CAN a ruler ever be in touch with the everyday lives of ordinary people? The age-old question, with the numberless tales it has spawned of princes moving disguised among their people or messiahs passing unnoticed through the crowd, pressed itself on me as I made my way through the fortified gates of the Addis Ababa Sheraton in Ethiopia eight days ago. Armed guards in pith helmets conducted a bomb search on cars as we drove through into another world: of landscaped gardens dotted with plastic palm trees in primary colours (ironic) and old-fashioned British red telephone boxes (to make rich visitors feel at home).
Here Tony Blair stayed when he arrived last year for a summit to promote the launch of his Commission for Africa. I was calling at the Sheraton to e-mail last week’s column. Briefly I entered Mr Blair’s planet. Music tinkled, glasses of iced drinks clinked, Westerners — tourists, plutocrats and men and women of affairs — in bright casual clothes drifted between swimming pool and souvenir shops as uniformed porters hovered ready to help with the smallest bag. Outside there was an illuminated fountain in a pool built from Ethiopian marble. At the entrance the air-conditioned Mercedes-Benzes of the wabenzi — the African elite — awaited their masters.
Etcetera. This sort of prose tripped easily enough from the sweaty ballpoint of a columnist now sitting, fly-tormented, amid the camel dung beneath a solitary thorn tree at the foot of Hertale, an active volcano in the Danakil Desert in the north of the country, as clouds of sulphur dioxide blow over us in almost intolerable heat. Easy to dramatise the contrast with the Africa Tony Blair saw.
So why do it? We should not begrudge prime ministers every comfort and convenience. Security is obviously a problem. They have a job to do. They should not be bothered by flies. Their time is precious. They should not walk when they can drive and not drive when they can fly. If a helicopter can get world leaders quicker to more places, why should they be detained or tormented by the places in between?
Nor do I think that Mr Blair is careless of the places in between. At least he went. At least he tried. He visited a project when he was here. He was photographed with children. I know from my own small experience as a parliamentarian that one’s motives for doing such things are tangled beyond unpicking, even alone in the self-examining watches of the night. You do want to advertise how in touch you are with those at the bottom of the heap; but you do also really want to help, and to understand their condition. You have long ceased to know where or how your ambition has corrupted your goodwill, but you still feel the goodwill and the hunger to hear the truth.
So I am not asking about our Prime Minister’s motives, or any leader’s motives. They do want to know what it is like. But can they? That is my question. Especially in Africa, can you, by diligent study and the highest quality briefing, know how things really are?
I think you cannot. Or, rather, I think you can know what the conditions are, but I doubt whether you can fully grasp why they are so. Mr Blair, in common with the rest of us, can watch a video which pitilessly records catastrophe in Africa — or Aceh. He can watch relief efforts in Sumatra — or project work in Addis Ababa — almost as if he were standing behind the camera. He can be better acquainted with facts and figures than many on the ground. People can show Bob Geldof, and Geldof can tell Mr Blair, what the needs and opportunities are.
But why, in Africa, has it come to this? That is what it is hard for him to know by briefing. Even to begin to answer that question you need time, so much time, dead time. Time has to hang heavy on you. You need to be stuck, bored, and to watch: to watch not attentively, eager to prove or disprove a lively hypothesis, but listlessly, with your eyes roving and your mind empty, and nothing to do. Only then do truths begin to swim into vision.
What the heck does my armed guard think he is doing here, sitting at the foot of this tree? He has a rifle and a sort of uniform and is intrigued by my binoculars (once he works out which end to look in, for he has not seen binoculars before). He seems a bright and helpful chap. But he is here because he is one of the local Afar tribe and, though our splendid guide and organiser, Solomon Berhe, is Ethiopian too, Solomon is from the highlands, and in the highlands they advise not to travel in the lowlands without two paid and armed Afar guards. We picked them up by the Afrera salt lake and they will earn many times the local wage by just hanging around. The Afars are volatile and distrust strangers and it’s a sort of protection racket. However, when we reached Dodom, a tiny, primitive settlement ten miles away, the village people insisted one of their own village join us as an extra armed guard.
I have no objection to three men and three guns — the cost is chickenfeed — but I do mind that the instinct among the men, on observing a new form of economic activity — tourism in their midst — has been not to join it but to demand with implicit menace a cut. That is Africa, or part of it.
I wish Tony Blair could look through those binoculars himself. He would see a mountain ridge dividing Ethiopia from Eritrea and cutting Ethiopia off from the Red Sea, and understand the idiocy of this division. This is Africa, too: self-defeating. If our PM had travelled, as we just have, the hundreds of hot and lonely miles down Ethiopia’s only good link to any port — the route from Addis to Djibouti up which Bill Deedes and Evelyn Waugh travelled (though by train) 70 years ago, the latter to write Scoop — and if he had killed a few hours just sitting on the roadside in a shanty village grown to service the hauliers, and if he had watched as lorry after laden lorry crawled by on its journey up to Addis, and watched as empty lorry after lorry thundered down towards Djibouti, might not a question have occurred to Mr Blair with more dismaying force than seems to have been the case: what can Ethiopia make, what can the rapidly multiplying Ethiopians do, in exchange for the food and soda pop, and bathroom suites for the senior personnel of resident NGOs being dragged up from the Red Sea port? How will Ethiopia compete in manufacturing with countries such as Thailand and Indonesia?
And if Mr Blair had watched with me as we filled our tanks and jerry cans with fuel (all imported) for our expedition, and watched idly as an all-woman workforce (“the ladies,” an Ethiopian said to me, “labouring and packing and loading camel and cooking and looking after children; the man watching cattle and carrying a gun and looking out for enemy and making sure hair look nice with butter”) undertook the construction of a huge six-storey office block in the middle of 10,000 square miles of useless, unoccupied land for a “regional authority” headquarters (“they tried to give them fancy offices with desks but they never using them — just lying on floor”) might he have wondered whether the overseas aid making this possible is being well spent? The case on paper for this regional authority must be formidable; but stand and watch and you know that all is lost.
The scrubbed-up African kids Mr Blair met will have been sweet. But were he stuck for a while in the sand near a desperately poor and isolated village of tiny thorn-bough and hide huts, as we were, and were he to see the fresh, alert, intelligent, fascinated little faces of tribal children anxious to learn, anxious to help, itching to be and become, he would see what every traveller with time on his hands sees: the tremendous, untapped genius and energy of youth in Africa. And he might ask, as I ask: where does it go?
What happens to them? What is it that keeps killing hope in Africa?
