This could be why I don’t give to charities, and why I won’t start. Not all of them might have turned out this bad but a good deal of them seem to ask for money for causes that never see the full benefit of such funds. There are always reasons of course, excuses given and a mention of expenses that must be paid, but the point is that raising money for charities doesn’t always go as it should, and too often, even if it isn’t very often, it’s because the charities end up being scams. Live Aid wasn’t necessarily a scam, but the money did manage to reach the hands of one of the last people on earth that should have had access to it. Instead of going to help the poor and impoverished the money raised from Live Aid went instead to an Ethiopian dictator by the name of Mengitsu.
This has been hotly denied and discredited more than once, but the truth of it is that those who realized the truth too late, such as Bob Geldof, the man that actually handed the money over, couldn’t face up to the responsibility of the act. That’s my opinion anyway. Think of it, you raise so much money for famine relief in a country that desperately needs it, and you hand it over to a man that has a reputation for killing innocents and relocating them from their homes in an effort to score some type of victory in his own nation that few of us could possibly understand. No one could be so naive as to think that this wasn’t a commitment to genocide that had been made in the guise of helping others in need.
Bob Geldof won’t even respond thirty years later, just as he wouldn’t back then. He believed his actions were justified and that things went the way they should have. He even went on record stating that he would shake hands with the devil if it meant that the people in need would get what they needed. That in itself is a very dangerous statement. In the mind of many it means that he would gladly deal with the devil if it meant that he could convince the devil into allowing those who need help to obtain it. But then again, it could mean that he could, as he did, shake hands with the devil in an attempt to make it look as though he was trying to put one over on Mengitsu. Obviously the act fell a little short, and Geldof was forced to vehemently defend himself before falling off the map for a little bit.
The BBC was forced to apologize after stating that they didn’t have enough evidence to show that the money had indeed gone to Mengitsu, but this also kind of undercut the investigation into why people in the region were still starving and why the famine relief didn’t seem to be working. There are many different answers, but the chief ones among them are that throwing money at a problem doesn’t solve the problem, it only alleviates the symptoms. The other answer is that the people didn’t get the money, and since it’s Africa few people really asked any questions.
And as though to add insult to injury, the man that handed over the money received an honorary knighthood.
