Band Aid fails to heal tax scourge

22 November 2014 - 22:46 By Ann Crotty
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By reviving a catchy 30-year-old ditty in time to target the maudlin Christmas crowd, Band Aid 30 might pull off the seemingly impossible and make some ageing pop stars look relevant.

This time it's not the millions of starving Ethiopians who are the target of the rockers' messianic obsessions, but the millions of West Africans whose lives are threatened by Ebola.

The pop industry in Ireland and the UK evidently works on the principle that you should never let a serious African crisis go to waste, particularly when you're just a few shopping days from Christmas. So last weekend out came a greyer and remarkably more wealthy Bob Geldof with Bono, lead singer of U2 and part-time promoter of tax avoidance, to save Africa once more.

It may be churlish to be cynical of the charitable efforts of anybody, even pop stars, but perhaps it is time to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of these sorts of exercises.

In doing so we need to look beyond the obvious facts, such as the enormous wealth accumulated by the major contributors to the original Band Aid bash since 1984, and compare that with the stark reality that not too much has changed in East Africa other than a reduction in foreign media coverage of events there. The seeming lack of progress is hardly surprising, given that the underlying problem relates to the achingly slow process involved in developing robust post-colonial political institutions.

Despite the huge media hype around the original Band Aid song, it only raised about $11-million (R120-million at today's rate). This doesn't stretch very far when you're trying to save a continent. It is a bit like using a Band-Aid to cure cancer. But even $11-million is, as they say, "better than a poke in the eye with a stick". Except that like much "charity", this relatively small sum came with huge amounts of patronising smugness. Earnest Europeans were saving Africa.

This meant they didn't have to do more complicated things, like insist that their elected politicians stop enabling the legalised theft of billions of dollars from Africa through tax avoidance and other unsavoury corporate practices.

Judging by the media buzz, last weekend's London pop show prompted almost the same levels of uncritical self-satisfaction.

One or two journalists did have the temerity - extremely brave in the face of a wall of smugness - to raise the issue of tax avoidance. They were quickly dismissed as party poopers and reminded that the critical objective was to get resources to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

And perhaps in the romance of the moment it would have been difficult to draw some sort of a line between the slow pace of development in large parts of Africa, which makes it so vulnerable to crises, and tax avoidance by powerful multinationals.

The commitment that wealthy companies put into tax avoidance and their ability to dictate government policy on the matter highlight just how trivial and momentarily distracting the Band Aid affair is.

The billions of dollars lost each year through tax avoidance, which is entirely legal, dwarfs the pittance that this continent receives in aid.

In this context Bono's recent defence of Ireland's extremely "competitive" tax regime is repugnant. Ireland's tax regime, mimicked to a lesser extent by other Western states, has enabled powerful multinationals such as Google and Apple to get away with paying derisory amounts of tax on their global earnings. Bono explained that Ireland is a small country with not much going for it. "Tax competitiveness has brought our country the only prosperity we've known," the singer said, seeming to justify tax piracy on a global scale.

Bono's comments came just weeks after Apple paid U2 about $100-million to dump the band's latest album on the playlists of about 500 million iTunes users without charge.

And just a few weeks before, he and his pop star colleagues launched another vain effort to save Africa from Ebola and themselves from irrelevance.

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