lights out." Do you still have that emotion?

Yes, of course. I mean you know when I think about it…, as I said, the Arab League meeting, next week. You know half of the leaders will show up, as usual; they will make some grand pronouncements; there will be rivalries between the Libyans and….Gaddafi will do his usual stage stuff; the Saudis will get fed up… you know… it’s a joke.

Let’s take the Global Fund for AIDS, malaria and TB. This is the United Nations’ fund to deal with these three killers. You go to school, you are beginning to have a life, the next day a mosquito bites you and you are dead. Now, malaria is a great problem in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Particularly in this region, it’s a very big problem. And this is the fund that everyone agreed to set up, except for the Americans who set up their own thing, kept it far, and which is very effective, as effective as the Global Fund.

So how much does the Middle East contribute to this great global fight against these three killers of children? I’ll tell you. Saudi Arabia gives $2.5 million a year, and Kuwait in 1993 I think made a one-off contribution of a million dollars. This, for one of the greatest killers in the region!

Now, Saudi Arabia and Yemen have a sort of responsibility to deal with this issue because it is their area. Instead, money from the world comes in to deal with malaria in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Good. I don’t mind contributing to stopping kids dying of malaria in Saudi Arabia. But don’t you think, the Saudi government, one of the richest on the planet, can give a little more than a million pounds a year. A million pounds in a year! Don’t you think they should do that? What’s the problem with them? What is their problem? We’re trying to deal with sickness.

There’s a UN mandate, the Fast Track Education Initiative, where all children will go to school by 2015. Isn’t that an amazing thing…to put your kids into schools so that they learn, begin to know how to use their brains so that our economies in the region and everywhere else will grow? And what’s their contribution to this? Zero! Why can’t they be serious about this?

They’ll say, ‘Bugger off, Geldof…who are you to come into our country and say such things...” Well, you know…”Bugger off you, I’m me; if I can talk about it, why shouldn’t I? I don’t want to see children dying in the world. I don’t want to see them not being educated. As a result, I got a right to say these things.

Do you think music can contribute to solving problem of the world?

Music can contribute to getting people around, as I say it, the electronic heart of the television. People listen to music all over the world. And there’s a general agreement that there are great stars that everyone listens to. And so, if they’re going to be on TV, a lot of people will watch. And if you tell the people the reason you are doing this is for this, you then get a sentiment.

Of course, you can focus the political lobbies, but there’s a general sentiment that music is the best vehicle for doing it. But that doesn’t mean that musicians have a unique responsibility to do this. The only responsibility an artist has is to create good art. That’s it. They fail if they create bad art. Now if you’ve a brain that thinks I’m interested in this, then do it. If you’ve a brain that’s not interested in it at all, then don’t do it. There’s no moral compunction. Journalists should do more…. (He laughs)

What do you think of personal charity, and what’s your view of the charity of Bill Gates?

Personal charity is absolutely critical. Bill Gates’ charity is not more important that a reader reading this, putting a couple of dirhams into some charity box. In fact, it’s enjoined in Islam, as it’s in most religion because it is so important. And in countries where governments contribute little, personal charity is king.

But personal charity is political. Personal charity is like the butterfly…you know...the Chaos Theory…where a butterfly flaps its wings in a Brazilian rainforest and the next minute there’s a hurricane in Hamburg… Well, putting a dirham in a charity box is the political equivalent of the Chaos Theory because somewhere down the road you get political policy happening because somebody contributes. That means they want to do something; they want to help…

Bill Gates is very rich, so his charity is greater. But it’s a fantastic thing what Gates is going, and it is world changing, because the amount of money he has, it can change things hugely. He’s doing even more than most states because of his wealth. But Bill Gates is not doing any more than someone in the streets of Dubai deciding to put three dirhams in a collection box. Gates is not doing any more than that; it is just on a greater scale.

You have taken a stand on many issues, from Africa to debt relief for developing nations. Have you never felt strongly about British soldiers dying in Iraq?
Like everybody else, I’ve opinions about everything. But what I focus on talking about is poverty in Africa. I’ve done that for 24 years. If I start crapping all about everything else under the sun, I’m going to dissipate my focus and people will say, ‘Oh, he’s just a blurter.” So I just focus all the time on Africa. And whereas some situations are chronic, they’ll pass…in history. But this situation we cannot allow to pass where innocent children die every 30 seconds, just simply because they are poor. That’s the greatest moral scandal in the planet. It is an intellectual absurdity and morally repulsive.