Gaddafi says Africans must reject conditional aid

By Francis Kwera

KAMPALA (Reuters) - Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi urged African governments on Monday to reject Western aid that came with conditions, saying world powers were trying to dictate democratic standards on the world's poorest continent.

Gaddafi is visiting Uganda to address an Afro-Arab conference of 5,000 youths that he sponsored, and to formally open a huge new mosque in the capital Kampala.

"They colonized us and now they're coming with their aid, you should reject it. Any aid with conditions should be rejected," he told cheering crowds through an interpreter.

"They give you their aid and dictate that one should adopt electoral democracy, that one must adopt multiparty systems. All these work in the West, but not in Africa."

The Libyan leader said he traveled 2,000 km (1,240 miles) across the continent by road, and that his extensive journeys had shown him how much black Africans were afflicted by poverty.

"South Africa is not independent ... it is full of whites and the blacks are living in poverty," he said.

"In Congo, the people are very poor because the white man once owned that huge country."

Gaddafi also hit out at constitutional limits on the number of terms the presidents of many African countries can serve.

He was speaking alongside Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, a former rebel who took power in 1986 but was criticized two decades later when Uganda's parliament removed term limits that would have stopped him running for re-election in 2006.

"President Museveni here, through a revolution, liberated Uganda. How can anyone come and say that because of the constitution he should leave power?" Gaddafi asked.

"Other African leaders who are limited by constitutional term limits are unsettled and disturbed because they cannot implement revolutionary development programs," Gaddafi said.

On Wednesday, the Libyan leader is due to open a mosque built on a hill overlooking Kampala city centre.

Work on the Gaddafi National Mosque was started in the 1970s by Uganda's late dictator Idi Amin, but then stalled until 2003.

Ugandan officials say it is now the second biggest in Africa, after the Hassan II mosque in Casablanca, Morocco.

(Editing by Daniel Wallis and Mary Gabriel)