COLUMN ONE : Africa Hit by ‘Donor Fatigue’ : The developed world is contributing a smaller share of relief needs amid a sense of futility about the recurring famine, corruption and economic mismanagement.

NAIROBI, Kenya —  With the Western world in a recession, Mozambique’s leaders were wary last year of asking for too much emergency aid, even though one of the world’s poorest countries was facing another year of dire need and possible famine.

So they put out an international appeal for about half of the food they requested in 1989. In the event, they were still disappointed: only about half of the grain they asked for arrived.

A similar thing has been happening in Sudan, where a drought rivaling the famous 1984 disaster in Ethiopia is shaping up to claim as many as 4 million lives. There, slightly more than 2% of the needed 1.3 million tons of critical food aid has arrived so far this year--and famine looms as early as April.

Many African leaders and relief and development professionals say that as Africa’s problems continue to deepen, the developed world is contributing a smaller share of the continent’s relief needs and its attention span for the African crisis is growing shorter. Recently the phenomenon has become so pronounced that Africa hands have a term for it: “donor fatigue.”

Faced with African economies that seem to slump lower every year, famines that recur with regularity and government policies that foster corruption and neglect instead of development, private donors are increasingly looking for new recipients. Many in America and Europe are also spending more at home, as pressure grows to address neglected domestic ills like poor urban education, drug abuse and homelessness.

“Africa’s just off the map,” says C. Payne Lucas, head of Africare, a Washington-based aid group. “People think Africa is marginalized, that it doesn’t have any potential.”

This trend was exacerbated in the last year as the Persian Gulf War diverted more attention and money from the problems of Africa. War-related expenses were a factor, for example, in the British government’s recent announcement that much of the $56 million it has allocated for famine relief would not be available until April, the beginning of the next fiscal year (when it may come too late to be of much use).

Not only were the developed world’s money and attention diverted to the Gulf for more than seven months, but so was an important tool for documenting the continent’s anguish: television crews.

As dire as this year’s Sudanese famine appears, relief specialists say there is little hope of mobilizing international concern if the problem is not graphically illustrated.

“Until the TV scenes show up again there won’t be the same public outcry back home,” says a prominent aid official in East Africa. “Now, all the TV cameras are in the Gulf.”

But the Gulf War is not all of it. Among the Western public, particularly in the United States, interest in Africa’s problems has been dwindling for years. Private relief groups relying on individual donations show sharply falling contributions.

Aid officials working in famine-stricken corners of the region like Ethiopia, Mozambique and Sudan say deliveries of donated food are later, and lighter, than in past years although the need is greater. When unrest and chaos erupt in a needy place--a common occurrence all over Africa--aid agencies are quicker to withdraw and may be slower to return.

This is the case in Somalia, where a rebel advance on the capital of Mogadishu drove all remaining relief workers and European diplomats out of the country at Christmastime. Aid vehicles, offices and supplies suffered wholesale destruction and theft in the aftermath of the ouster in January of President Mohammed Siad Barre, and with fighting still going on throughout the country almost no relief work is taking place. Meanwhile, more than 2 million people face starvation in what is one of the world’s poorest countries.

“Nobody’s going to go back in there and just bring in tons of resources,” says Charles Laskey, head of the Somalia office of CARE, from his temporary refuge in Nairobi. “You won’t find any agencies or governments saying: ‘Let’s set it all back up again . . . ‘ They’ll go in cautiously.”

The collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the economic crisis in the Soviet Union mean those areas now compete with Africa for foreign aid, even as turmoil there removed aid sources for leftist regimes in Africa. The Soviet Union this year ended its subsidy of petroleum shipments to Mozambique, for instance, a step that will cost the African nation more than $140 million a year.

And while African aid from most Western donor countries has not dropped because of the demands of Eastern Europe’s reconstruction, “it hasn’t gone up,” remarks Jack Titsworth, head of the Canada International Development Agency’s East Africa office in Nairobi. That means the gap between Africa’s needs and the money available to meet them is widening.

Donor fatigue is increasing during what may become a record year for African misery. The Sudanese drought joins long-term famines in Ethiopia and Mozambique among the continent’s current plagues. The political upheaval in Liberia, which is still in search of a solution after 14 months of fighting, has turned more than 1.5 million of that country’s 2.3 million citizens into refugees. In all, the United Nations believes that 27 million Africans are in danger of starving to death this year.

Africa has fallen off the developed world’s radar screen for many reasons. One is the seeming implacability of Africa’s problems. Private relief agencies such as CARE, Save the Children and Oxfam are stuck with the burden of making continual appeals for crises that never seem to ease.

“Donor dissatisfaction sets in over spending money to prevent famine in Ethiopia, when it seems to repetitively return,” says Philip Johnson, chairman of CARE, the world’s largest nonsectarian relief organization. “You would get a groundswell of support if you had an antidote. People want to know that their money is having some impact.”

Johnson says that when he is asked by potential donors why so little progress seems to be made, “not at all times do we have an absolutely convincing and airtight answer.”

Certainly it is true that the solution to Africa’s persistent poverty has yet to be found: The U.N.’s Economic Commission for Africa, in its latest annual overview of the region’s performance, stated that in 1990 “the average African (continued), for the 12th successive year, to get poorer.”

Wrote Commission Chairman Adebayo Adedegi, a Nigerian: “It is a measure of the socio-economic decay and retrogression on our continent that the number of (African) countries officially classified as least developed countries--the wretched of the earth as they have been categorized--rose to 29 in 1990 . . . and many more, I regret to say, are still knocking at the door to join.”

Then there is the end of the Cold War, which made ideological and economic battlefields, like parts of Africa, obsolete. With the Cold War apparently consigned to history, the great powers are now focusing more attention on regions of genuine strategic importance, such as the Persian Gulf. Africa’s declining share of world trade--now about 1.7%--makes the continent increasingly marginal by that standard.

Some countries have suffered more than others from the decline of Africa’s strategic role. Zaire reaped a whirlwind of American aid during the ‘80s--nearly $39 million in 1989--in return for assisting U.S.-backed anti-Marxist guerrillas fighting in neighboring Angola. Now U.S. lawmakers are paying more attention to the Mobutu regime’s atrocious record of repression, corruption and mismanagement in Zaire. This year, that country was one of only two in Africa for which the Bush Administration’s aid request was cut (to $23 million from $33 million, with none to be disbursed through government hands).

Sadly, donor neglect comes in a period when the continent is beginning to change its ways. Over the last two years, dozens of sub-Saharan regimes have embarked on painful and sensitive restructurings of their economies. Many also have started unprecedented political reforms. Both trends bear the potential to finally reverse the continent’s long decline--but in the short term more aid, rather than less, will be needed.

“The most dramatic figure is that in the last 12 months, more African countries have introduced multiparty politics than in the previous 25 years taken together,” says Salim Lone, a Kenyan who is editor of the United Nations journal African Recovery. “If they’re going to succeed in these efforts, they’re going to need assistance.”

The prospect of reduced aid puts some showcase programs at extreme risk. Leading this category is Ghana, whose ruthless restructuring of its economy, including the removal of most price and currency controls, has made it a model of compliance with international austerity rules.

Yet virtually all of Ghana’s 5% annual economic growth over the last three years is due to the inflow of international aid chasing its policy success. That aid must be sustained for years into the future, until the new policies allow a genuinely open climate for private investment to take root. If the foreign aid drops off first, analysts say, the country could be plunged into economic--and almost certainly political--chaos.

But since the mid-1980s, when worldwide concern for the victims of Ethiopia’s famine generated a peak in foreign aid for the entire continent, Africa has had to face proliferating competition for outside aid. The recent economic recession in Europe and the United States has diminished the inclination and ability of major private donors, such as corporations and foundations, to contribute.

“When a company is facing layoffs it’s hard for it to spend money on Africa at the same time,” says James Bausch, president of Save the Children-U.S., a leading relief organization active in Africa. Save the Children’s contributions from corporate donors to Africa have fallen from $117,618 in 1986 to only $11,000 last year.

In the same period, donations from foundations and individuals also have fallen sharply; from those two sources the group’s income for Africa programs was $399,368 last year, compared to $644,989 in 1986. At CARE, private contributions are running $1.5 million behind the target for this point in the year, a shortfall of 5%, Johnson says.

Africa competes poorly for limited funds in part because it lacks a strong, vocal constituency in the developed world. Even poor Asian countries benefit from the large number of Western corporations doing business in their region, as well as the swiftness with which immigrant Asians have moved into the American middle class, where they become advocates of their home region’s development.

In contrast, African-Americans “are preoccupied with their own problems in the United States,” Africare’s Lucas says. Few American corporations do business in sub-Saharan Africa of any significant value. “Africa’s got the least-developed constituency in the U.S.--that’s the hard fact,” says Lucas.

For their part, most Western donor nations say their government aid to sub-Saharan Africa has increased, rather than fallen, in the last two years. The United States, for example, will provide $800 million to its development fund for Africa in fiscal year 1991--that is, $250 million more than the average of $550 million in the previous five years.

But those figures mask a hidden exasperation with development projects that consistently fail because of corruption and mismanagement. These factors discourage expansion of potentially useful programs.

Countries like Thailand, Taiwan and South Korea, once economic have-nots, have shown they can make good use of development funds to create economic booms of their own. That is in contrast to many African countries, where outdated economic policies and rigid political thinking can confound even well-designed development schemes.

Dozens of foreign aid projects have flopped in countries such as Tanzania because of its policy of socialism, which stifles initiative and promotes mismanagement. Last year, Swedish aid officials balked at providing 350 new rail cars for the joint Tanzania-Zambia railway--a vital lifeline for both countries--because lack of training, employee absenteeism and managerial lassitude produced a wreckage rate on the system that would destroy the entire consignment in seven years.

Corruption also has taken its toll. Canadian aid officials discovered not long ago that a plan to grow high-productivity wheat in Kenya failed because some government officials were illicitly profiting from wheat imports that would be reduced or eliminated if more wheat were grown domestically. (They were using falsified invoices for imported wheat as subterfuges to cache foreign currency abroad.)

Similarly, projects aimed at expanding Africa’s export markets have failed because African governments maintain unrealistic exchange rates for their currencies. These make African goods inordinately expensive to sell overseas, but keep imported luxuries cheap. The situation benefits what a recent World Bank report called the “vampire elite” of Africa--well connected people who squander precious foreign exchange on frills like the Mercedes cars that are ubiquitous on the roads of even the poorest African nations.

“We and other donors have concluded that we’ve been wasting a lot of money on some projects,” remarks the Canadian aid agency’s Titsworth. The result is not necessarily diminished overall aid, but very small increases and decisions “not to pursue things which would have aided Kenya.”

Overall, donor impatience means that in Africa even emergency aid has lagged dangerously behind the needs of starving people. In Ethiopia, perhaps the paradigm of needy African countries, only about one-third of the food considered necessary by the World Food Program has been pledged by donors or arrived so far this year--340,000 tons out of the 1 million. By this time last year, when the need was only 726,000 tons, fully two-thirds, or 484,000 tons, had already arrived.

The situation is worse in Sudan, the African country with perhaps the most dire famine emergency this year. An estimated 1.3 million tons of food is needed to avert starvation among more than 4 million Sudanese in 1991. Of that total, says Bronek Szynalski, director of emergency operations for the World Food program, less than 30,000 tons has been delivered.

“We keep hearing that there are pledges of 447,000 (metric) tons (equivalent to about 492,000 U.S. tons),” Szynalski says. “But all that is on paper, up in the air, requiring tremendous amounts of money to get into the country and to move around.”

It may be that the scale of the emergency today has bypassed the world’s attention because constant repetition of heart-rending scenes of starvation may have inured the public to the repeated crises.

“In 1988-89 there was some pretty horrible coverage of the famine in southern Sudan,” says Jack Titsworth, “and people did not react. The Canadian Broadcasting Co. had heart-wrenching footage of young boys--showed two or three times--and it had very little effect on the national psyche.”

Adds the U.N.’s Lone: “In 1984 people didn’t know what it meant to say that people are starving to death. Now the pictures are everywhere, and there’s still not a great upsurge of interest and concern.”