Africa’s Former Pariah Is Now a Potent Future Force : Economics: A powerhouse is expected after South Africans vote. Their neighbors are filled with hope, fear.

Newspapers in Nigeria breathlessly reported a few years ago that the South African army planned to bomb Africa’s most populous country because of Nigeria’s tough stand against apartheid.

Of course, South Africa never planned such an attack. But Nigerians, like most people in Africa, figured the evil, white-controlled regime in Pretoria was capable of anything.

Now, Nigerian newspapers are worried about South Africa again. But this time the Nigerians are warning that their three decades as the most influential country in sub-Saharan Africa are about to end, with democracy arriving in South Africa and Nigeria still struggling under military rule.

“Even South Africa is going to get democracy before us,” lamented the Guardian newspaper in a recent editorial in Lagos.

After the elections next week, South Africa will finally shed its pariah status among the 40 other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and, just as quickly, it will become the continent’s economic powerhouse, political model and, perhaps, leader as well.

But many African leaders are now asking whether South Africa will become the locomotive that leads Africa out of its economic and political valley, or will it lure Africa’s brightest people, creating a brain drain on the continent? Will a black-governed South Africa remember that Africa stood behind it through years of liberation struggle? Or will it, instead, use its clout to dominate and run roughshod over the continent?

“There are many people in Africa who are clearly very nervous,” said Eugene Nyati, director of the Center for African Studies in Johannesburg, a business consultant group. “We are bigger. We are stronger. And once you are powerful, it doesn’t matter if you are a white or black government. You sometimes have a tendency to take advantage of weaker people.”

Rakiya Omaar, a Somali and co-director of African Rights in London, said the continent is anticipating South Africa’s new government “with a combination of hope, pride and trepidation.”

“Every African and every black person has felt that South Africa’s struggle was their own,” she said. “They feel they also have suffered for South African liberation. And they hope that will not be forgotten.”

Africa may, in fact, be in for a shock when, as is expected, the African National Congress and its leader, Nelson Mandela, come to power.

For one thing, the new government will be preoccupied with domestic problems.

It will be under pressure to build houses for tens of thousands of shack-dwellers, bring electricity to the impoverished townships, increase opportunities for blacks in business and raise the level of black education to current white levels.

As a result, African countries hoping for development assistance from South Africa, something once gladly provided by white governments seeking to win friends on the continent, will be disappointed.

“African countries would love to do business with South Africa,” Nyati said. “But, quite frankly, there isn’t much they can sell us. Even with countries like Nigeria, there is nothing we can buy from them. Even petroleum, we can get from Angola.”

Only 4% of South Africa’s foreign trade occurs in Africa now, compared to 34% with Europe and 10% with the United States.

South Africa will also be preoccupied with dismantling the apartheid system.

“To think that we can deal with all our own problems and have time and money left over for Burundi is crazy,” said one official with close links to the ANC’s foreign affairs department.

But there will be some moral and political debts to pay in Africa as well.

For years, African countries could agree on little besides their opposition to apartheid. They banded together, filling the halls of the United Nations with their demands for sanctions and for the release of Mandela.

The ANC president, who has made personal visits to thank many African countries since his release in 1990, has promised “sensitivity and self-restraint in our dealings with the rest of Africa.”

Yet the talk on the campaign trail in South Africa has already rankled some African leaders. Even some ANC leaders are saying that other countries in Africa, with their self-inflicted wounds, are complete failures and bad examples.

“Things may sour quickly if people with short memories and no sense of loyalty or identification with Africa are allowed a very big role within the ANC,” said Omaar of African Rights. “I hope their foreign policy will be dominated by people, like Mandela, who remember the assistance and brotherhood that we extended.”

But any economic cooperation between South Africa and the rest of the continent will have to be, in the words of black and white business leaders here, “mutually beneficial.” In other words, there will be no handouts and no trade pacts that do not provide clear economic benefits for South Africa.

“People have always said we will be the locomotive that drives the African economy,” said Greg Mills, director of studies at the South African Institute of International Affairs. “But there will have to be a harmony of interests. And, in many countries, that seems a fairly scant prospect.”

Of course, the new South African government will want to forge diplomatic and economic ties with the rest of Africa, especially among its neighbors. South Africa will be an important partner in the battle against a host of problems in the region, including the smuggling of drugs, cattle and arms. It will be able to share its considerable expertise in wildlife conservation to help Zimbabwe and Kenya salvage their wildlife-based tourist industries.

But the new government will be more judicious in its foreign policy.

In the days of apartheid, the white government in Pretoria threw up embassies in every country that would have them, from Ukraine to Taiwan to Malawi; Pretoria was always ready to win new converts to its cause. That may soon change.

“African countries are bending over backward to get us to set up embassies,” an ANC foreign affairs specialist said. “Basically, every African country would love to have an embassy. But we are not about to waste our foreign currency on having an embassy in Somalia. What for?”

South Africa’s new foreign policy may also affect not just nations but also some key political groups. Opposition to apartheid, for example, has for years been the raison d’etre of the Organization of African Unity. But the OAU has been incapable of dealing with the myriad other problems of Africa, from military takeovers to ethnic strife. And ANC leaders say privately they are not sure they even want to join the OAU.

“They want us to become a member, but we are going to have to pick and choose,” one ANC official said. “Some of these organizations, the members don’t even pay their dues. They are hoping South Africa will carry all those free-riders.”

Even African leaders agree that the OAU has been ineffectual.

“Many Africans, myself included, have been impatient for South Africa to become independent because its plight has for so long been an excuse for other African leaders to deflect attention from the continent’s other problems,” Omaar said.

“South Africa was, morally, a black and white issue,” she added. “But criticizing (former President Ibrahim) Babangida in Nigeria or (Hastings Kamuzu) Banda in Malawi was considered interference. We don’t want African leaders and institutions to have any more excuses.”

South Africa’s economic influence is already becoming apparent across Africa. South African goods are on the shelves of most African capitals, and South African Airways is flying to more places in Africa than ever before.

Meantime, authorities in Kenya and Zimbabwe, two of the continent’s more industrialized countries, are battling one unwelcome import: Thousands of cars stolen in South Africa are turning up on the streets of Nairobi and Harare, as well as other African capitals.

And as the free and economically prosperous United States once lured Europeans, so too South Africa is luring Africans.

Most of the engineers from Zambia, an impoverished country that suffered numerous bloody attacks from South African security forces while it housed the ANC’s exile headquarters, are now working on mines in South Africa.

Doctors in Zimbabwe, which borders South Africa, are also heading south soon after graduation for the more lucrative medical practices here.

“People are seeing South Africa as a place where you can go and do business the way you once could do business in Kenya,” a Western diplomat in Nairobi said. “With the economy decimated by the Kenyan government, everyone is looking south.”

But immigrants may not find the welcome mat out. South Africa has an unemployment problem of its own, with an estimated 46% of blacks out of work. The country appears to be heading out of its lengthy recession, but that does not mean it will open the doors to immigration.

“Black South Africans may feel they have waited long enough, without having to share it with the rest of Africa,” one African political analyst said.

Many analysts believe that Africa needs a strong and stable South Africa--and a respected world leader such as Mandela--to improve the continent’s image.

‘If South Africa tears itself apart, I think Africa will be put on the shelf to grow cobwebs and dust,” said Mills of the International Affairs Institute in Johannesburg.

But, he added, “if South Africa can successfully manage its transition, it will generate a lot of hope for other African nations and the world’s goodwill will spread across the region.”