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Live 8 concert motivated young to care about Africa
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Live 8 concert motivated young to care about Africa
Irish rock star Bob Geldof said this week that the Live 8 concerts in July had been successful in motivating the young to care about Africa’s woes. “It was a bizarre confluence of politics and populism,” the rocker turned activist said of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest line-up ever, designed to pressure world leaders to alleviate poverty. However Geldof said: “Some people may, perhaps correctly, view Live 8 as the blink of an eye. Five days later, the horrific, devastating London bombs dissipated the goodwill of the Olympic bid and Live 8.” “But the concert was only ever meant to be a device to push an anti-poverty agenda through the political process of the G8. In that it was hugely successful,” he told Reuters in an interview.
Just 24 hours after London was celebrating its success in being selected as the site for the 2012 Olympics, suicide bombers struck the city’s transport system on July 7, killing 52 people in bomb attacks. The attacks coincided with the meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland, of leaders from the Group of Eight industrial nations who agreed to double aid to poor countries in Africa by 2010.
He said the series of 10 gigs staged around the world on July 2 heightened young people’s awareness of Africa’s problems and called the concerts “a hugely effective political device.” “The effect forever on the economic life of Africa is there,” Geldof added. “The aid agencies are now marketing the young like big companies because the agencies truly understand,” he said. Then, pointing to himself, Geldof said: “They always suspected it but it took marketeers in popular culture to be able to show that you can really inform younger people and get them to move the agenda.”
Dubbed “Saint Bob” for staging the 1985 Live Aid concert to save the starving in Ethiopia, Geldof has always been an intriguing mixture of contradictions. The foul-mouthed and dishevelled rocker rails against authority but rubs shoulders with world leaders in his determination to break the spiral of poverty in Africa. He is a master at bullying rock stars into leaving their egos at the side of the stage and displaying genuine altruism.
<B>Paul MAJENDIE</B>
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