The gateway to African economic revival in a place once famous only for a hijacking

‘We men don’t want to wear condoms, we want the West to find a cure.’ This dilemma, faced by HIV counsellors at the Mildmay Centre near Entebbe, mirrors that experienced by those hoping to help Uganda financially. Mukasa, a handler at the chimpanzee sanctuary on Ngamba Island, 45 minutes from Entebbe by speedboat, gives me the analogy: the chimps there are hand-reared orphans. Five times a day food for them is tossed over the fence. A Pavlovian response has developed: they come whooping through the undergrowth at set times — and can never be released into the wild, as they would not survive. They are literally sustained by handouts.

The other problem with handouts is that ‘the Big Men eat all the money’, a reference to high-level corruption heard all over Uganda — earlier this year Britain redirected £15 million of aid away from President Yoweri Museveni’s government and into the humanitarian agencies.