It Is Harder to Give

In the field of foreign aid, giving provokes grumbling. The U.S. has learned this lesson through years of political argument at home and criticism abroad. Now West Germany is discovering the Law of Painful Generosity.

Prodded by the U.S., Bonn agreed to carry more of the West's underdeveloped-areas burden about a year ago, when it set up a special aid ministry under a former private-business consultant, Walter Scheel. Since then, the West German government has provided or promised $1,425.000,000 in assistance funds to 45 countries, mostly in Asia and Africa, but also in Latin America. Most of Bonn's loans are in the form of long-term credits (12-20 years), and almost all of them are earmarked for such projects as factories and mines that encourage private German investment.

New Complaints. Predictably, the aid effort has stirred trouble at home and abroad. Yaounde, capital of Cameroun. was the scene of a noisy argument last winter between government officials of the newly independent African nation and a group of visiting West German financial experts. Cameroun needed cash to balance the budget, and wanted money from Germany, which used to run the place as a colony before World War I. When the Germans refused, the Camerounians held them at the airport for several hours before allowing them to go home. Other African leaders, such as Togo's President Sylvanus Olympic, come to Bonn themselves.

The Germans are also running into a new variation of the familiar neutralist blackmail (i.e., "If you don't help us, we'll go Communist"). It is: "Help us or we'll recognize the East German regime." Equipment supplied by the West Germans is first-rate-in fact, sometimes too complicated for the limited skills of the recipients. When Bonn built a steel plant at Rourkela. India, there were simply not enough local people to run it, and so far it has worked at far below capacity.

In the field, German technicians are somewhat handicapped by the fact that English is the most commonly spoken foreign tongue in Asia and Africa. In addition, the steaming climate of many underdeveloped countries tends to debilitate the Teutonic constitution. Said one expert, recently returned from a swing through Southeast Asia: "Two of my companions had to go to a hospital to recover." But in Thailand, members of a German teaching team were startled to find that the tasty local beer was as good as the brew at home; it turned out that the beer was made by a transplanted German brewmaster. German field workers usually stay on foreign projects three years to make sure that operations are running smoothly. One of the most successful projects has been the establishment of technical schools in Ceylon, Thailand and South Viet Nam, which are training 5,000 native students.

New Accusations. Though almost all of Bonn's aid is in the form of loans, not grants, some Germans have inevitably been growling about giveaways. The newsmagazine Der Spiegel ran a series of articles arguing that West Germany is an underdeveloped nation. A German diplomat, echoing complaints in the U.S. about misspent funds that American aid officials have heard since the days of the Marshall Plan, pointed to the $30,000, custom-built Rolls-Royce in which the

Ghanaian ambassador makes his rounds in Bonn, and sputtered: "Yesterday they didn't even wear shoes, and today they come to town in big cars and fancy clothes bought with our money, and ask us for more." Germany's tightfisted Finance Minister Heinz Starke objects that "vast sums of money have been wasted," vigorously presses for less government spending abroad, and more tax inducements to pump private capital abroad.

But, as Foreign Aid Minister Scheel put it last week, "Too many people believe that countries which get our aid use it to finance diadems, expensive tea services, or the golden bed of some minister's wife.* There is not a single word of truth in it. In economics, as in everything else, there are political risks and surprises&151;but not golden beds."

West Germany still has far to go before its publicly financed foreign aid program equals $775 million, which would match the 1% of Bonn's gross national product that many international economists consider a proper figure. Actual government aid last year totaled $540,500,000, although the Germans claim a far higher figure by including such items as private investment abroad by German firms, reparations payments to Israel.

Even though West German generosity is below par by U.S. standards, Washington hopes that Bonn's aid program will not founder in the spate of criticism. But the Germans have much to learn. As one Bonn foreign aid official puts it: "Because we lost our colonies early, we come to Africa and Asia with 'clean hands.' But that also has disadvantages. We don't know them or understand them."

*A reference to the conspicuous consumption of Mrs. Krobo ("Crowbar") Edusei, wife of Ghana's ex-Minister of Industries, whose purchase of a gold bed while on a shopping trip to London cost her husband his job.

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