Thirty years after publishing Black Mischief, his hilarious novel about Abyssinia, the only independent African monarchy at that time, Evelyn Waugh wrote that the unthinkable in 1932 had come to pass.  The Europeans were departing Africa, leaving the administration of the benighted natives to Ministries of Modification presided over by Basil Seals of the United Nations.

The prescient Waugh had envisaged the toppling of Haile Selassie (“Highly Salacious”); but, life imitating art, the real-life agent, the questing journalist Jonathan Dimbleby, and the preposterous events that followed his appearance in Ethiopia in 1973 were straight out of the other great Waugh satire, Scoop.

Dimbleby was granted entry into Ethiopia (Abyssinia revivified) after offering to create yet another film commending the development efforts of His Supreme Majesty, the Lion of Judah.  He traveled north to check out the rumors of famine.  Shaken and perturbed, he returned to screen his television reportage in a film entitled Ethiopia: The Unknown Famine.  A juxtaposition of shots of thousands of famished skeletons with His Venerable Highness serving his dogs morsels of meat from a silver platter scandalized British viewers.  Within two years of the showing of the film, the leader of the DERG (the committee of a hundred junior officers), Mengistu Haile Maryam, throttled to death the 83-year-old Selassie, alias Ras Tafari.  Even Waugh could not have dreamed up the absurdity of Highly Salacious being the center of a religion, Rastafarianism.

Mengistu’s tyrannical Marxist client regime ended with the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, when he and 3,000 followers were bundled out to a haven in Zimbabwe, but not before murdering an estimated half-million civilians, suppressing all ethnic and regional movements, and plunging the northern region into another famine in 1984-85.

Michael Buerk’s BBC documentaries of the famine, shown in October 1984, spurred a minor rock artist, Bob Gel-dorf, to form Band Aid and cowrite (with Midge Ure) “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”  The record, issued a month after Buerk’s documentary, involved 40 British and Irish pop performers, sold three million copies in Britain, and grossed eight million dollars worldwide.  Hollywood entrepreneurs immediately spotted the potential and replicated Band Aid’s project, forming U.S.A. For Africa, who recorded the song “We Are The World,” written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, with Quincy Jones as producer.  By early 1985, Geldorf and promoter Harvey Goldsmith had hatched the idea of a global telethon from Wem-bley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia.  Live Aid played for 16 hours on July 13, 1985, to an audience of 1.5 billion.  More than $140 million for the Band Aid Trust was collected.

Geldorf screamed, “We won” and, following a celebrated altercation and meeting with Mrs. Thatcher, received an honorary knighthood in 1986.  The 25-year-old Bono (Paul Hewson), lead singer of U2, who performed at Live Aid (and with the original Band Aid), had discovered his antinomian philosophy and a cause—Africa.  Infused with grace, he and his like-minded rock stars were to lead their ecstatic followers in the crusade against every and all injustice, whether poverty, disease, war, or racism.  The global audience validated the moguls of the corporate culture and the culture they had peddled.  Thanks to their promotion, rock ’n’ roll was the lingua franca that linked the developing with the developed world.  Their critics could no longer charge them with pushing the profitable but sensationalistic and destructive nihilism of the counterculture, for, through Live Aid, they had aroused universal, life-enhancing sentiments by mobilizing their clients’ Dionysian rock.  The secular humanists were reassured, as the media pundits, described by John Lloyd in the Financial Times as the cardinals of the Holy Media Church, displaced the sanctimonious clerics.  The doyen of Britain’s media cardinals, Michael Buerk, pronounced, in his autobiography published appropriately 20 years after his documentaries on the Ethiopian famine, that these were “by far the most influential pieces of television ever broadcast.”

Unfortunately for Africans, Buerk’s shocking documentaries were influential, while the considered writings and measured utterances of Lord Peter Bauer, an Hungarian émigré and professor at the London School of Economics, who had dared to point out the dangerous idiocy of postcolonial development policy, were brushed aside.  Among Bauer’s heretical utterances were some that averred, disconcertingly, that aid is a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.  The nature of a country’s institutions and the abilities of her peoples, not an inflow of Western money, determine whether people adapt and survive or perish.  It was the duty of government to ensure individual freedom, safeguard private property, and enforce contracts because opportunities for private profit, not planning and aid, were the determinants of economic growth.  The corollary was damning: African societies are regressing to the Stone Age because they have been cursed with extensive government involvement in economic life and showered with aid.

Bauer pointed to the absurdity of governments taking on ambitious tasks when they were unable to fulfil even the elementary and necessary functions of government.  He had identified the institutional flaw that proved fatal to the postcolonial development strategies of the IMF and the World Bank.  They were obligated to transact with the recipient governments, while the donor governments were disinclined to stipulate conditions that would in any way constrain their opportunities with the recipients to trade arms, extract mineral wealth, and strike contracts advantageous to their clients.  The African people quickly discovered that the loans that had allegedly been contracted on their behalf had been dissipated and stolen, leaving them with a heavy burden of debt.  The governments of postcolonial Africa were invariably incompetent, and, once the loans were paid over, they became, also, irredeemably corrupt.  The nationalists who assumed power at independence, and the military dictatorships that overturned them, destroyed what was left of their societies’ indigenous institutions, replacing them with kleptocracies, which, as George Ayittey showed in his book, Africa Betrayed, plunged their respective peoples into poverty, civil strife, war, and starvation.

While Buerk’s sensationalistic documentaries conveyed the deleterious consequences of the regime in Ethiopia and emphasized the contribution of colonization and natural disasters to the devastation that had befallen the African peoples, they failed to emphasize that this murderous oligarchy was supported by the Soviets and Castro’s Cuba.  More significantly, Buerk, and most other commentators, failed to discuss the culpability of the governments of Africa.  The tragedy was that many of the aid agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) that Buerk’s documentaries energized failed to enhance the problem-solving capabilities of the recipients and, thus, further lowered the chances of survival of millions of Africans.  The zealots were passionate egalitarians who reviled self-seeking Economic Man transacting through the competitive market process.  To these ideologues, all was to do with nurture and nothing to do with nature, and so children were regarded as blank slates to be filled with their knowledge and propaganda, rather than young minds with varied and inherited capabilities.  They were reacting against the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, which, in turn, were relieved to have troublemakers pursuing their futile quests in Africa and not in the United States or Great Britain and delighted that their noble, if futile, efforts were largely financed from voluntary rather than state contributions.

The subsequent calamitous history of Africa confirmed the intractability of inter-group conflicts, the further diminution of individual adaptability as a result of the zealot’s programs, and the prudence of the Reagan-Thatcher strategy.

And there, perhaps, the issue would have stayed but for Tony Blair.  He renewed public interest in the cause of saving Africa for a reason: In his search for a ready-made project suitable for re-packaging and delivery in 2005, when Britain holds both the Presidency of the European Union and the G8, he came up with Bono’s organization “DATA” (which stands for the wiping out of Debt, the eradication of Aids, and fair Trade).  Blair deftly interconnected DATA’s three-pronged agenda to the G8 countries via the core issue of extreme poverty, which he, along with Bono, allege is the root cause of AIDS—and, conveniently, of terrorism, too.

Accordingly, in May 2004, Blair launched his “Commission for Africa.”  The objective is to take a fresh look at Africa’s past, present, and future.  Consisting of politicians including Prime Minister Meles of Ethiopia and Trevor Manuel, the South African minister of finance—the commission is modeled on the “Brandt Commission,” which Willy Brandt headed in 1977.  Its fresh-look purpose was to propose a restructuring of the global economy to facilitate the equitable development of poor economies and to ensure that such economies could compete in global markets.

The Brandt Commission’s two reports, North-South (1980) and Common Crisis: North-South Cooperation for World Recovery (1983), addressed the issues of agricultural development, trade, energy, international monetary and financial reform, and aid, with a view to solving problems of environmental degradation and population growth, stimulating global economic growth, and limiting the arms race.

The recommendations of the Brandt Reports to restructure the international trade and financial regimes in favor of the developing nations were unanimously endorsed by the United Nations and discussed at subsequent G7 summits.  But the international community, instead of uniting to promote development as Brandt had intended, proceeded to become hopelessly divided over globalization, the emergence of which had been made possible by the leaders in the G7 themselves who had liberalized international trade, financial, and communications regimes across the globe.

Opposing the allegedly deleterious consequences of globalization were a noisy and largely ineffectual, if not all corrupt and self-serving, assortment of NGO’s and agencies of the United Nations.  They took up the challenge of promoting, in defiance of the new globalization regime, the Brandt Report’s recommendations, which included, inter alia, the development of renewable forms of energy, an international tax on arms, the rollback of trade barriers by industrial countries on exports from developing countries, and the establishment of international fair-labor standards and an international investment regime that would create reciprocal obligations on recipient countries and corporations.

But, in the end, despite all the huffing and puffing of the developed nations, only the Scandinavian countries and Holland seriously attempted to meet the Brandt Commission’s central recommendation—namely, that developed nations increase their foreign aid to one percent of GDP by 2000.

Despite the repeated pillage of Scandinavian aid by anti-apartheid leaders in South Africa, the international organizations continue to claim that this thoroughly discredited instrument will propel the disintegrated sub-Saharan societies into the developed world.  And, of course, these poverty pimps fail to mention that taxpayer-supplied aid always propels upward the lifestyles of the numerous aid bureaucrats, no matter whether it contributes one iota to the suffering masses of Africa.

Their latest pimping is formulated in the portentous “UN Millennium Development’s Goals.”  In terms of this masterpiece of self-delusion, eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, reducing infant mortality by two thirds, and achieving universal primary education can allegedly be attained by 2015 if the donor countries keep to their promise, made in Monterey, Mexico, in 2002, to devote 0.7 percent of their GDP to aid.  Jeffrey Sachs, special advisor to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who is notorious for having implemented the disastrously unsuccessful shock therapy of market-oriented reforms in Russia, claims the eight Millennium goals will be achieved if $150 billion is donated in aid each year for the next ten years.

Sach’s pimping has succeeded in eliciting promises of U.S. and U.K. taxpayers’ monies.  In 2002, the Bush administration announced the “Millennium Challenge Account,” which aims to support “the poorest nations that rule justly, invest in their people and encourage economic freedom.”  A further $15 billion has been pledged to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean.

Blair, for his part, displayed his commitment to his Commission for Africa by promising that the government of 2013 would, on behalf of British taxpayers, “donate” (sic) 0.7 percent of GDP.  As a means of financing the UN Millennium Development Goals, Blair’s chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, has proposed an “International Finance Facility” scheme, which would double aid to $100 billion per year by issuing bonds in the capital markets, using donor countries’ long-term funding commitments as collateral.

Poul Nielson, the E.U. development and humanitarian-aid commissioner, skewered this proposal when—just as the constructed clamor started to rise at the end of 2004 with the launch of the new version of the Band Aid song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”—he charged Blair and Brown with imposing on the children of the donor countries the burden of repayment of long-term debt, while showering themselves in glory for their brave efforts to save Africa.

Such dreary home truths are, however, lost on the glittering, self-promoting rock star Bono who, in his speech to the Labour Party Conference, grandly called upon the conference to honor “the John and Paul of the development stage,” the rock artist manqué, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown.

But it is Nielson, not Bono, who must have the last word here.  Tony Blair bears no resemblance (to his credit, let it be said) to the musical pothead and martyr John Lennon, but he is surely a dead ringer for Basil Seal, the check-bouncing bounder of Waugh’s Black Mischief.

As so, the ragtag Parade of Instant Solutions to the intractable problems of the impenetrable continent and its transoceanic spawn rolls on through the centuries with its usual complement of buffoons, charlatans, and snake-oil salesmen firmly in control.