Africans love to party so Tony Blair is assured of much revelry when he arrives today on a farewell visit to the continent whose plight he has championed.

No amount of backslapping and dancing, however, can mask the huge gap between lofty ideals and reality in countries where millions eke out a living on less than 50 pence a day.

Like others desperate to end what they see as a moral wrong, Mr Blair has every right to feel let down by his African friends. Since he famously labelled Africa “a scar on the conscience of the world” in 2001 and began his campaign against poverty, few of its leaders have come to his party.

Instead, they have often pocketed the cash on offer and returned to their old ways, while aid groups accuse Mr Blair and other G8 leaders of failing to honour their commitments to double aid by 2010.

So on this final trip there will be no visit to Ethiopia, the country where he began the campaign. Elections there in 2005 ended in violence and mass arrests and tarnished the image of Meles Zenawi, the Prime Minister, who was a member of Mr Blair’s landmark Commission for Africa.

“Blair is the latest in a long line of Western leaders who are taken in by African leaders, who always put on a good façade. But he still deserves credit for taking time to look at Africa’s problems and producing a blueprint to solve them,” said Behru Zewdie, of the Forum for Social Studies, in Addis Ababa.

There will also be no stopover in Uganda, which receives £70 million a year in aid from Britain.

Yoweri Museveni, its President, once the darling of Western donor countries, has changed the country’s constitution so that he can remain in power indefinitely. Plans to hold the next Commonwealth summit there in November are now in doubt.

Mr Blair flies first to Sierra Leone, where he dispatched British para-troopers in May 2000 to end one of Africa’s most brutal civil wars. Five years ago he was greeted with banners: “Tony Blair – we love and respect you.” That euphoria has long gone. Corruption has returned to the UNbacked Government of Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, the President, and unemployment has destroyed many hopes.

Britain is accused of keeping quiet about government errors but Mr Blair is still held in high esteem. “Blair can come and live here anytime he wants, he is still a hero here,” said Mohamed Kargbo, a resident of one of Freetown’s sprawling slums.

Mr Blair will also miss out Nigeria, Africa’s biggest oil exporter and the destination for much British investment, even though he could have been the star guest at the inauguration on Tuesday of the new president.

Britain lobbied hard to persuade the Paris Club to cancel more than £10 billion of Nigeria’s foreign debt, but the elections in April, which brought the new incumbent, Umaru Yar’Adua, to power were blatantly rigged.

In South Africa, Mr Blair will make one last attempt to push the President, Thabo Mbeki, to take meaningful steps to deal with the “desperate crisis in Zimbabwe”. The President there, Robert Mugabe, 83, has taunted Mr Blair as an old-style colonialist and can barely mask his delight at outlasting him.

Zimbabwe has highlighted the limitations of Mr Blair’s Africa policy. His African friends proved unwilling to take any significant action against Mr Mugabe, because of his standing as a prominent figure in the liberation struggle.

Critics say that Mr Blair could have put a lot more pressure on the South Africans to act had he not been sidetracked by adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the collective failure to end human rights abuses and land grabs that ruined one of Africa’s best economies and created millions of refugees stands as a shameful rebuke.

Nelson Mandela, originally a Blair fan, who criticised him harshly over Iraq, is expected to make a rare sortie out of retirement to wish him well.

The picture is not all bleak. Mr Blair wins plaudits across the continent for putting Africa’s problems on the global agenda. The 450-page Commission for Africa report, which encouraged the G8 promise to double aid from the world’s richest countries to £25 billion a year, is the basis for the current debate on the causes and solution to poverty.

“He deserves enormous credit for placing these issues on the global agenda. Even if you disagree with proposals, the debate is now out there – issues such as the inequities of the world trading system, bad government, aid flows and debt cancellations are not going away. That is his achievement,” said Kumi Naidoo, a South-African based civil society activist.

Oxfam agrees, though it recently gave warning that Mr Blair’s legacy in Africa was at risk unless he could put pressure on France, Italy and Germany to meet the commitments that they all made at the Gleneagles G8 summit in 2005. “The G8 must prove its promises were more than empty rhetoric and say when and how they will increase aid . . . There can be no excuses – the cost of inaction is too high,” Max Lawson, of Oxfam, said in a recent statement. Figures from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development showed that aid actually fell in 2006 for the first time since 1997, the charity said.

Critics of Mr Blair’s approach to Africa say that it was bereft of new ideas and failed to take into account that years of aid from the West have failed to lead to economic growth and have propped up corrupt and inefficient governments.

James Shikwati of Iren, a Kenyan think-tank that advocates private sector solutions, says: “Africa needs less aid, not more. China and India have lifted more people out of poverty than anywhere else but not as a result of aid, but enterprise. But Blair has got people thinking and we will miss him.”

Under Mr Blair, British aid has increased significantly to £6.85 billion – up £2.5 billion on ten years ago. Much of the aid to Africa has taken the form of debt relief. Advocates say that millions of dirt-poor people in countries such as Mozambique and Tanzania have benefited enormously.

Mozambique’s debt relief enabled the Government to immunise half a million children against easily preventable killer diseases, while Tanzania eliminated fees for primary school. Uganda also used debt relief to double primary school enrolment and increase funds to fight HIV/Aids.

Zambia has also used funds to abolish health charges, thereby giving thousands of people access to health-care.

“Blair had good intentions and succeeded to a certain extent . . . his policies will continue under Gordon Brown and with the UK pulling, and South Africa, the continuation will be good,” said Shadrack Gutto, of the Centre for African Renaissance at the University of South Africa.

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