Irish rock star Paul Hewson, better known as Bono, took US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on a trip around Ghana, South Africa, Uganda and Ethiopia from May 20-30 – to prove to the sceptical American mandarin that aid can help Africa. DECLAN WALSH, who joined the roadshow for the second leg, attempts to answer the question: did it make any difference?

The duo – unofficially billed "The Odd Couple," after the popular 1970s television series – had traipsed around slums together and shaken hands with presidents. They had peered down wells and roamed around coffee factories. They had dressed up in strange costumes, argued and agreed – all in front of news outlets as diverse as The Financial Times, the Ethiopian Herald and the music magazine Rolling Stone.

In fact, O’Neill had just come from an interview with the teenage channel MTV – not his regular audience, he readily admitted. "Tell me this," he asked earnestly, leaning his chin on both hands. "How do we explain this stuff to a 12- or 14-year-old? How do we get them interested?"

Bono had plenty of ideas about how Americans should engage with Africa, not all of them shared by O’Neill, as had been clear from some sharp exchanges in the preceding days. Outside a school in Uganda, O’Neill suggested that "cosmic" amounts of money were not necessary to solve some basic problems. A visibly fuming Bono flatly told reporters that the Treasury Secretary was wrong, and if he couldn’t see that, "I’m going to get him a new pair of glasses and some new ears."

But equally, a friendly rapport had developed between the man who controls America’s wallet and the rock star who wants to open it. And on this warm, easy evening, hours before leaving for home, they were keen to stress unity, not difference. Instead, there was humour.

When Bono mistakenly described O’Neill’s former business as steel – it was aluminium – Mrs O’Neill yelled up from the back seats "You’re dead meat now!" Bono, a man more used to the company of fawning groupies than Republican spouses, grinned from behind his trademark wraparound shades.

Their "tour of the poor" undoubtedly made a bang: never before has a Treasury Secretary’s visit to Africa enjoyed such attention. But has it made a difference? 

The hullabaloo went largely unnoticed in the countries they visited – Ghana, South Africa, Uganda and Ethiopia. All most people saw was their screaming motorcade whipping up a cloud of dust as it sped down the streets. Perhaps they saw it as just another politician bringing empty platitudes and some singer whose songs they didn’t know. Or more likely they didn’t think anything at all, writing it off as another high-profile, low-relevance VIP visit. 

If anything, the elements seemed to tell them to slow down: in Ghana, a furious storm stranded their plane for six hours while in Addis Ababa, errant herds of goats and donkeys brought the speeding convoy to a halt. 

But the unprecedented tour was focused on Western, not African, attention. Although the US recently announced it would increase its foreign aid by $10 billion over two years, it remains one of the stingiest donors in the rich world. When Bono pleaded to O’Neill in his Washington office last year that aid was necessary and effective, the Treasury Secretary challenged him to show how. The idea of a joint trip was born.

Bono’s job was to soften O’Neill’s famously sceptical views on foreign aid. It seems to have worked, at least to some degree. The straight-talking Republican was visibly touched by the hardship and squalor endured by ordinary people he met several times.

"If you really want to change my mind about anything, just give me a baby and talk to me," he said on the final evening only half-jokingly, before indulging in a misty-eyed description of how a little orphan wrapped her arms around him that morning. "I felt she adopted me," he said.

By the time he was stepping onto his chartered Boeing back to Washington, O’Neill was rabbiting on about clean water for Africa in terms as if it were a personal crusade. He promised to reflect carefully on how to communicate to President Bush the "facts and the emotions" of what he had seen. And, given some of his strong comments about the workings of the World Bank – of which he is the most powerful board member – some changes at the controversial international development body also look possible.

With their obvious political – and sartorial – differences, the two played the "odd couple" angle for all it was worth over the trip. Bono might jibe at the US secretary’s silk ties; the American might make a quip about Bono’s Dublin accent. Nevertheless, the trip highlighted significant differences between the singer and the multimillionaire Republican who demands "results, results, results." And it exposed hypocrisies in Western policy to Africa. 

Both men agree on the problems; their differences are in the solution. O’Neill is a passionate believer in the magic of the free market and its ability to help African countries trade their way out of trouble. Bono agrees, in part, but says the West must first invest billions on "social capital": creating a healthy, educated workforce to man the self-sustaining economies O’Neill wants to build.

But it was clear the US has difficulty practising what it preaches. In a conversation with South African President Thabo Mbeki, Bono impolitely brought up the Farm Bill, a new piece of legislation that boosts subsidies to American farmers by $35 billion. It has enraged African leaders because the World Bank and IMF insist they drop their own subsidies in the name of liberalisation. Later on the trip, Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi offered his own stinging criticism.

According to British aid agency Oxfam, such trade barriers cost developing countries $100 billion a year – twice as much as they receive in aid. The European Union is the worst offender, followed closely by the US and Japan, it says in a recent report.

Bono’s attitude to his travelling partner was expressed in a typically barbed but humour-coated compliment that he delivered in an address to the African Development Bank in Addis Ababa. The Treasury Secretary was "a man who would ask God for measurable results," he said, but had "a heart and a head for these problems. In my opinion he is the right man for the job. He is God’s messenger."

The trip marked another peak on the remarkable trajectory of Bono – once a plain old rock star and now referred to, only half-mockingly, as The Man Who Wants to Save the World. He has pulled off the remarkable coup of winning the confidence of the Bush White House, carving out a position of unique influence that earned him the cover of Time magazine of March 4. The following month, when President Bush announced the extra $5 billion in aid, there was Bono strolling beside him, flashing a V-sign for the cameras.

It’s easy to forget that not so long ago, Bono was making two-fingered signs in the direction of the establishment, not from within it. During the last Bush presidency – George Bush Snr – the singer used to call the White House switchboard as part of the act during the Zoo TV tour. Thousands of concertgoers would laugh as he made fun of the attendant and, indirectly, President Bush. In recent months, that detail has been quietly forgotten.

But the transformation from stone-thrower to negotiator is no accident. A committed Christian, Bono has an established pedigree as a campaigner. Whereas some stars pick up and discard fashionable causes like new Gucci leatherwear, Bono is a long-time supporter of Amnesty International and Greenpeace. In early 1986, he and his wife Ali spent weeks in an Ethiopian camp in order to better understand the cause they helped fund through the Live Aid concerts.

Then, three years ago, he joined Drop the Debt campaign and adopted a new approach – that it was celebrity, not music, that can change the world.

Bono has used his fame to open doors – politicians like to collect his autograph for their sons and daughters – then once inside, has dazzled sceptical policymakers with his nimble grasp of the facts. O’Neill admits that he tried to avoid their first meeting, thinking it just a publicity stunt, then extended it from 30 minutes to an hour and a half.

Bono has famously converted some crusty old conservatives to his cause, people who are despised by most liberals as untouchables. The most famous case was the powerful Republican Jesse Helms, a bitter critic of foreign aid, the United Nations and homosexuals. By appealing to their common Christianity, Bono reduced the 80-year-old senator to tears and brought him on board.

The fusion of celebrity and knowledge may be the new frontier of Third World campaigning. It has brought much-needed glamour to an area once dominated by people "who want to wear a hair shirt, don’t know how to have fun and aren’t ambitious," according to his adviser Jamie Drummond. But Bono admits that his embracing of the conservatives embarrasses his fellow U2 members. And the tactic has forced him to neuter his own opinions. "I’ve had to become apolitical to further the cause," he said, "and sometimes I wince."

Then again, he points out, the lines between left and right are more blurred than ever before. For example, the Farm Bill was forwarded by Tom Daschle, a senior Democrat and a prominent supporter of the debt and HIV/Aids campaigns. "Now I don’t want to take a position, because they are all loaded," he said.

Of course, if they chose to, both Bono and O’Neill could make a dent in African poverty by deploying their personal fortunes. Their combined wealth is conservatively estimated at over $400 million, more than Ethiopia’s entire health budget for its 60 million people. But Bono doesn’t see it like that. "Bill Gates has the deepest pockets of anyone and he doesn’t have enough money to fix the problems. There’s a certain type of poverty that’s structural, and we need governments to get themselves organised," he said. "What we do with our personal wealth is our own business. We have to face ourselves, and I will too."

Instead, his tireless campaigning energy is his gift to the poor. To that end, he and fellow scruffy Dubliner Bob Geldof recently set up the DATA Foundation, a high-octane lobbying vehicle that stands for Debt, Aid and Trade for Africa. But some fellow campaigners fear Bono’s new tactics give credibility to racist conservatives like Jessie Helms and erode his own legitimacy. 

"The closer he gets to politicians, the closer he’s getting to that grey world of compromise. His strength is being on the outside, a campaigner," said Salih Booker of the Washington think-tank, Africa Action. And while his message encourages African leaders towards democracy, it often ignores the complex interplay between aid and politics. During some of the largest emergencies of recent decades – from Biafra in the 1960s to Rwanda in the 1990s – ruthless local forces have exploited aid as a tool of war. Bono’s focus on funding – or O’Neill’s obsession with results – side-step the debate on whether aid can harm as well as help.

At the end of the trip, O’Neill refused to acknowledge that US strategic aid for Mobutu Sese Seko contributed to the degeneration of the Congo and the current humanitarian disaster. Nevertheless, the singer can be proud of having opened the eyes of the "can-do" O'Neill. Whether that translates into a policy sea change in the US – or the powerful World Bank – remains to be seen.

The first test comes later this month, with the meeting of the G8, the world’s most powerful nations, in Canada, where British Prime Minister Tony Blair will be pushing the Nepad initiative. Paul O’Neill will be a powerful player in any negotiations. Bono says he will be there too.

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Declan Walsh is a Nairobi-based correspondent for The Irish Times