Tony Blair’s “vision for Africa” is about as patronising and exploitative as a stage full of white pop stars (with black tokens now added)

- August 1, 2011

The front page of the Observer on 12 June announced, “$55bn Africa
debt deal ‘a victory for millions'”. The “victory for millions” is a
quotation of Bob Geldof, who said, “Tomorrow 280 million Africans will
wake up for the first time in their lives without owing you or me a
penny…”. The nonsense of this would be breathtaking if the reader’s
breath had not already been extracted by the unrelenting sophistry of
Bob Geldof, Bono, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, the Observer et al.