Regional Outlook : Western Aid Buys Lots of African Reforms : Democracy is moving forward on the continent, but not without the influence of the economic carrot.

A few days after President Daniel Arap Moi announced the re-establishment of multi-party democracy in this country, thousands of Kenyans gathered for a demonstration downtown.

Chanting slogans in support of a key opposition organization, they massed in front of a landmark of the movement: the American Embassy. Then they began an impromptu serenade, as it were, of Ambassador Smith Hempstone Jr.

“Hempstone juu, Hempstone juu, “ the demonstrators chanted in Swahili: “Up with Hempstone!” Finally the ambassador, a former conservative newspaper columnist, came out to give the crowd a wave from behind a wire-mesh grate.

It was a new sensation for a diplomat who just a few weeks earlier had been vilified by the Kenyan government as a “racist” with a “slave-owner’s mentality”--all because of his position as the Western ambassador most outspokenly critical of Moi’s autocratic policies and deteriorating human rights record.

But the pro-American demonstration also reflected a discomfiting truth about the democracy movement in this country, as well as elsewhere in Africa: It could not have been so successful without the overt support of European and American governments.

Nowhere is that as plainly evident as in Kenya, where Moi’s staunch resistance to multi-party democracy--he called its supporters “anarchists” and “rats”--made him an increasingly lonely figure in African politics.

Then came Nov. 25 and a meeting in Paris of Kenya’s Western donors, the source of the country’s more than $800 million in annual foreign aid. Sorely tried by Moi’s recent crackdown on the opposition and by Kenya’s declining economy, the donors--led by the World Bank--said there would be no new assistance to Kenya for at least six months, unless Moi put his house in order.

One week later, Kenya’s sole legal party agreed to end its political monopoly, allowing opposition groups to form for the first time since 1982.

African leaders grumble about the Western role in their continent’s wave of political reforms, and dissidents express gratitude. But both sides are well aware that the situation only proves that Africa is so marginal geopolitically and so dependent on Western aid that the developed countries can still call the shots in most African countries.

Over the last two years, 21 African countries have formally or implicitly abandoned their traditional one-party systems amid important changes in their relationships with Western donor countries and international finance institutions. Many other regimes are facing unprecedentedly strong opposition movements.

In some cases, the West has withdrawn the military and covert support that helped dictators maintain power--a key development in the former French colonies of West Africa and in Zaire. In many others, donors have precipitated political change by attaching firm new conditions to their aid programs, sometimes making explicit threats that continued autocracy would lead to a cutoff of funds.

That the West has come to use its authority to promote laudable aims does not obscure the dangers of such a one-sided relationship, say many African observers.

“It’s a positive step that they’re using their leverage this way,” says Richard Joseph, director of the African Governance Program at Emory University in Atlanta. “But ultimately the donor countries are all still acting in their own interests. They’re more interested now in trying to see more productive economies emerge in these countries.”

Just because the West’s interests and those of native Africans happen to coincide now, he observes, does not mean they always will--or always have.

In fact, the very political reforms being wrought under such foreign urging may themselves change the relationship between African governments and their donors. If truly representative governments replace the autocratic one-party regimes of today, they may be less likely--or less able--to accept harsh Western prescriptions, which create political strains at home, for their domestic policies.

They may also become less willing to accept aid packages that benefit donor countries more than their own, such as programs that require recipients to spend donated funds on equipment or goods manufactured in the donor country.

Of course, it would be incorrect to say that Western pressure is exclusively responsible for the growth of pro-democracy movements in Africa. Most of these are genuinely indigenous, even if they have drawn strength from political developments elsewhere on the globe. The determination and courage of African dissidents was widely recognized during the decades in which they were harshly repressed, exiled, even assassinated (sometimes with Western complicity).

And it is unlikely that the West would be pressing Africa’s autocrats so hard to change unless concurrent pressure was being applied domestically.

“The Paris donors would not have made that decision (to cut off new aid to Kenya) unless there was pressure from within the society,” says Peter Anyang’Nyong’o, an organizer of the important Kenya pro-democracy group FORD (Forum for the Restoration of Democracy).

But the dissidents’ opportunity to emerge from the shadows and effect real change owes much to Western pressure on national leaders.

In large part, the West’s change of heart results from the end of the Cold War. By erasing superpower conflicts, the global political change of the 1980s also devalued the real estate of Africa. Ethiopia and Somalia had owed their prominence on the geopolitical map to their roles as militaristic client states of the Soviet Union and United States, respectively. (At least after 1976; before that, the United States backed Ethiopia’s government and the Soviets equipped the Somali military.)

Zaire’s dictator Mobutu Sese Seko also reaped millions in American aid for allowing the United States to equip anti-Communist Angolan guerrillas through his borders.

But after Cold War tensions eased, nobody cared much about such displays of ideology. In an odd way, the sudden political marginalization of Africa gave Western countries the luxury of approaching the continent’s political situation entirely on principle.

As it happens, not all the West’s pressure for reform was overtly political. In fact, the first Western squeeze on Africa was purely economic.

In the 1980s the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other donors became convinced that a main reason for the continent’s dismal economic showing was its fiscal policies. Currencies were grotesquely overvalued to provide a semblance of urban prosperity, public payrolls were bloated, state-owned enterprises were inefficient and corrupt.

These situations brought dozens of African countries to the brink of collapse, but the remedy--at least in the short term--was painful. Lenders and donors insisted on fiscal restructurings as a condition of more aid. The African standard of living, which could not have been sustained in any event, fell. Just as government officials feared, political opposition fed on economic discontent.

“One reason the democracy movement gathered so much steam is because of the deepening economic crisis,” says Salim Lone, a Kenyan who is editor of the U.N. publication Africa Recovery (and who is applying for the return of his passport seized by Moi’s autocratic regime). “Many of those hardships have been the result of economic conditionalities. When you lay off large numbers of civil servants, increase school fees, and devalue the currency, which reduces earnings by 50% to 60%, economic conditions have tremendous political impact.”

Most of the unrest sweeping across Africa in 1989 and 1990 was economically inspired. Benin, long victimized by President Mathieu Kerekou’s nominally Marxist policies, suffered a total collapse. Civil servants went for months without getting paid, and so much currency was smuggled across the border to the haven of Togo that the latter country experienced a banking boom.

In 1990, the once-thriving nation of Ivory Coast went through a similar crisis, provoked by a collapse in the price of its main cash crop, cocoa, and the refusal of the French government to help President Felix Houphouet-Boigny corner the market to support prices. Economic unrest also affected Zambia, Gabon, Cameroon, Zaire and Congo, where trade union concerns about austerity-inspired layoffs were aggravated by charges of fraud against President Denis Sassou-Nguesso.

Western pressure shifted to politics in 1989, with a spur coming from an entirely unexpected source: the World Bank. Perhaps the largest single lender to the Third World, the bank had long borne the brunt of criticism for the way its lending policies had helped enrich and entrench corrupt African leaders.

In its 1989 report “Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth,” the bank for the first time raised the issue of “governance.”

“Officials in many countries have served their own interests without fear of being called to account,” the report noted. It pointed the finger at corruption: “The extent of corruption is largely determined by the example set by a country’s leadership.”

And it acknowledged that the existing free-for-all system of foreign aid aggravated the problem: “Foreign aid has greatly expanded the opportunities for malfeasance exacerbated by the venality of many foreign contractors and suppliers . . . . The cost is not just the waste of funds but also more seriously the profound demoralization of society at large.”

The World Bank’s position encouraged other donors to speak out against the African status quo, as well as to attach more stringent political and economic conditions to their aid.

Hempstone made a stir in Kenyan political circles in May, 1990, with a speech to the Rotary Club of Nairobi warning that “a strong political tide is flowing in our Congress . . . to concentrate our economic assistance on those of the world’s nations that nourish democratic institutions, defend human rights and practice multi-party politics.”

British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd echoed that position a month later. Regimes that “persist with repressive policies, corrupt management or wasteful and discredited economic systems,” he said, “should not expect us to support their folly with scarce aid resources which could be used better elsewhere.”

Placing conditions on aid can be a dangerous game, of course. It underscores the dependence of the recipients and if pushed too far can add an improper element of coerciveness to bilateral international relations. On the other hand, donors rightly claim an interest in how well and efficiently their own money gets spent.

“I think conditionality is fair enough,” says Hempstone. “It’s our dough, the American taxpayers’ dough--and times are tough enough in America.”

Nevertheless, part of the resentment that such treatment inspires among recipient governments is based on history. “For a long time, those (Western) governments had other interests, and those interests ran counter to the people’s interests in Africa,” says Joseph of Emory University.

Europe and the United States countenanced rapaciousness on a majestic scale by client despots who claimed anti-Communist credentials, such as Zaire’s Mobutu and Somalia’s Mohamed Siad Barre.

In places where superpower ideology was less of an issue, the West simply found it more convenient to deal with existing regimes, no matter how unsavory. The quintessential American misstep was its handling of Liberian President Samuel K. Doe, who got billions in U.S. aid until the American government finally cut him off after 1986. By then, however, the American government had openly acquiesced in Doe’s theft of the 1985 presidential election.

Queried about widespread reports that the election had actually been won by Jackson F. Doe, a coalition opposition candidate, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester A. Crocker told Congress that Samuel Doe should actually be lauded for his restraint in claiming a bare majority of the vote, rather than African leaders’ customary 90%-plus.

Faced with this signal that their quest would get no American support--indispensable in the only African nation settled by descendants of Americans--Jackson Doe and his supporters abandoned a campaign to overturn the election results before the Liberian courts.

The Liberian opposition never recovered from the blow, and Samuel Doe’s blood-soaked reign was finally overturned in 1990 the way it began--through the actions of a bloodthirsty band of murderers masquerading as politically inspired rebels. Liberia today is a country without a government, as rebel groups continue to fight what amounts to a gang war over its remains.

The French, who were the dominant colonialists in West Africa, identified their commercial interests with preservation of existing regimes throughout their old territory in the post-independence era. Tens of thousands of French troops were permanently stationed near Dakar, Abidjan, Libreville and other West African capitals, where they were always available to quell public disturbances and control coup impulses among the (French-trained) local military.

French intervention was so much a part of the landscape that one school of thought has it that Zaire’s Mobutu deliberately incited his army to mutiny in October in order to provoke the French and Belgians to send in their troops. If so, he misread the prevailing winds. For when the French and Belgian troops did arrive, their charge was only to evacuate trapped Europeans, not mess in Zairean politics. The French habit of backing up client governments by force was on its way out by the mid-1980s. One reason was the cost of the relationship.

Since the end of World War II, the French had helped finance West African economies by backing the region’s subsidized currency, the so-called CFA franc, which was (and is) convertible to the French franc at a fixed ratio of 50 to 1. By supporting a ready-made market for French goods, the arrangement made money for the French treasury.

By the mid-1980s, the situation was reversed, and the French could support the overvalued CFA only at a loss. This led to a noticeable waning of French determination to prop up the old African leaders.

The first real test of the new attitude came in Gabon in 1989, when riots threatened the regime of President Omar Bongo. French officials responded to his pleas for help by saying French troops would protect French nationals but not the regime.

Later that year, the French refused to intervene to prop up Benin’s Kerekou, whose regime was bankrupt. When pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in Ivory Coast--whose President Felix Houphouet-Boigny had been Charles de Gaulle’s most loyal African supporter--Paris ordered the Abidjan garrison to keep to its barracks.

By 1990, all three leaders had been forced to renounce single-party rule; Kerekou in 1991 made history of a sort by becoming the first mainland African leader to be voted out of office in a democratic election.

Opposition figures across Africa today recall how difficult it used to be to interest Western donors in political change. When he first started urging donors to press Moi for reforms in 1988, recalls Anyang’Nyong’o of Kenya’s pro-democracy group FORD, they blanched at having to confront a regime that was an island of stability in a region that included Sudan, Ethiopia and Uganda.

“They would say, at least there’s a government there to deal with,” he recalls. “They viewed Kenya as at least a going concern.” It was only last May, when evidence of Kenyan official corruption and economic underperformance was inescapable, that many donors fell into place.

Now that they have done so, it may be the donors’ turn to demonstrate some restraint in countries where the democratic process is finally taking root.

“Donors have to be careful that they don’t become controllers,” says the United Nations’ Lone. “The process has to be indigenous. It will fail if it’s propelled from the outside. And outside pressure can be used politically and be counterproductive.”

Others predict that the very nature of the donor-recipient relationship in Africa, which gave the donors the power to effect change, is bound to evolve as elected governments appear with unprecedented claims on legitimate power.

“At the present time, most African governments deal with the World Bank from a position of real political and economic weakness,” argues Joseph. “When the international community is actually dealing with governments that have some legitimacy, the terms of the dialogue will be quite different.”

Governments that made policy monolithically will be replaced by those with real public constituencies and the need to respond to public opinion, he suggests.

“The whole climate is going to change,” he says, “and the people who represent international organizations are going to have to change, too.”

* AND IN SOUTH AFRICA

There is a climate of reconciliation as talks on reform approach. Page 2

Aid to Africa: How Much and What It Means to the Economy Net Receipts of Official Development Assistance to Selected African Regions or Countries. Sahel group*: $2.7 billion Tanzania: $1.2 billion Kenya: $1.1 billion Ivory Coast: $900 million Mozambique: $900 million Ethiopia: $900 million Reunion: $900 million Zaire: $800 million Sudan: $800 million Ghana: $500 million Uganda: $600 million Cameroon: $500 million Nigeria: $500 million Somalia: $400 million Zambia: $400 million Madagascar: $400 million Rwanda: $300 million Zimbabwe: $300 million Congo: $200 million * Sahel group includes Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal.

Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

Who Gets the Aid in Black Africa Official Development Assistance (aid from the major industrialized democracies) as percentage of recipient’s GNP 1889-1990 Mozambique: 83.2% Somalia: 41.8 Sahel group*: 18.9 Lesotho: 17.5 Madagascar: 15.8 Ethiopia: 14.0 Kenya: 13.7 Ghana: 12.2 Uganda: 11.5% Rwanda: 11.4% Zambia: 10.4% Zaire: 8.4% Congo: 7.6% Sudan: 6.3% Ivory Coast: 5.8% Zimbabwe: 5.2% Cameroon: 4.0% Nigeria: 1.0% Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development *Sahel group includes Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal.