It's Africa season in Britain. Everyone from pop stars to the prime minister himself wants Africa to take centrestage this summer.

It would be quite a boon for the continent if the aim of the season was to ensure more sales of African products in Britain and more opportunities for Africans to showcase their work. But the Africa season - also known as the "Make Poverty History Campaign" - does none of this.

Its main aim is to "save" Africa by compelling the United Kingdom and the European Union to fulfil their obligations to end poverty in Africa by adopting policy changes in three areas - ending export subsidies, writing off debt and giving $50 billion more in aid.

All noble aims, we might think, but there is something rather peculiar about this feverish love for Africa -none of its main proponents are African. The leading voices - Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the musician Bob Geldof - are all white men. (White men weeping louder for Africa than Africans themselves.)

A concert dubbed Live 8 organised by Geldof in support of the Make Poverty History Campaign, as far as I know, doesn't feature any African musicians, except Youssou N'dour and perhaps Oliver Mtukudzi. The concert will coincide with the G8 Summit when the world's richest leaders will meet in Gleneagles in Scotland next month to discuss the plight of Africa's poor. Tony Blair's Africa Commission has African commissioners in it, but one gets the distinct feeling that they are not the ones setting the agenda. In other words, Africa remains silent in a campaign held in its name.

AS MY colleague Sam Mwale, an economist, put it to me recently, "Until Africa has its own agenda, uses its own resources to get real things done-we are going to remain sitting ducks for every new donor fad led by folks seeking Nobel prizes in economics or some fading Western politician or musician wanting to leave a global legacy, trust having lost trust or fans at home."

Moreover, while I am all for debt relief/cancellation (they owe it to us, as interest on debt payment now exceeds the capital borrowed in the first place) and fairer terms of trade, evidence suggests that aid has very little to do with poverty reduction. If it did, Africa would be one of the most prosperous continents in the world.

In 2003, Africa received the developing world's largest share of financial aid ($24 billion), but as a recent report by Action Aid shows, much of this aid ends up back in the pockets of the donors, who insist on using their own experts and technology in the implementation of development programmes.

In fact, with all their vast natural resources, including diamonds and uranium, why is it that countries such as Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) suffer the most from poverty and conflict? Could it be because the conflicts serve Western interests? As Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, President of the strife-torn Sierra Leone, said, "Ours was not a civil war. It was not a war based on ideology, religion or ethnicity, nor was it a 'class war'- It was a war of proxy aimed at permanent rebel control of our rich diamond fields, for the benefit of outsiders." (Don't forget, it was the French who supplied arms to the Interhamwe in Rwanda.)

APART FROM the fact that most development assistance ends up in the pockets of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats (both national and international), aid has done little to boost productivity and to allow African countries to nurture their own development. A growing school of thought, propagated mainly by Latin American and Asian academics, is of the view that the era of "post-development" is upon us - an era that moves out of the development paradigm adopted after World War II to embrace a development model that is home-grown and self-funded.

Majid Rahnema, a retired Iranian career diplomat and professor, says that the "myth of development" emerged as an ideal construct to meet the hopes of three categories of actors: the leaders of the independence movements who were eager to transform their devastated countries into modern nation-states; the masses who were hoping to liberate themselves from new forms of subjugation; and the former colonial masters who were "seeking a new system of domination, in the hope that it would allow them to maintain their presence in the ex-colonies, in order to continue to exploit their natural resources, as well as use them as markets for the expanding economies or as bases for their geopolitical ambitions".

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, only the former colonial masters got what they wanted. And they went one step further by letting Africans do the bidding on their behalf. How else can we explain the fact that a white settler in Kenya has more rights than a black pastoralist, or why local politicians will be the first to protect their foreign benefactors in corruption cases. They are what former UN diplomat and writer Viraendra Tarzie Vittachi calls "the brown sahibs" - a class of people who may have African or Asian blood but represent European interests. In many cases, they will treat their own worse than Europeans. They will pay them less and betray them more often, as they themselves drive around in luxury cars and live in palatial houses while begging for more donor aid for Africa.

IF AFRICA has to look at another continent to know what it takes to get out of the poverty trap, let it look towards Asia, East Asia in particular. In countries such as Singapore and China, governments built their own people's capacity to compete in a globalising world by offering home-grown solutions (including a first-class education) with a global vision, with the result that poverty in Asia reduced dramatically from half the population to one quarter from 1970 to 2000, the largest decrease in mass poverty in human history.

India's home-grown software industry is now a billion-dollar industry, and Indians seeking to make a name and a fortune in the industry don't do it in America, but in their own country in cities such as Bangalore and Hyderabad. Some countries, as India did after the tsunami, are known to shun development assistance altogether when it is seen to be inimical to the national interest.

If Africa is committed to fighting poverty, it too must shun what Wolfgang Sachs, a leading critic of the aid industry, refers to as "the arrogant interventionism from the North and the pathetic self-pity in the South".

-Rasna Warah