BOB GELDOF launched a bitter attack on President Mugabe of Zimbabwe last night as he flew into Africa 20 years after launching Live Aid.

The Irish pop star called on African leaders to challenge despots if they wanted the rest of the world to take them seriously.

“He (Mr Mugabe) is engaging in state-sponsored terror and famine and that cannot be allowed,” Geldof said. “He is a shame on the face of Africa.”

Geldof, on his first official trip to Ethiopia since the days of Live Aid in 1985, added: “You people should be demanding that Mugabe steps down. I don’t care where he goes. He can join Idi Amin in Saudi Arabia, he can join the ghetto of tyrants, but get him out of there.”

Geldof, whose trip is timed as a “wake-up call” to the G8 summit of world leaders in Evian, France, early next month, also came face to face with the horror of Aids.

He met Meseret Tadesse, a ten-year-old Aids orphan who is one of three million people in Ethiopia infected with the virus.

“This is a disgrace,” he said at the start of his five-day visit to the impoverished country — the third-poorest country in the world, with the world’s third-largest Aids population. “I am a father and have a ten-year-old daughter. This girl wants to be a doctor when she grows up. Instead she will die within a year.”

The pair held hands in a tiny mud shack in a shantytown on the outskirts of the capital, Addis Ababa. Families are too poor to buy drugs to combat the virus.

The former Boomtown Rats singer also attacked the European Union. “Their grotesque inability to respond in a full, adequate manner is responsible for the food shortages here,” he said. Some 14 million people, or one in five of the population, are facing starvation in the country and the aid bill is estimated at more than £500 million.

The singer is a hero in Ethiopia for his fight against the 1984 famine, which culminated in the Live Aid concerts in Britain and America. Geldof now wants Western governments to each pledge 0.16 per cent of gross domestic product to helping Africa.

• President Bush signed into law yesterday a $15 billion (£9.2 billion) plan to help to fund the fight against Aids in Africa and the Caribbean and challenged Europe to follow America’s “generous” lead without delay. Mr Bush, in trebling US spending on Aids over the next five years, said that he would “challenge our partners and our friends to follow our lead”.

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