A 'Contract' Clause Casts Africa Adrift : Foreign aid: U.S. dollars once sustained brutal dictators, but now help emerging democracies; GOP cuts are a recipe for chaos.

A ‘Contract’ Clause Casts Africa Adrift : Foreign aid: U.S. dollars once sustained brutal dictators, but now help emerging democracies; GOP cuts are a recipe for chaos.

By CHARISSE ADAMSON and CALEB ROSSITER

March 13, 1995 12 AM PT

<i> Charisse Adamson, formerly assistant to the director of Save the Children in Somalia, is a research fellow at the Project on Demilitarization and Democracy, a Washington-based advocacy center. Caleb Rossiter, an author of foreign-aid studies, is the project's director. </i>

The Republican “contract with America” has added a subsection on Africa. Along with the contract’s call for sharp cuts in domestic social programs, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, chairman of the subcommittee that handles foreign aid, has proposed a budget that would cut funding for African development as much as 50%. Hearings got under way this past week.

If McConnell succeeds, millions of Africans would lose access to child immunization, drinkable water, grade-school education and loans for small farmers and businesses. The net result could be more Somalias and Rwandas, where chaos reigns. America would lose, too, because such countries are unable to buy our exports, and so we lose jobs.

McConnell has called for a 20% cut in overall foreign aid, with Israel, Egypt and the former Soviet states exempted because their economic growth and progress toward democracy are crucial to our national security and our commercial interests. Since these countries get more than half of all U.S. foreign aid, McConnell’s plan would actually require a 40% cut in other programs. That would gut our Development Fund for Africa, which spends $800 million a year on countrywide campaigns to improve health and agriculture. And it would probably kill outright the innovative African Development Foundation, which channels $16 million to hundreds of small-scale development projects at the village level.

The GOP logic both for poor people at home and poor countries abroad seems to be: Why throw money down a drain of despair that can never be plugged? But just as there are responsible individuals who use welfare as a steppingstone to independence, there are responsible, democratic African nations such as Botswana and Senegal that have moved from economic dependency to stability. These countries are using their increased income to buy far more U.S. exports than their neighbors can. When we cast the poor adrift at home and seek to abandon an entire continent abroad, we only guarantee that failures will outnumber success stories.

Critics of U.S. foreign aid to Africa can rightly point to wasted tax dollars during the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union vied for influence. The largest recipients of our aid in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s were Somalia, Zaire, Liberia and the Sudan--corrupt, brutal dictatorships that we propped up in return for their cooperation with our military policies. Today, these four countries have virtually ceased to exist.

But with the end of the Cold War, our aid program in Africa has finally taken the right direction. (Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for our arms-sales policy, but that would not be affected by McConnell’s cuts.) Instead of lining the pockets of dictators, our money now helps average citizens become self-sufficient and supports the pro-democracy groups that are cropping up all over the continent.

If grass-roots development agencies in Somalia had gotten the $200 million we gave to Somalia’s dictator in military aid during the 1980s, we probably wouldn’t have had to spend $2 billion and two dozen lives trying to stop a civil war fought with U.S. weapons. If McConnell has his way, more African countries will resemble Somalia than Botswana 10 years from now. How will that advance America’s interests?