Senators Criticize Grants for South Africa Projects : Foreign aid: Agency gave funding to U.S. groups for programs in that nation, which included $300,000 for hair care training, they say.

The Clinton administration was chastised Thursday by Democrats as well as Republicans for spending valuable foreign aid dollars on frivolous projects in South Africa, such as a $300,000 grant for hair care training.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), a longtime critic of U.S. assistance to South Africa, declared the entire program to be “a multimillion-dollar fiasco.”

And even strong supporters of the program, such as Sens. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), expressed opposition to questionable, noncompetitive foreign aid grants to politically well-connected organizations in the United States.

Specifically, their criticism was directed at grants of $300,000 to a foundation run by the Chicago-based Soft Sheen Products Inc. to provide hair care classes, $550,000 to the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta to provide voter education and $100,000 to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, which used some of the money to bring South African legislators to the United States.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings into the aid program for South Africa came in response to a recent Times story, which disclosed that the Agency for International Development’s inspector general had found evidence that a number of grants to African American organizations had been improperly handled.

Kassebaum objected that the agency, which administers U.S. foreign aid, gave nearly half of its money earmarked for South Africa to American groups seeking to provide programs there. She said that AID, instead, should have given the money directly to South Africans.

“I am very disappointed. . . ,” said Kassebaum, who was instrumental in creating the aid program for South Africa. “It casts a shadow over the other initiatives that AID has done and done so well.”

Responding to the criticism, AID officials admitted that they had erred on some grants and pledged to correct those errors.

“We took risks and we made some mistakes,” AID Administrator Brian Atwood said in a written statement. Atwood, who is attending a conference in Spain, was not invited to testify personally.

But Atwood’s subordinates who testified at the hearing were reluctant to acknowledge specific mistakes. And they firmly disputed reports that these grants were awarded under pressure from black politicians.

Under questioning by Feinstein, for example, Assistant Administrator John F. Hicks, AID’s highest-ranking African American, refused to acknowledge that the Soft Sheen training program had placed only five people in jobs in the hair care field--even though that figure was contained in a recent report issued by his agency.

He only succeeded in angering Feinstein. “To have a program that nobody can say how many people got a job from it--my goodness, that’s terrible,” she declared.

Later, Leslie “Cap” Dean, who heads the AID mission in South Africa, acknowledged that the Soft Sheen project for hair care training “has not been a successful program.”

Dean blamed his agency for failing to closely monitor the progress of the Soft Sheen project, which he said was poorly designed. He noted that the Johannesburg training facility was located too far away from potential trainees and that there was a shortage of people qualified to provide the training.

But neither Hicks nor Dean acceded to criticism leveled against grants to the Black Caucus and Martin Luther King Center.

Hicks acknowledged that the King center’s original proposal was not up to government standards and that the agency gave the center $40,000 to hire a consultant to write an acceptable proposal.

The King center received the grant because it had a unique idea for combining nonviolent methods with voter education training, Hicks said. In addition, he said, he thought there was “symbolic” value in giving money to a group named after the civil rights leader, who is also revered overseas.

Likewise, Hicks said, the grant to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation fulfilled its purpose, which was to teach South African legislators about housing issues. Helms has suggested that AID created a conflict of interest by giving money to a congressional group whose members oversee AID funding.