"STOP the world, I want to get off!" I wanted to say as Dambiso Moyo whipped us off on a whirlwind world tour. This came to us in bits, sandwiched into her keynote address at a seminar held at the SA Reserve Bank on Wednesday. The seminar's theme was "alternative policies to address poverty and inequality in Africa". It was hosted by the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability in Africa and The Institute for Democracy in Africa.

Moyo spoke fast, despite having earlier that morning arrived from London, where she lives. Her book, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is Another Way for Africa, appears to have taken on a life on its own, propelling her across the globe.

As an analyst and economist, she claims that democracy is not essential for the early stages of development; that aid has not reduced poverty - and it should be thrown out of the window.

Moyo, her fingers already burnt at the altar of media scrutiny, implored her audience not to respond "with emotionalism" to the thesis of Dead Aid.

"The first thing is that it is not desirable that Africa be receiving aid forever. Africa does not need handouts."

The thesis of her book is that aid has not reduced poverty, and has held Africa back - corruption, conflict, dependency and disenfranchisement are its by-products. Indeed, aid is responsible for everything from civil war to lumbago. This thesis has been bolstered by the global recession that came after the book's publication, and the fact that the aid coffers have been shrunk by the credit crunch. Moyo's anti-aid argument offers the donors a comfortable way out of difficult times by dint of her African identity.

She's an African woman - the daughter of a Zambian mother, her father is the son of a miner from apartheid South Africa. Her parents were among the first black graduates at the University of Zambia in the 1970s. They furthered their education in the US and returned, "convinced that they could help their country to become politically great", but for Moyo there were few opportunities at home.

Raised in Zambia, she went through the Zambian education system and says, "I get mad when people think I am not familiar with development on the ground".

Moyo holds a Master's degree from Harvard and a PhD from Oxford. She spent two years at the World Bank and eight years at investment bank Goldman Sachs. She is writing a new book, and she is putting down roots - she was recently appointed to the board of SAB Miller.

The title of Dead Aid reveals it to be partially a response to the flooding of Africa with money by the likes of rock stars Bono, Bob Geldof - whose Live Aid concert brought aid to Africa - and other "glamour donors" with money that ultimately pays to stuff the faces of the elite.

That Brand Moyo is herself not shabby and a disciplined soldier in the "moral army" she deplores, is an inescapable irony.

She has, since the success of her book, which sold 50 000 copies in the UK and hit the New York Times bestseller lists, experienced the sweet taste of fame. She is by no means shy to drop the names of the top people she's seen or the places she's been. From the head of the IMF to the president of Rwanda, from Brussels to Brazil, she's on the move. But where exactly is Moyo going with her mission to get the plug pulled on aid in Africa and just how many African presidents are lining up to call her in for tea?

In addition to being f234ted by a Norwegian minister and the Rwandan president, Muammar Gaddafi - the Libyan leader in his capacity as chairman of the African Union - invited her to visit Tripoli. But did he grant her an audience?

"I travelled in a motorcade, but was kept waiting to see him for two days, so I left. But I will return there and tell the African leaders what I think of them, with no journalists present, behind closed doors."

"What will you tell them?" I ask her after the seminar.

"I will let you know."

Moyo said that her work was focused on "logic and evidence of the work that came out of my PhD thesis".

"I believe we are all on the same side, but unfortunately the media - and also others - have pitted us on different sides...

"You would not believe how many people have called me a pariah," said Moyo.

It is worth noting that she plays a different tune from those "pop star philanthropists" she makes so much noise about. She writes in Dead Aid that they "have capitalised on the success of raising cash for emergency aid, and extended it to a platform to raise development aid; something completely different".

She stressed that she is, in fact, for humanitarian or emergency aid. Despite the setbacks arising from poor implementation, and donor conditions, she is for charities and she sits on the boards of a number of NGOs. After the seminar, I asked why this important aspect of herself had not emerged in the big media profile she projects. "Nobody asked."

They're on her website and one is Absolute Return for Kids (ARK), an international children's charity.

The effect was dizzying as Moyo described her travels across the continent, putting down tracks on its varied terrain.

"I had dinner with a friend from Somalia who says that since 1992 they have not sent a child to school."

Moyo says she is a fan of Rwanda. She has been there several times, and it is a wonderful transformation story. Although some people say the county has draconian rules, she is impressed by its transparency. If health ministers, for instance, want health care outside the country, they have to pay for it themselves. It is not provided by the state.

Also in President Paul Kagame's favour is his approach to aid, "far more philosophical than mine", says Moyo. "He believes that that aid cannot build a society of entrepreneurs by giving handouts," she says.

Has it escaped her attention that more than 50 percent of Rwanda's budget comes from aid?

During the seminar, Moyo provided her audience with a litany of passport stamps - breathless and hardly impactful, particularly for South Africans accustomed to negotiating the interface of third and first worlds on the road, her tourist descriptions are commonplace. "Been to Lagos, been to Lusaka, been to Nairobi, there are children on streets, selling trinkets at the traffic lights, in that kind of metropole everywhere this happens. We need more trading among ourselves."

Although Moyo has for a long time lived away from home, she is well-versed in the ways of the continent; she wants us to know this. "Africa is not one country" she writes with flourish. "It is a continent..."

She says in the seminar: "I went to Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, in February, I needed three visas, is this a formula for attracting business? We have failed to even create markets among ourselves. We need African governments to be motivated to be involved and to be in charge."

Moyo was introduced in the seminar as on Time magazine's list of the world's top 100 influential people. But what lies behind the package?

She has also earned her place as a proponent of Afro-pessimism, who likes to counter her own praise of the progress of some African countries in the stock market - and the fantastic demographic and geographical layout of the land - with laments: why is it that seven of the top 10 failed states are on this continent?

African leaders and policy makers and people who truly wish to see Africa progress are the target audience market of Dead Aid, she writes. Yet she cites few African scholars.

Moyo invited Niall Ferguson, the Harvard historian, criticised for his sympathetic view of imperialism, to write the foreword. Ferguson says it seemed to him problematic that "so much of the debate about Africa's economic problems should be conducted by non-African white men", among whom he lists Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and William Easterly, author of The White Man's Burden - two very different writers.

Bheki Moyo, the Zimbabwean programme director of TrustAfrica, which gives aid to African NGOs, said that Colliers's book was published before hers, as was Easterly's.

As David Moore, who heads the development studies department at the University of Johannesburg says, her argument is ridden with contradictions: it's trendy to attack aid, although it is the same old thing, it is neo-liberalism dressed up in brand new drag.

Gilbert Khadiagala, the Kenyan head of the University of Witwatersrand's political department, said: "Moyo's ideas are not new, they have been with us since Peter Bauer (the Hungarian economist) wrote against foreign aid in the 1970s - but Moyo should enjoy her 15 minutes of fame."

Dead Aid is, in fact, dedicated to Bauer. I ask her why she thinks she has been misrepresented.

"The media wants to be obtuse and to observe the status quo. We live in a world that likes headlines - 'Dambisa Moyo wants to kill African babies!' or 'Moyo wants to turn off the aid taps within five years!'"

But you did suggest that, I query. Ferguson mentioned it in his foreword. And Moyo wrote: "The Dead Aid proposal envisages a gradual (but uncompromising) reduction in systematic aid over a five to 10-year period."

She says she did not say it. Perhaps she did not mean to say this. Could it be that, at some level, the book was intended to be polemical?

"You complained that you have been labelled a conservative..." I said.

"I am pro-immigration, pro-women's rights and pro-health... for all. Is that conservative?"

She cannot conceal her dislike for journalists, but says: "They help me to sell my book."

The Dead Aid solution, she writes, "offers a variety of financing alternatives: trade, FDI, the capital markets, remittances, micro-finance and savings".

Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian takes her to task for, among other things, offering pre-credit crunch solutions to poverty reduction such as borrowing capital for infrastructure.

Dead Aid prescriptions are market- based, according to Moyo, "only capital and competition (have) succeeded in getting the greatest numbers of people out of poverty in the fastest time".

She suggests that the majority of African countries should look at boosting trade with China and emerging nations like themselves. And that the 15 countries that have already acquired credit ratings should consider following Gabon and Ghana's lead in drawing on the capital markets.

Financing plans, cut-backs and strengthening of institutions are also advised.

Bheki Moyo says "Dambisa Moyo's suggestion that African countries should rely on capital markets and issue sovereign bonds as a source of their finances ignores two basic points: sovereign bonds are a preserve of a few - only three African countries have such bonds - South Africa, Ghana and Gabon. Even these are not fully effective. This solution only works when markets are functional - when they crumble as they recently did, her solution falls flat. Also, who does the rating, politically speaking? She says it herself in the book that previously about 35 African countries issued such bonds, but all defaulted - why will they not default now?

"Her recommendation on trading with China is fine only if China was not in Africa primarily for its own domestic consumption. Advocating for Chinese domination is tantamount to sacrificing human rights at the expedience of trade - a feature that seems to follow logically in Moyo's thinking."

Stephen Gelb, the executive director of the Edge (Economic Development, Growth and Equity) Institute, says the problem with market-based solutions is that they assume there is a market, but there is a vicious circle - it is what we call "the poverty trap".

"African countries have low growth input because developers do not have access to sufficient finance, but as a result they are not creditworthy.

"People won't lend to them - because they have low growth. The question is how do you break the circle? To say they must trade using microfinance doesn't say how they break the circle.

"Jeffrey Sachs says that by shoving in vast amounts of money through aid you can do a 'Big Push' that gets you out of the trap. It gives enough energy to help you jump out of the circle to undertake the Big Push. My criticism is that there is not enough capacity and that in a country like Malawi, there is a skills shortage.

"The only way to get out of it is to make the country more attractive to investors and to get people trained to stay there. It involves addressing corruption, crime, etc. This takes a long time. I don't think there is a solution and I don't think that that aid or dead aid is the magic bullet."

Moyo's respondent in the seminar was Neville Gabriel, the executive director of the Southern Africa Trust - an independent regional donor and policy development agency. He applauded the fact that the debating space was being opened to an African woman - Moyo was called provocative, and praised for stimulating debate.

Gabriel agreed "with some of what she said". But it was no bad thing that Moyo did not head the trust, which in the past three-and-a-half years has given about $12 million to more than 120 organisations across 15 countries in southern Africa.

Gabriel said figures indicated that the government revenue was at least five times higher than aid flows into Africa. "Is aid the problem?" he asked. "The structural adjustments she advocates will have serious impacts on the poor. We have to ask if it is all Africa's problem, or whether the global economic system results in Africa's continued marginalisation. She is advocating that Africa borrows more - on the open market and not given preferential rates. This will result in a new debt crisis. So who will take responsibility for the poor in that context? The poor are not disposable and dispensable."

Moyo's thesis, that donor aid contributes to the corrosion of responsibility, echoes Kenyan Nobel Prize-winning political and environmental activist Wangari Maathai's argument in The Challenge for Africa; A New Vision, which applauds the intentions of western donors, but suggests that Africans should engineer their own solutions to their many problems.

But in a stirring essay, Ending Aid to Africa Will Not Help, written in response to Dead Aid and similar arguments, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane challenged Moyo. He said that under present circumstances aid resources were vital for human survival and development in Africa.

"Aid is a life and death matter for most of its intended beneficiaries. The real problem is that we have gotten so used to stunted children and starved people, to short life expectancy and premature death, and mass unemployment and underemployment, that we have stopped seeing these as an unacceptable status quo that needs urgent, massive and concerted attention. It is as if we have almost given up on the belief that we can find solutions, including making development aid work for the poor."

Moyo does want her kind of Africa to do well. But she is a gaggle of contradictions.

In Ferguson's foreword he describes Moyo's prescriptions as "strong medicine" and "shock therapy". But then she appears not to fare too well under the glare of the media, whose comments she experiences as another kind of shock therapy.

Dambisa Moyo says that she wants debate. But this debate confuses the way aid is handled - by corrupt leaders indifferent to the very real need for aid.

Without aid, in the short term, the people she claims to be fighting for on her continent will curl up and die.