ASK Andrew Mwenda how rich nations can help Africa and you get a quick and disturbing answer.

“The best thing the West can do is nothing,” he says.

The Ugandan journalist and broadcaster is in London telling anyone who is prepared to listen that aid has been a disaster for Africa, fuelling corruption and hindering development.

For Tony Blair and the G8 leaders who meet next week in St Petersburg, for Bono, Bob Geldof and all the other celebrity campaigners for generosity towards Africa, Mr Mwenda has a curt message: stop the aid and stop the debt relief.

He is Africa’s most vocal and persistent critic of the multinational aid industry and a thorn in the side of President Museveni of Uganda. His attacks against government venality in The Monitor, a Kampala newspaper, and on air — he hosts his own radio show, Andrew Mwenda Live — earned him a jail sentence last year.

Mr Mwenda is widely known in Africa; less so in the West — and for a reason. He accuses charities and aid agencies of self-interest, of seeking to feather their nests and expand their market share, and he talks about the big issue that is never mentioned: race.

“White society is being blackmailed. The white world looks at Africa from a position of guilt,” he told a seminar at IPN, the London think tank. The beneficiaries of aid are governments, politicians, the staff of aid agencies and charities, he says. Head in hands in mock despair, he reels off a list of “charities” that sprang into being when the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria began to disburse its millions. “There was Children of Hope, there was Hope for Children, there was Help the Children.”

Vast sums vanished into the pockets of politicians and corrupt government officials. Money from Western taxpayers, corporations and individual donations raised with rock star endorsement was siphoned into private bank accounts. The scandal eventually forced the Global Fund to suspend its $200 million (£110 million) grant to Uganda.

“The sick and dying in hospitals never saw the money,” he says.

Mr Mwenda is not alone in his attacks on what he calls the “rapacity of the African state”. However, he goes further than that, turning over stones that reveal nasty wriggling creatures where most of us would rather see purity and goodwill.

Aid is the problem, not the solution, he says. Debt relief is a moral hazard. What is the incentive for country “A” to continue paying interest on its borrowings if country “B” steals the money, defaults and then gets debt relief.

“Countries that are deserving don’t get aid,” says Mr Mwenda. Aid creates the wrong incentives, he argues. It makes objects of the poor, passive recipients of charity rather than active participants in their own economic betterment. Africans don’t need handouts, they need better institutions, land reform and access to cheap mortgages.

“Countries and individuals get richer out of self-interest. Capital is a by-product of development, not an input,” says Mr Mwenda.

Aid is directing self-interest elsewhere because, instead of engaging in a risky dialogue with their citizens about reform, African politicians would rather talk to aid donors and solicit handouts. “Africans need to move on from the slave trade and stop whining,” says Mr Mwenda.

He compares the old colonial administrators rattling around in Land Rovers with today’s army of foreign aid officials and government bureaucrats. “There were 72 colonial administrators and frugal public expenditure. Today, there are 2,800 foreign expatriates. They fight poverty in a BMW. When was Uganda more colonised, in 1962 or today?”

No surprise that the message is ill-received in Kampala where Mr Mwenda was a guest for several days in one of President Museveni’s jails. He accused the Government of incompetence and negligence in sending John Garang, the Sudanese rebel leader, to his death in a Ugandan government helicopter which recklessly flew into a storm in a rebel area.

Mr Mwenda admits freely that he would like to be president. While criticising the Ugandan opposition parties, he says that he will eventually join one. He wants to replace the African tradition of patronage with a meritocracy and admires Botswana and post-civil war Rwanda as better systems.

“Aid has destroyed the concept of civil society in Africa. What exists are the NGOs. They are bureaucracies committed to the interests of donors. Cut off the foreign aid and 90 per cent will disappear,” says Mr Mwenda.

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