The hypocrisy of Bono and his ‘One’ charity
In January 2012, Bono arrived in Timbuktu on a private jet with “ONE” emblazoned on the side, accompanied by his wife, daughters, the designer Renzo Rossi and several others.
He had come to the historic city in Mali for a festival celebrating the music of the famous Tuareg tribe. On the night of the event, Bono and his entourage were placed on a small bleacher surrounded by, yet separated from, the thousands of local people via metal traffic barricades and a dozen heavily armed men. Toward the end of the evening, a woman announced that “BONE-no from Youtube” was in attendance. Later, the U2 frontman appeared on stage screaming, “We are brothers here!” and “Music is stronger than war!” before trying to sing in French in front of a nonplussed crowd. Then he exited the event, boarded his jet and flew back to the country’s capital, Bamako.
The next morning, the nomadic Tuaregs, who inhabit the north of Mali and the Sahara, told government ministers who’d arrived for the festival that they would once again be taking up arms to revolt against the regime. Three months later, Al Qaeda usurped the Tuareg rebellion and started raping women, chopping off limbs and burning libraries full of centuries-old books, but there was scant mention of Mali in the western press.
I wondered why Bono would keep quiet when one word from him would place this humanitarian disaster front and center in the media. If he said something maybe people would pay attention. A magazine I was working with said to make some calls.
Six months after Bono’s visit to Mali, I posited this to a rep for One.
“Bono was on a private family vacation and One doesn’t get involved in politics,” a rep for the organization told me.
“Why, if it was private, was he riding in a jet with his charity’s logo on the side of it?”
“He paid for that trip,” the rep said.
“Can you prove that?” I asked.
Crickets.
The editor I’d been writing the piece for soon called to kill it as Bono was up for an award by the publication (and they wanted him to show up and generate press for the corresponding event). But the incident has always irked me. Bono, the self-proclaimed protector of the great masses of Africa especially, was at the site of a revolt in a country run by a demonstrably corrupt government that had for years accepted millions in foreign aid yet done almost nothing to lift its people — especially women — out of poverty or educate them. And now a man with a much-used international megaphone declined to say anything.
In the years since, Bono’s hypocrisy has been revealed in other ways. In 2007, U2 moved part of its multi-million dollar song catalogue from Ireland to Amsterdam just as their homeland ended a tax exemption on music royalties, to take advantage of the Netherlands’ low to non-existent tax rates for musicians.
Fine — except in the ensuing years Bono (and his charity One) earned kudos for insisting countries, corporations and people pay taxes in pursuit of a fairer society. In 2011, Bono, 57, who, according to CNN has an estimated net worth of $590 million, further angered his countrymen when he espoused the values of Ireland’s 12.5 percent corporate tax breaks. He went on the record to claim that these breaks for multi-billion dollar companies had brought Ireland the “only prosperity we’ve ever known.” He had a point, but as the locals pointed out, Bono wasn’t even giving the country a meager 12.5 percent any longer.
In defending his tax position, Bono told Sky News that just because he had campaigned for a fairer society did not mean he had to be “stupid” in business.
Then, in 2015, Bono’s One Campaign repeatedly called for more transparency on the ownership of “shell companies” and offshore trusts, decrying the effect of lost tax revenues on developing economies. A spokesperson for One said, “Anonymous shell companies and trusts [are] often being used to siphon much-needed funds out of developed and developing countries alike,” and claimed these companies cost the Third World the staggering sum of “a trillion dollars each year.”
So, last week, when it was revealed in a trove of leaked documents that Bono himself was a partner in one of these shady companies, the hypocrisy stank.
Meanwhile, Bono repeatedly falls back on the work of One and his messianic campaign to save Africa as his failsafe excuse for any perceived bad behavior.
And what exactly does his charity, founded in 2004, do with the millions it collects?
According to its website, One is “a campaigning and advocacy organization of more than eight million people around the world taking action to end extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa.”
In other words, it is a think tank that creates studies and marketing slogans like “Poverty is Sexist!” (which won Bono Glamour magazine’s 2016 (wo)Man of the Year Award) and tries to get African governments in places like Liberia, Nigeria, Mali, South Africa, Ethiopia and Rwanda, (not ones necessarily known for keeping their word) to agree to earmark foreign aid for causes One promotes.
Not one dollar donated to One goes to real “boots on the ground” help. A person who worked closely with One for years and has intimate knowledge of the organization told me this, and added that the charity is “strictly an advocacy group which tries to influence or shame African governments into behaving.”
And a lot of this influencing and shaming seems to involve Bono or his bestie, One chairman Tom Freston, taking friends on first-class, all-expenses-paid sightseeing trips to briefly experience African poverty by touring schools and hospitals before settling down to enjoy local music. According to several press accounts from reporters invited on these junkets, the groups are chauffeured in armored SUVs, stay at the finest hotels like Timbuktu’s once-grand Hotel le Maison, drink the finest wines and pose with the leaders of African nations for endless photo ops.
According to One’s tax returns, the organization raised $50 million in 2015. That same year, it paid Vice Media more than $920,000 for “World Aids Day Production” and gave the nonprofit Project Everyone $1.173 million for “Event Production, Project Management.” (Freston is an investor in and also on the board of Vice. Richard Curtis, the founder of Project Everyone, is an old friend of Bono’s.) And while neither Bono nor Freston are listed as accepting salaries from One — they get to fly themselves and their friends around the world for free through the charity. Travel bills in 2015 exceeded $3 million. (According One’s website, Bono contributed at least $25,000 to his charity in 2015.)
My insider at One, who asked not to be identified for professional reasons, told me that the organization’s direction needs to be reevaluated. “It’s time to take a close look at whether or not the One model works anymore,” she said, adding that, “(Bono) catapulted himself through charity to a different social level of importance — otherwise he’d just be another aging rockstar. He’s the frontman not just for U2 but for One and … he’s a complicated guy. He’s very earnest but he does like to hear himself talk.”
It’s hard for the charity to point to any tangible achievements. For example, a major focus of Bono’s charity is educating women and girls. But unlike, say, Oprah, One doesn’t actually build any schools or provide funding for teachers, supplies or uniforms for students. This seems like a severely wasted opportunity, especially if you consider that the cost of building a single school in Africa is roughly $13,500 and the average cost of a year’s college tuition is $3,000. In 2015, One spent $768,000 in “direct expenses” on the star-studded Red Gala at Carnegie Hall attended by Miley Cyrus, Bill Clinton, Stephen Colbert and Joe Biden. That $768,000 could have paid for 57 primary schools — or sent 256 women to university for a year. (Calls and emails to Juliet Vedral, One’s spokeswoman, went unanswered.)
So, let’s be honest, guys. Yes, Bono is a successful musician who has saved a lot of tax dollars — a smart business move. He’s figured out a way to score lavish trips to Africa for him and his friends — good for him. All the while, he is rewarded by a sycophantic media honoring his every utterance with a magazine cover or an accolade.
But the rest of us need to stop lionizing him for it. When it comes to taking action in Africa or taking a stand against the continent’s atrocities, Bono hasn’t done much. For a rock star who “likes to hear himself talk,” his talk is pretty cheap.
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