Carter's Third World Gospel

...Brzezinski and Vice President Walter Mondale, are not so happy about being tucked into the same bed with Marxist types...

...The next day, the man searched me out in triumph to report that the CIA map was out-of-date because it failed to show last year's division of the country into 19 tribal-oriented provinces...

...field of action in Africa...

...Nigeria) had been nationalized some time ago, and that Lieutenant General Olusegun Obasanjo's military government happens to be the bank's controlling stockholder...

...According to his new secular gospel—proclaimed during his recent week-long 14,500-mile journey, mostly below the Equator—the welfare of poor emerging countries, like Nigeria, and the prosperity of rich established nations, like the United States, are inexorably linked...

...As a consequence, the final joint communique issued with Nigeria's strongman "expressed his [Oba-sanjo's] government's strong disappointment at the lack of results" in this sphere...

...American policymakers have pulled back from a brief flirtation with the Salisbury internal pact reached in March...

...At a news conference in Brazil, the day before he arrived in Lagos, the President was reminded that the economy is the primary concern of Americans—even as he hopscotched across the underside of the globe...

...If he weren't, he probably could not have visited Nigeria, where Ian Smith is commonly called an "arch rebel...

...In some quarters of Lagos, Barclays branches had to close for several days to avoid being overcome by panic withdrawals...

...Nevertheless, Carter cannot afford to ignore the potential reaction of Congress and the people...

...A classified State Department history of U.S...

...Everything has to take place with proper timing," he said...

...unless an overall understanding can be reached—And the odds for one are not promising—Nigeria will continue supporting armed struggle in southern Africa...

...But, so far, Carter has been listening to Young and company...

...They are again taking the line that the pro-Marxist guerrillas fighting along Rhodesia's borders—who, under the rejected Anglo-American plan would take over the military after "liberation"—must be included in any settlement...

...While there are some non-African businessmen here as well as a large diplomatic colony, there is not a single white Nigerian citizen in Africa's most populous and influential black country...

...Those few Britons who chose not to leave during the traumatic 1960s, when the nation was wracked by civil war, were subsequently kicked out of the country because, as an upper-echelon Foreign Ministry functionary put it, "they were insincere...

...The Nigerians, for instance, returned his smile, but remained skeptical...

...Andrew J. Glass, a frequent New Leader contributor, is head of the Con Newspapers bureau in washington...

...Carter's staff argues thai, unlike his immediate predecessors in office, he is seeking to practice preventive diplomacy to meet world issues head on before they erupt into full-Hedged crises...

...The President also encourages the developing nations to industrialize, to send their newly made goods northward, and thereby reverse traditional mercantilist patterns...

...Carter's South Africa position, on the other hand, did not please the Nigerians...

...Lagos insists, moreover, that all foreign firms doing business in the country be at least 60 per cent Nigerian-owned—And its rulers wonder why U.S...

...A second unstated reason is that a unilateral American embargo would probably be ignored by Japan, Israel and most European nations, while putting the British, whose investment in the area is considerably larger than the U.S...

...One suspects that any stable Nigerian society could not afford either the stadiums or the hovels...

...The Nigerian solution is to pressure the pace-setting Saudis to raise prices again...

...Never mind that Barclays Ltd...

...At a press briefing here, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski temporized when I asked him why the Administration opposes economic sanctions against South Africa...

...When the Lagos Sunday Times, the country's leading newspaper, inquired why 200 journalists deemed it necessary to accompany Carter, it found a ready answer: "It is now well-known that some American journalists are part of the official intelligence-gathering apparatus...

...The "Young Turks," who call many of the shots on African policy these days, led by Andrew Young, had their thinking about Rhodesia formed by the American involvement in Vietnam much as, say, Dean Rusk formed his thinking about Vietnam by events in Korea...

...The problem was that at every slop along his way, a gap emerged between Carter's rhetoric, which was widely applauded, and the perception of actual American policies, which are just as widely deplored...

...Political change may be taking place there and it is important not to take certain measures prematurely...

...Carter often speaks these days of the need for "a common fund" to stabbilize zig-zagging world commodity prices...

...one, squarely on the spot...

...The fourfold increase in oil prices in 1974 that weakened the industrialized nations has now led to an oil glut...

...Similarly, the junta last month withdrew all government funds from Barclays, Nigeria's leading bank, and simultaneously ordered the number of white managers it employs to be cut by a third within 30 days...

...No American President has done that before, they say...

...But no one possessing any familiarity with the Third World imagines for a moment that it will peg prices at moderate levels...

...Those black-governed countries, in fact, do a lot of under-the-table business with the South Africans...

...An especially urgent priority of U.S...

...As beret-clad soldiers with submachine guns stood around, water was pumped from Army trucks into the tanks of the city's fanciest hotel, where most of the U.S...

...In addition, Carter does not mention that any accord of this kind is bound to send some domestic raw material costs soaring...

...Among the most important of these, is the conviction of the President and his senior advisers that such bans do not work and are frequently counterproductive...

...He was adamant as well in rejecting a blanket trade embargo, or even a more limited set of economic sanctions against Praetoria...

...That leaves Rhodesia as the major U.S...

...corporations are wary about investment...

...The new wave contends that any deal excluding the so-called Patriotic Front, now waging a guerrilla war, would be no deal at all...

...But he does not explain what effect this may have on American jobs...

...Another is the matter of mutual understanding...

...economic steps against Cuba, Communist China and (at one time] the Soviet Union supports this view...

...Interestingly, military on the issue in Nigeria, a country that shares no common borders with white-ruled states, is far more strident than that felt in such front-line states as Botswana and Mozambique...

...That kind of thing just does not occur in a land where the waiters still call white hotel guests "Master...

...this in turn, has cut Nigerian revenues and hampered development...

...Without a base of political support for his policies, the President's Third World evangelism may be for naught...

...In the area of foreign policy the military clique strongly champions the Marxist regime in Angola...

...delegation and the press were housed...

...The legacy of colonialism permeates the nation's life...

...On Rhodesia—or Zimbabwe as Carter often refers to it—the President and Obasanjo found much in common...

...A neofascist stadium—with concrete flooring thick enough to withstand the pummeling 65-ton Centurion tanks that regularly pass in review—casts its shadow on disease-rid-den urban hovels barren of all of the amenities of life...

...The Americans Addicted to showers and bedeviled by the clinging humidity of West Africa did not endear themselves by flushing the water right out again...

...It is therefore conceivable that some of the journalists have come to get the information which is needed to fill in a gap in the knowledge the Pentagon or the CIA has about us...

...An energetic modern economy and a stomach-turn-ing poverty coexist in this laud, often side-by-side...

...He refuses to break relations with Vorster, for the White House policy is to seek ties with just about everybody except the Cubans...

...diplomacy in Africa to limit the expanding Soviet and Cuban military presence was nowhere to be found in the Carter-Ob-asanjo communique...

...Nor do Administration officials win brownie points from the boss for pointing out that Third World customers like Nigeria and Brazil are erecting prohibitive tariff walls against a growing number of American-made products to control their internal markets and conserve foreign exchange...

...Quite unofficially, I gave an official here a copy of an elaborate map of Nigeria that the CIA had given me back in Washington...

...In private, Carter told Obasanjo exactly how far he would go in attempting to end the remaining white minority rule on the Continent...

...He is behaving, they say, without the aloofness of an Eisenhower, the crisis-mongering of a Kennedy, the compulsiveness of a Johnson, the suspiciousness of a Nixon, or the listlessness of a Ford...

...President traveling through black Africa, shown on TV screens back home...

...The reason for the action is that Barclays London-based cousin does business with the hated white supremacist regime of John Vorster in South Africa...

...And comprehension is not made any easier when such basic concepts as "freedom," "order," "democracy" and "economic reform" often mean something quite different in underdeveloped countries than they do in the stately halls of Washington...

...A state-run society such as Nigeria simply isn't able to grasp that an American President will not—Indeed, cannot—tell multinational corporations what to do regarding, say, investments in South Africa...

...When UN Ambassador Andrew Young first visited here last year, he was greeted by the headline: "Set a nigger to catch a nigger...

...A mid-level Nigerian officer seemed stunned when, upon being introduced to me at a diplomatic party, I addressed him as "Sir...

...Naturally, a collateral benefit was the exotic spectacle of a U.S...

...But the current ruling clique, having long since thrown out the resident Western correspondents, emphasizes progress while setting aside problems of widespread squalor, massive inefficiency and internal corruption...

...During his visit here Carter found black Nigerians proud of their country, defensive over its manifest shortcomings—and mordantly suspicious of outsiders' motives...

...Carter wants new friends at the old prices...

...Thus the President has called for a new, "more just international order," to be marked by vastly expanded world trade, stable pricing systems, North-South technological transfer and, most importantly, much faster growth rates for developing nations, bankrolled by beefed-up international lending institutions...

...A coming struggle over oil prices is but one snag in the Carter Doctrine for the Third World...

...The short-lived White House press corps invasion strained Nigerian resources and patience to the breaking point...

...Yet there is some question as to how Carter's overtures to the Third World—overtures it does not regard as substantive enoughwill go over with Congress and the electorate...

...Having cast Henry Kissinger's five-pronged realpolitik into oblivion, he is listening respectfully to the views of Third World leaders such as Ob-asanjo...

...As might be expected in this atmosphere, anti-American sentiments are never far from the surface in the nationalist-minded press...

...And Americans are big spenders when intelligence information is available for free...

...A full 18 years after achieving independence from Britain, the hierarchy still bases its economic and political policies on a felt need to even the score for a century of colonial rule...

...Yet despite such prior and some current Nigerian provocations, Carter genuinely tried to make friends here...

...As usual, the real reasons were left unmentioned...

...And it is unlikely that the implications of the "more just international order" the President called for here, have been fully appreciated back home in terms of their impact on living standards...