October 1, 2005
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/09/29/1127804604972.html
Bono at the GB summit at Gleneagles in July.
U2's lead singer, Bono, turns heads when he is on stage, and off it he turns heads of state onto the problems of the world. James Traub reports.
At 1:45 in the morning one day in July, Bono, the lead singer for U2 and the world's foremost agitator for aid to Africa, was in a van heading back to his hotel in Edinburgh from Murrayfield Stadium; he had just performed in, and expounded at, a concert designed to coincide with the beginning of the summit meeting of the major industrialised nations, held nearby at the Gleneagles resort.
Despite the hour, practically everybody in the van was on a mobile phone. The bodyguard in the front seat was calling the hotel to see if a huge crowd would still be camped outside hoping to catch a glimpse of their world-straddling hero. (Roger that.) Lucy Matthew, the head of the London office of DATA, Bono's policy and advocacy body - the acronym stands for Debt AIDS Trade Africa - was whispering to some contact in the States.
And Bono, who had been conferring 12 hours earlier at Gleneagles with US President George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, was sharing an anxiety attack with a friend. The leaders of the G8, as the group is known, were going to offer far less in aid and trade to developing nations in Africa than the activists had led their followers to expect. Thousands of bright-eyed young recruits to the cause were going to go home in disgust.
Bono, normally the most courteous of men, shouted an obscenity in Matthew's general direction, though the intended target was himself, or perhaps fate. "What's the point of coming back to talk to Chirac?" he said. "It's going to be too late then."
The French president had reached Gleneagles late, and was probably sullen given that Paris had just lost out to London in its bid for the 2012 Olympics. (This was several hours before the terrorist bombings in London.) Bono was leaving later that day for a concert in Berlin and so would be unable to see Chirac until the day after.
The thought was making him desperate: "Lucy, is it too late to call somebody with Chirac?" Matthew gently pointed out that it was, after all, the middle of the night for most people. Bono digested this unwelcome news and then said: "Look, let's call them tomorrow morning and say I'd be happy to meet with him any time he wants."
Bono did not, in fact, talk to the French president until the third and final day of the conference. But by then his despair had lifted. The summit meeting's final communique offered significant pledges on aid and debt relief for Africa, as well as new proposals on education and malaria eradication.
Bono's embrace of the package was treated with a solemnity worthy of a Security Council resolution. When I saw him the day after the summit ended, over tea in the courtyard of the Hotel Plaza Athenee in Paris, he said: "I feel like I've got a right to punch the air."
And so he did. Bono had moved the debate on Africa, as five years ago he moved the debate on debt cancellation. Later he was trying to move the debate set to take place at the United Nations summit meeting, which he said he hoped would consolidate the gains made at Gleneagles, or at least not erode them.
He's a strange sort of entity, this euphoric rock star with the chin stubble and the tinted glasses - a new and heretofore undescribed planet in an emerging galaxy filled with transnational, multinational and subnational bodies.
He's a kind of one-man state who fills his treasury with the global currency of fame. He is also, of course, an emanation of the celebrity culture. But it is Bono's willingness to invest his fame, and to do so with a steady sense of purpose and a tolerance for detail, that has made him the most politically effective figure in the recent history of popular culture.
I first met Bono last January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a gathering that answers almost perfectly to the conspiracy theory of global domination by a corporate-political-cultural elite. A core function of Davos is to mix different kinds of authority, which makes it the site par excellence of the celebrity prince and the one-man state.
Bill Gates was there, as was George Soros - figures whose global currency, of course, is currency, and who deploy their philanthropy strategically, just as states deploy their aid budgets. Angelina Jolie, roving ambassador for the UN's refugee agency, showed up, too. Bill Clinton came, as did Jeffrey Sachs, the Columbia professor and unofficial economist to the Third World.
When I went to meet Bono at the bar of his hotel, I saw Richard Gere seated at a table with a gorgeous woman in a little fur jacket and a leather cap. Bono, on the other hand, had removed himself to a quiet back room, where he was keeping company with a plump, middle-aged white guy in a suit and tie.
This was Randall Tobias, head of the Bush administration's AIDS program. The administration had just announced that the program was providing antiretroviral drugs to 155,000 Africans with AIDS. Another kind of activist might have said, "That leaves 25 million more to go." But not Bono: he looked his corn-fed interlocutor in the eye and said: "You should know what an incredible difference your work is going to make in their lives." Tobias looked embarrassed. Bono said various wonderful things about President Bush. Tobias beamed.
The glamour event of the following day, indeed of the whole forum, was a symposium on efforts to end poverty in Africa. The guests were Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, presidents Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Bill Gates and Bono. The heads of state, leading off, candidly acknowledged the obstacles to development - violent conflict, poor governance, corruption, lack of political will in the donor states and so on.
It was all terribly sombre and Davos. Then Bono was asked what he would like to see changed. "The tone of the debate," he shot back. The celebrity prince was wearing a black T-shirt under a black leather jacket, and he appeared to have shaved the stubble off his jutting, bellicose jaw.
"Here we are," he went on, "reasonable men talking about a reasonable situation.
I walk down the street and people say: `I love what you're doing. Love your cause, Bon'. And I don't think 6000 Africans a day dying from AIDS is a cause; it's an emergency. And 3000 children dying every day of malaria isn't a cause; it's an emergency."
The crowd of CFOs and executive directors, silent until then, burst into applause. Bono had put music to the words; that's one of the things the rock-star activist can domain.com.au.
Bono gave Davos its music; but he also operated in prose. His chief goal was to win commitments, or the possibility of commitments, to be redeemed six months later at Gleneagles. A major item on the agenda for Gleneagles would be cancelling $40 billion of debt that the poorest countries owe to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral institutions; and in Davos, Bono met John Taylor, an undersecretary of the US Treasury, to try to move the Bush administration's position on the issue.
He huddled with Gordon Brown, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer and heir presumptive to the prime ministership, to strategise on financial mechanisms. When the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, arrived to deliver a speech on aid to Africa as well as on the German economy, he met beforehand with Gates and afterward with Bono.
As soon as the Schroeder meeting ended, I was summoned to the war room in which Bono and his troops were camped. "Schroeder just agreed to 0.7 by 2015," Bono cried. "It's fantastic!" In 2002, the industrialised states had pledged to increase foreign-aid spending to 0.7 per cent of GNP by 2015, but the German economy was tanking, and Schroeder had been loath to lay out a timetable for increased spending. Now, to Bono, he had done just that. Of course, a sceptic might have noted that since Schroeder was unlikely to be in power in 2006, much less 2015, this was not a pledge he would have to honour, but Bono is not a sceptic.
BONO may be a one-man state, but he is not a one-man band. U2 is a rock phenomenon because the Edge, the lead guitarist, the drummer, Larry Mullen jnr, and Adam Clayton, who plays bass, are very talented musicians who share Bono's gift for conjuring a sense of rapture. But the voice of U2 is Bono's voice, which seems to rise out of a great pool of naked yearning.
It takes the form sometimes of an arena-enveloping shout, sometimes of a keening wail and sometimes of a piercing falsetto. The voice, like the stage presence, is easy to spoof, for as a performer, Bono generally does without the irony that he deploys as a bantering citizen.
Bono, who was born Paul Hewson, had more than enough unhappiness and loss growing up to give a sharp edge to that wail, but not too much to kill his sense of delight. He was reared by a Catholic father and a Protestant mother in Dublin's ragged middle class, a smart boy who was playing in international chess tournaments at 12. But when Bono was 14, his beloved mother suddenly died, leaving him with an older brother and a father who, he has said, "would always pour salt - and vinegar - on to the wound".
He was a very angry teenager, but at 16 he and some of his angry, barely middle-class school chums began noodling around on instruments. By the following year, 1977, they were performing in local clubs. Even then there was something fiercely affirmative in their music. U2 had a bond, a benevolent relationship, with the audience.
The band has been together ever since. Even Paul McGuinness, their manager, has been with them from the beginning. This is not only rare in the rock business, it is just about unheard of. U2 is also one of the very few bands in which all revenue is shared equally; Bono and the Edge could have claimed the songwriting revenue but didn't.
Nor do any of them appear to have succumbed to drugs, alcohol or raging ego. Religion played an important role in the band members' lives, if not always in their music; indeed, the band's survival was threatened only when, early on, Bono, the Edge and Larry Mullen jnr thought of leaving to join a Christian fellowship.
Bono remains religious, and not in the cosmic, New Age sense you expect from rock stars. He describes himself as a "meandering Christian", and his four children attend the Church of Ireland, which is Anglican (and thus splits the difference between his mother and father).
In 1997, Bono was approached by Jamie Drummond, then working with a church-sponsored campaign to cancel the debts that the most impoverished nations owed to the industrialised nations. (This was "bilateral debt", owed by one state to another, as opposed to the "multilateral debt" debated at Gleneagles.)
The movement made real headway in England, but was virtually unknown in the US. Bono agreed to spearhead the American debt-relief effort and began by educating himself on the subject. As a superstar, Bono had the advantage of being able to conduct his education at a very high level. Bobby Shriver, a record producer and member of the Kennedy clan, set up meetings for him with James Wolfensohn, who was the head of the World Bank, and with Paul Volcker, David Rockefeller and others of the financial establishment.
Bono travelled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to meet Jeffrey Sachs, then at Harvard. But he also asked Sachs to find him an academic who opposed debt cancellation, a very peculiar request for a graduate of the school of Rock Agitprop.
By the summer of 1999, Bono was ready to take on Washington. The Clinton administration was already committed to canceling two-thirds or so of the $6 billion that the poorest African countries owed the US, but Bono wanted 100 per cent cancellation - not only because he thought it was right, but also because you can't sing about two-thirds of something. "It has to feel like history," he says. "Incrementalism leaves the audience in a snooze." Shriver arranged for Bono to meet Gene Sperling, President Clinton's chief economic adviser, and Sheryl Sandberg, chief of staff to Lawrence Summers, who had just been named Secretary of the Treasury.
Summers himself was not about to waste precious time meeting a rock star. He did agree, however, to "drop by" while Bono spoke to Sperling. Bono laid out his argument. "He was deeply versed in the substance," Sandberg recalls. "He understood capital markets, debt instruments, who the decision makers were."
SUMMERS tried to give Bono the polite brushoff. "These are complicated issues," Summers told him. "I'll have to take it up with the G7 finance ministers." And now this earnest, impassioned rock star with the accent of a race track tout issued a call to destiny. "You know what," he told Summers, "I've been all over the world, and I've talked to all the major players, and everyone said, `If you get Larry Summers, you can get this done'." It was, Sandberg says, "a really important moment. I think we were all inspired and motivated."
It wasn't Bono's belief in the issue that was so effective; it was his belief in others. One Sunday morning that autumn, Bono called to ask Sperling if he could come to his office in the West Wing. There he put his hand on top of a giant stack of papers Sperling was working through and said: "I bet that most of the things in this pile feel more urgent than debt relief. But I want you to think of one thing: Ten years from now, is there anything you'll feel more proud of than getting debt relief for the poorest countries?"
When Bono left, Sperling called a Treasury official and said that he wanted to insert something on debt relief into a speech Clinton was about to give at the World Bank. He and Summers got a few minutes in the presidential limo. Clinton instantly agreed to call for 100 per cent cancellation of the debts owed to the US by 33 impoverished countries.
But it wasn't enough just to pierce the hearts of guilty ex-liberals, for there was still the Republican-controlled Congress to attend to. In late 1999, Bono arranged to meet John Kasich, a wild-man rock-fan conservative from Ohio who was chairman of the House of Representatives budget committee.
Kasich might not have been the most obvious candidate for the job; one of his obsessions was getting rid of foreign aid, most of which he considered, he says, "a joke". But Kasich says he was impressed by the force of Bono's argument. The congressman was also a Christian, and Bono spoke of biblical injunctions to succor the poor and downtrodden. Kasich enlisted. And this became a pattern: Bono was able to dislodge conservatives from their isolationist or free-market reflexes by reaching them as Christians.
During this period, Bono flew to Washington eight times, meeting not only legislators but also their aides - even though U2 was then in the last stages of recording a new album. In late October 2000, Congress appropriated the additional $435 million needed for 100 per cent debt relief.
Why Africa? Why not, say, global warming? Part of the answer is happenstance: Africa is what Bono got swept up into. But Africa, or so Bono feels, needs what only a certain kind of world figure can give - a call to conscience, an appeal to the imagination, a melody or a lyric you won't forget.
The cause of ending extreme poverty in Africa speaks to Bono's prophetic impulse. Rock music, for him, is a form of advocacy, but advocacy is also a form of rock music.
God knows Africa could use a song or two. The reason that debt relief required such an excruciating effort is that foreign aid has virtually no constituency.
Not only conservatives such as Kasich but also Clinton administration "neoliberals" argued that aid was powerless, perhaps even harmful, in the face of corruption, civil conflict, weak governance, self-defeating economic policies.
Whatever its merits, the neoliberal argument began to seem morally unsustainable as much of Africa retrogressed throughout the '90s. Was the West to offer nothing more than pious advice about free markets and small government while whole portions of the globe slid into misery?
Did all African countries suffer from bad values, bad governance and bad policies? Liberal economists and activists formulated an alternative argument: a combination of "natural" factors - poor soil, high incidence of infectious disease, lack of access to ports - along with disadvantageous trade conditions and wrong-headed neoliberal policies had gotten many countries stuck in what Sachs called "the poverty trap".
They could not escape, without outside help.
Bono passionately embraced this expansive view of the obligations of the industrialised world, and of the possibilities of Africa. In 2001, he went to Bill Gates and others to finance an organisation that would lobby for action on Africa. DATA has offices in London, Los Angeles and Washington, but it was plain from the outset that the real challenge lay in Washington, both because historically the US spent so small a fraction of its budget on aid - one-tenth of 1 per cent of GNP as of 2000 - and because the incoming Bush administration believed so single-mindedly in free-market solutions to problems of development.
At the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001, Bono managed to wangle a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, who was then the president's national security adviser. Rice was surprised to learn that Bono took the hard-headed view that "there's a responsibility for the recipient" as well as for the donor, and after the meeting with her, the policy works at what would become DATA produced a proposal for a two-pronged strategy to "reward success" in six to nine well-governed countries and to keep others from "falling back".
The proposal might have gone nowhere, but then 9/11 changed all contexts, including development assistance. Aid became a national-security issue (if a marginal one), for it was clear that fragile states could not be allowed to become failed states. The administration vowed to put real money behind the Millennium Challenge Account, as the program came to be called.
By the third year of operation, it was to be dispensing $5 billion. But the administration wanted something from Bono in return - his imprimatur. The idea seems laughable but Bono had enormous credibility in an area where the administration had virtually none. Bono had bargaining power, and he now used it.
He told Rice that he would appear with Bush at an event promoting the president's development-assistance program if Bush would also commit to "a historic AIDS initiative". The day before the planned appearance, in March, Bono learnt that the president would not do so. In an uncharacteristic act of confrontation, he called Rice and said he was pulling out of the joint appearance.
Rice was very unhappy. She recalls telling him: "Bono, this president cares about AIDS, too, and let me tell you that he is going to figure out something dramatic to do about AIDS. You're going to have to trust us."
Bono accepted her pledge, but the Millennium Challenge Account, announced with such fanfare, sank to the bottom of the administration's priority list. Only in early 2004, two years from the announcement, did the president sign the law creating it. Congress appropriated only $1.3 billion for the first year and $1.5 billion for the second.
This year President Bush asked for $3 billion rather than the $5 billion he had promised. Many of Bono's own allies have lost what little patience they had. Jeffrey Sachs calls the operation of the MCA "a disgrace". When I asked Sachs if he thought that Bono should stop cultivating the president and start denouncing him, he said, "Even aside from him saying it publicly, I'd just like him to say it to himself."
The leader who deserves the greatest credit for placing Africa at the top of the world's agenda, or at least near it, is the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. It was Blair, who, at the urging of Bob Geldof, impanelled the Commission for Africa, whose report, released earlier this year, painstakingly laid out the case for an enormous increase in aid to Africa.
Blair seems to believe what the Bush administration only says, for he uses the same ringing tones to talk about the West's responsibility to Africa that he does to discuss the war on terrorism. But Blair also knows that his crusade enjoys broad political support. And for this he has Bono and Geldof, among others, to thank. Justin Forsyth, Blair's special adviser on development, credits Bono with making Africa an urgent issue in Britain.
The Gleneagles momentum began building in the northern spring. In May, European Union development ministers pledged to double global aid from $60 billion to $120 billion by 2010.
The following month, Paul Wolfowitz, the hawkish former Pentagon official who had just left the administration to become head of the World Bank, embraced the 0.7 per cent target. The Americans and the British had worked out their differences on multilateral debt relief. But the Bush administration remained a conspicuous holdout.
ON DAY one of the summit, Bono, Geldof and key aides went by helicopter to Gleneagles from their Edinburgh hotel. Bono spoke with Schroeder and Blair about the issues that were still up in the air - financing mechanisms and trade reform. He met Bush. He finally met Chirac and Kofi Annan. During the afternoon of the third and final day, he started seeing leaks of the communique, which was drawing ever closer to his own agenda. He remembers thinking, "Oh, my God, this is really happening."
The "movement" did not, in general, share Bono's enthusiasm. Activists bitterly complained that the communique included no real progress on trade, no expansion of debt relief to additional countries, no movement by the Bush administration towards 0.7 per cent. But when I saw Bono the next day in Paris, he was ebullient.
The heads of state had promised that by 2010 they would increase aid to Africa by $25 billion a year, and aid worldwide by $50 billion a year.They had extended debt relief to Nigeria, a goal activists had long sought. They had added to President Bush's commitment on malaria, so that the number of victims should be reduced by 85 per cent by 2010. They had vowed to ensure that all children had free access to school by 2015.
Bono left Gleneagles to meet the band in Paris. That night, before a sellout crowd of 80,000 in the Stade de France, he read a text, in French - a language he does not speak - listing the brave commitments of President Chirac, a figure few in the audience were likely to admire.
The next morning, as motorcycle cops were leading Bono's van on a slalom ride through the Paris traffic, he turned to me and said, "Guess who called this morning to say he had seen the reviews?"
"I don't know. Blair?"
"No."
"Clinton?"
"No. Think what country we're in."
"Chirac?"
"Yeah. A lot of his people were at the concert last night. He said that he had heard about what I had said. He wants to work with us very closely."
No doubt he meant it. But then along came the grande vacance, and a few days after returning to Paris, Chirac was stricken with a mysterious illness that confined him to the hospital. It appeared that Chirac would not attend the United Nations summit meeting; nor could Chancellor Schroeder, who was facing the fight of his political life in an election this weekend. Things went from bad to worse.
By the first week in September, Bono's friends in the Bush administration seemed fully prepared, even eager, to scuttle the long and windy statement on development prepared for the summit meeting. The White House prepared an edited draft that proposed to eliminate practically every pledge made by donor countries - even the very words "Millennium Development Goals".
And then Hurricane Katrina scrambled everything. When Bono called from his house on the Riviera in early September, he said: "I have to be sensitive about putting my hand in America's pocket at a time like this." He would, he said, be keeping a low profile in New York.
It has been a frantic time, this year of Africa. The other members of the band love the cause but they fret that Bono's hobby is eclipsing his day job. "The band has survived," Adam Clayton told me, "but there's been a price in terms of relationships."
Bono has promised to let the world spin on its own axis for a while. But it can't be left alone for long; there's so much proselytising still to do. Bono's next target is the American people: he expects to have an army of 10 million activists signed up for the One Campaign by 2008.
He believes - he knows - that the American people would demand action on Africa if only someone would tell them the facts. "Middle America," he said to me one day. "Don't get me started. I love it."
- New York Times Magazine
