U.S. Aid Beats Moscow’s, Shultz Tells Africans

Secretary of State George P. Shultz, striving to put the best possible face on sharp cuts in U.S. economic aid for Africa, said Thursday that the West is far more generous than the Soviet Union, which sees the continent only as a potential military outpost.

In a speech to Senegalese business leaders and Cabinet officials, Shultz urged Africans to consider “the difference between guns and butter, between stomachs filled with food and heads filled with empty slogans.”

Citing figures from 1984, which he said were the latest available, Shultz said the Soviet Union and its allies gave African nations only about 8% as much aid as the West.

But he said the Soviet aid was so heavily weighted toward the military that “over the course of the 1980s, the Soviets have sent 20 times as much arms to nations of sub-Saharan Africa as the United States.”

2 Different Visions

“These figures capture the difference between two very different visions of Africa’s future,” Shultz said. “In one, the continent becomes an outpost of militarism and strategic designs. The other vision sees Africa . . . as a collection of nations whose people . . . are paramount.”

The Soviet news agency Tass responded sharply, describing Shultz’s African visit as an “attempt to justify Washington’s neo-globalist policies aimed at dividing, rather than uniting, Africa.”

On the first full day of his six-nation tour, Shultz also made an emotional trip to Goree Island, a few miles outside Dakar Harbor, from which an estimated 15 million West Africans were sent into slavery in North and South America and the Caribbean between 1536 and 1848.

After walking through a 211-year-old prison where slaves were held before they were forced through a “door of no return” to the slave ships, Shultz called the place “horrible but moving and elevating in its way.”

“This scene of the ultimate in inhumanity will stand forever as a symbol of the importance of the human spirit and soul and of human freedom,” he said.

Urges ‘New Partnership’

Shultz’s speech to the Senegalese Business Council was the keynote of his first trip to Africa south of the Sahara. He called for “a new partnership” between the developed world and the struggling African economies. He said both donors and recipients of foreign aid must recognize and correct past mistakes if the effort is to have any chance of success.

Before leaving Washington, Shultz complained bitterly of congressional cuts in the overall foreign aid budget. He said then that he was embarrassed even to talk about the level of aid for Africa because it is so low.

In his speech, Shultz emphasized the positive: “Between 1974 and 1985, our regular (aid) programs to Africa increased fivefold, reaching over $1 billion in 1985.”

But he conceded that aid levels to Africa declined in 1986, “and this stringency is likely to continue in 1987.”

For the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, only $661 million in economic aid has been allocated for African nations. Small military assistance programs boost the total to $713.4 million, still only a tiny fraction of the overall $13.4-billion aid program.

South Africa, Plagues

Shultz made just one reference to South Africa and its system of racial segregation. He lumped apartheid together with “drought, plagues of locusts and grasshoppers . . . tyranny . . . and war” as the scourges that have blocked the continent’s progress.

But he said that Africa’s chances for a better future have increased as a result of attempts to replace state-dominated economies with greater reliance on private business. He also said that increasing numbers of African nations have ended or modified self-defeating food price policies that made agriculture so unprofitable that millions of farmers left the land and thronged to already crowded cities to compete for dwindling supplies of price-controlled food.

“The man in the forefront of this progressive movement has been Senegal’s President (Abdou) Diouf,” Shultz said.

Here in Senegal, where a major reform program has been under way for three years, the government has substantially increased agricultural producer prices, reduced subsidies and embarked on major reform of the state-controlled sector.

“This brave reform effort is critically needed, but it involves many hardships for the people of the country,” Shultz said. “Fortunately, it is beginning to pay off.”

A U.S. Embassy official said Diouf’s program is politically risky because it increases sharply the prices that city dwellers must pay for food and other goods. It also cuts government payrolls and reduces the jobs available for graduating university students.