At last, the American President will meet African leaders on their home turf

By CHRISTOPHER OGDEN

he fact that Bill Clinton is the first sitting U.S. President to make an extended visit to sub-Saharan Africa says a lot about what's changing in Africa and the United States. It's easy to describe the 11-day trip starting March 23 as pure show, with the added benefit of Clinton escaping the sex scandal lapping around him in Washington. It's true that there is plenty of pomp forthcoming, but considerable circumstance too. The President is right to note that the continent is moving beyond the cliched collection of economic basket cases led by brutal kleptocrats who seized power with guns and presided over crumbling infrastructures and populations ravaged by hunger, disease and ethnic bloodshed.

That group is not an endangered species, of course. Enough despots remain to have limited the President's itinerary. The Pope can visit Nigeria, the continent's most populous and after South Africa most influential nation, but Clinton cannot because of the egregious human rights violations of strongman Sani Abacha. Kenya's Daniel arap Moi is newly re-elected, but too corrupt for a presidential drop-by. Liberia, which was founded by former U.S. slaves, would have been a natural stop if President Charles Taylor, a jail escapee from Massachusetts, were not stained with the blood of thousands of slaughtered Liberians. When Laurent Kabila ousted the corrupt Mobutu Sese Seko and renamed Zaire the Congo, there was joy for several minutes in Washington. Then Kabila banned political activity and began acting remarkably like Mobutu. No stop there. Angola was assessed as too dangerous. Somalia, where 15 U.S. soldiers were killed five years ago while trying to instill order, still has no government to visit.

The Somalia debacle prompted a fresh bout of Afrophobia in Washington. For three decades, the U.S. considered the continent mostly a battleground for competing cold war interests and once that standoff ended interest in the region dropped even further. Aid declined as the United States re-targeted limited resources toward Eastern Europe. Realizing that they were in danger of becoming even more marginalized if not globally irrelevant, many of the 48 sub-Saharan nations began to transform themselves.

The end of apartheid in South Africa monopolized the headlines, but fully half the countries of the region have held democratic elections and some 30 have instituted market-based economic reforms. For the first time, the economies of 31 grew at a higher rate in 1996 than their populations, a vital development if the continent is to move past its legacy of miserable leadership and exploitation. Africa's GDP growth last year averaged more than 4%, double what it had been over the past decade. Uganda has been growing at nearly 8% for five years.

Inflation is coming under control. Private investment has been encouraged. State assets are being privatized in countries like Tanzania and Mozambique, former socialist economies which were among Africa's worst. Politically, last year's coup in Sierra Leone was met with outrage across the continent. Its reversal last month was a result of Africa's own efforts. So there is good news.

Clinton is going to encourage what he calls this New Africa. As might be expected, plenty of U.S. self-interest is involved. If Africa is left behind, the fear is that horrific developments will evolve on a desperate continent: state-sponsored terrorism, more drug gangs and international crime, and such offshoots as famine, environmental degradation and wholesale migration which could disrupt markets far from Africa.

Unlike the recent bailout programs for Asia's ailing economies, not much aid will be involved, though the $700 million of current annual assistance to the region--half what it was five years ago--will not be reduced. Clinton will arrive brandishing the African Growth and Opportunities Act, a broad trade bill passed last week by the House of Representatives with strong bipartisan support. If endorsed as expected by the Senate in April, the legislation will offer trade and investment incentives to sub-Saharan nations, including greater access to U.S. markets, if they make their economies more transparent, drop trade barriers and implement democratic reforms. The bill calls for duty and quota-free exports to the United States for 10 years, creates a special Africa office under the U.S. trade representative and directs OPIC, the quasi-official Overseas Private Investment Corp., to establish two funds--$500 million to support infrastructure projects and $150 million to boost joint ventures among U.S. and African small businesses.

The President's message will not be complicated. At each stop--Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Botswana and Senegal--there will be talk of easing tariffs, opening markets and better opportunies. But the key word will be reform. Good government will bring self-reliance. That won't come from the White House or Congress. It will come only out of Africa.