There are no two ways about it – “the Ethiopian Spice Girls” is funny, in the same way “the Wolverhampton Spice Girls” would be funny, or “the Penrith Spice Girls”. I’m not down on the phrase “Ethiopian Spice Girls” providing lols. I think we can lol away.
Similarly, Britain spending £9 million in foreign aid on said “Ethiopian Spice Girls” – whose real, unfunny name is Yegna – does seem a bit steep. Even though the £9 million was over five years, and paid for the band and a radio drama/talk show that ran for seven series, and a movie, and a wider education programme on female empowerment, and a free concert for teenage girls, there was probably a much cheaper way to do it. If you want to keep costs superlow, you can record an album for maybe £20k, pop video for £20,000, movie for £250,000 and radio series for £10k per episode. Around £1 million all in, before the band, their management and crew get paid – and the average yearly wage in Ethiopia is £2,700, so it’s not going to be that much.
Given this – even if you add management fees, website expense, app development and God knows what other running costs such an ambitious, countrywide project would accrue over five years – it seems to me that, in that timeless tradition of the entertainment industry, there may well have been a lot of very long lunches factored into the budget, somewhere along the line, in that £9 million. I’m just guessing. This is an uninformed shot in the dark. I’m happy to admit that I don’t actually know how much it costs to run a multiplatform feminist education campaign in a country with poor infrastructure and a population of 100 million.
But then, neither do the Daily Mail or The Telegraph, which, nonetheless, confidently ran numerous pieces, “blasting” the “blood-boiling waste of money” involved, until Priti Patel, the international development minister, announced last week that further funding would be cancelled. No more Yegna for you, Ethiopia. You’ll have to make do with good old defunct British Spice Girls from now on. And that’s got to be good for the hardworking Brexit economy, opening up the old Spice Girls pits, getting Baby back down the zig-a-zig-ah mines.
What’s bad news is kicking off 2017 with a reaffirmation of the old idea that culture is worthless, and that the only causes worth funding are, in the words of MP Nigel Evans, who led the campaign against Yegna, “saving lives [and] producing medicine and drugs”.
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While saving lives through medicine is obviously the first priority, it does then lead to the next question: OK, you’ve saved lives – what next? The body is healthy, but what of the mind? The community? The future? What are all these newly healthy bodies you’ve saved going to do?
Twenty-three per cent of Ethiopian girls under 14 still undergo FGM. Only 40 per cent of women use/have access to contraception. Marital rape is not a crime. A recent Unicef report said arranged marriage was as high as 95 per cent in one region, and bride kidnapping is not uncommon. How can you change this, in a country where women have a 41 per cent literacy rate, and 84 per cent of girls miss out on secondary education? You can search as long as you like for some “medicine” that will cure the belief that girls are things to be cut, stolen and beaten. Sadly, you will not find it yet.
What changes societies faster and cheaper than anything else, save wealth, is culture. As a girl who also failed to go on to secondary education, I can tell you that pretty much everything I learnt was through books, music, films, TV and radio. Culture is simply a network for spreading ideas. Give a girl a fish and she will eat for one day. But give her a heroine like Jane Eyre, Patti Smith, Alexis Colby, Madonna or Ripley in Alien and you’ll reboot her whole life. “I cannot be what I cannot see” is the truest thing ever said.
Yegna’s radio show – on teen pregnancy, forced marriage and isolation – reached 20 million people directly; but in opening up a new market of pop for girls, its potential is almost limitless. For here’s the final, regularly neglected kicker about culture: it makes money. A lot of money. In Britain, it’s our third biggest industry – £84.1 billion a year. Exporting our expertise in making Spice Girls is an almost uniquely benign idea – it will cause no wars or environmental issues. It’s just five girls singing to other girls about a better future. At best, it becomes an economy in itself. At worst, it just changes lives. Changes lives as powerfully as medicine does.
Anyway, aside from everything else, it tells us that – a cheeky £9 million later – there’s a brilliant, canny band manger in Ethiopia who may well be the next Simon Cowell. That manager is clearly a genius at meetings. If I were the British government, I’d hire her/him for Brexit trade negotiations, sharpish.
caitlin.moran@thetimes.co.uk