Blair & Geldof's Africa panel?

international | rights, freedoms and repression | other press

Sunday January 31, 2010 11:21

by Henk Ruyssenaars fwd. The Telegraph - Foreign Press Association

fpf at chello dot nl

Blair didn't show up for two years

Not one word too much: those creatures are a living shame to humanity in which they not any longer take part.

They are not the solution: they are the problem!

Quote from the Telegraph article:

"A top-level panel set up by Tony Blair to monitor official aid pledges to the global Live8 campaign will hold its final scheduled session this week with him not having attended a single meeting since 2007.

Convened with great fanfare in the wake of the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles, the Africa Progress Panel was charged with ensuring that Western governments did not renege on their promises to pump billions of dollars of extra cash into fighting poverty.

When announced by Mr Blair, who once described Africa as “a scar on the conscience of the world”, he said its remit would be as a high profile watchdog ensuring that Africa’s plight did not “slip out of the headlines”.

Yet the panel, which includes Bob Geldof as a member and has had about £1.5 million of taxpayer funding, faces the prospect of being wound up in Geneva on Wednesday despite only about half of the G8 pledges having been honoured.

Some of those close to the organisation believe that there is no point in it continuing in its current form. At most, they say, it should be scaled down to a few key staff and shed its high-profile membership line-up, which has failed to deliver the clout that was hoped for.

One insider told The Sunday Telegraph that it had achieved “nothing whatsoever”, and accused Mr Blair of having lost interest in it after setting it up. The former prime minister, who is currently based in Israel as special envoy for the Middle East Quartet, and also holds a large portfolio of other roles, has not attended any of its past four meetings.

He has also said he will not attend on Wednesday, despite having returned from Israel last week to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq.

“Mr Blair has not contributed anything whatsoever to this panel, even to the point of not bothering to turn up to meetings,” said one person with knowledge of the organisation.

“As far as we can see, he got his moment of glory when he launched it and that was that. Partly as a result, the panel itself has hasn’t achieved anything either. Basically, several million dollars have been spent, and nobody in Africa is any better off.”

The panel was formally announced by Mr Blair in June 2006, a year after the Gleneagles G8 summit, and was designed to counter fears from aid agencies that the wealthy nations of the world would quietly forget their promises to donate roughly $50 billion (£31 billion) extra to Africa by 2010." - [end excerpt]

The full story is at Url.: http://tinyurl.com/yeyjylo

HR