Nairobi — Wherever there is an economic crisis, be sure to find one or 10 World Bank officials peddling their lofty ideas before politicians who should know better.

The moneymen have been in Kampala this week, pledging to help the government deal with the worst energy crisis in Uganda's history. The World Bank MD, Dr Juan Jose Daboub, who was visiting President Yoweri Museveni as part of a whistle-stop seven-nation African tour, pledged to use the organisation's deep pockets to finance the simultaneous construction of several dams. Dr Daboub also said a few other things about governance and civil society, but they've been largely ignored in the wake of this latest offer, even if it was the same bank that refused to fund the Bujagali Dam Project several years ago.

In President Museveni, they've found an eager ear too. After ruling barely unperturbed for most of the last 20 years, the president has found his 21st a lot more difficult, with the initial democratic reforms severely undermined or wiped out by his strong-arm tactics and Uganda's economy taking a sharp down-turn partly because of the unprecedented electricity crisis. The wastage on public administration is indicative of a beleaguered ruling class whose only leverage is political patronage. These, together with brazen corruption and a sour political landscape, have combined to dampen interest among foreign businesspeople - with the possible exception of money launderers, drug traffickers and organised crime kingpins.

Then there are the headaches of next year's Commonwealth summit. It was originally a very good idea for the president who had hoped to host it before last February's elections. Now, everyone outside the hotel industry agrees that the meeting will be a costly talking shop with negligible benefit for the country. Preparations are eating up billions of scarce shillings; while the president is personally parcelling out prime public land to every prospective hotelier. (It's a real sign of progress when hotels are still being constructed for a four-day event that is a mere 14 months away).

Anyway, all these headaches have mellowed the big man, and he's been rather willing to listen to the World Bank, the IMF, IFC and bilateral lenders. But don't count on the men from Washington to change anything. It's not by accident that there's virtually no country that has ever developed on World Bank loans.

In plain English, these organisations are instruments of hegemonic control for rich Western nations, especially America. That is why they've given Uganda billions of dollars over the years, put it atop the list of HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Countries) programme, and offered all sorts of economic blue-prints, but it's still dirt-poor, and most of its citizens are still heavily dependent on handouts to survive on almost every front, including that against HIV/Aids.

The bankers' failure is not limited to Uganda either. Their spectacular debacles are so well-documented to go into here, but we'll recount just two. After years of giving Ghana the "best", "largest", "most" accolades under the benign dictatorship of Jerry Rawlings in the 1980s, the World Bankers had very little to show for the millions pumped into electrifying the entire country when people could not even afford food, leave alone the electricity! Ghanaians have done much better under a more representative democracy, which has also created some elbow room from the bankers.

In a second instance, the Bretton Woods institutions were excoriated for their part in the financial crisis that hit Asian economies in 1997 and threatened such strong economies like South Korea's (the world's 10th largest). So traumatised were the people of Thailand, for example, that after repaying the bailout monies, they asked the World Bank to ship out of their country and close their account. Bangkok vowed never to borrow from the bank ever again.

So why are World Bank officials still eager to bail out third world leaders with spotty economic records and zero democracy in their countries? It could be that they hate the dictatorships, but care about the peasants; but there are American citizens sleeping in cardboard boxes across the street from the World Bank building in Washington DC! If, as is obvious, the majority of its clients live in the impoverished south, most of the bank's employees would live there too.

Instead, up to 80 per cent of the World Bank's 10,000 employees are at the DC headquarters, many calling themselves "experts" on Namibia or Chad, when they've never stepped out of the US. Why then? The answer to all those questions is simple - they don't do a lot of useful work.

Consultants for any of these organisations (World Bank, IMF, the UN, etc) will tell you how much they love research, report writing and PowerPoint presentations. No one really cares what the findings are, because nothing is supposed to come out of them. No UN bureaucrat - not even Kofi Anan - can do anything to reform the five-nation dictatorship of the Security Council. The UN and World Bank have no money of their own to fund the billions of dollars worth of poverty alleviation and anti-retroviral therapy in Africa. Neither do they have foot-soldiers to enforce peace in Cote d'Ivorie, the DR Congo, Northern Uganda, Chad or the Sudan.

So they write reports and speak in glib diplomatic language designed to offend no one and call for zero action.

For this "work", our friends are the best compensated civil servants in the world. The UN even educates employees' children from kindergarten up to their first degree. See why a UN career can be so tempting? There are of course, still many who prefer to be in the private sector and compete against other equally smart businesspeople. Others go into low-paying government jobs, in civil society, and in academia. For the honest and hard-working in these sectors, rewards can be high or satisfying, or both.

It's not all the World Bank's fault of course. They don't force any African president to take their loans. As lenders, they also have an obligation to get the best deal from the borrower, even if they're financing the digging of boreholes in Karamoja. It's therefore the responsibility of borrowers like President Museveni to similarly negotiate the best terms for their countries, and to reject those that make it impossible to repay the principal - as is often the case.

It's also the borrower's responsibility to use the money wisely. Otherwise, the donors will quickly turn to the grant to set up nice digs, pay expatriate salaries, buy big fuel-guzzling four-wheelers and make frequent trips to Bwindi Forests to track the gorillas. With so little of the pie left, the logical step is for it to be shared between the corrupt minister and his top officials.

Eventually, a World Bank employee will be asked to write a report entitled: "Electricity generation, Uganda and the World Bank." And it will start all over again.