Clinton in Africa

President Bill Clinton’s four-day visit through Africa was, in one sense, a way of trying to repair an early failure in his tenure and, in another, a reminder of the administration’s sometimes muted concern over a continent that supplies equal parts oil and mystery to the United States. Particularly in his comments on AIDS, the president made forceful points. Too bad they came so late in his term.

President Clinton’s early experience in foreign policy arrived in the form of an American Black Hawk helicopter being shot being down in Somalia in October 1993. The ensuing battle, in which 18 Americans and several hundred Somalians died, persuaded the president to get the United States out of Somalia and to keep it out of all of Africa. His visit this week – to Nigeria, Tanzania, even Egypt, but not Somalia – was a simultaneous return and farewell.

What he said while there, however, is worth noting. In Nigeria he noted the spread of AIDS, poverty and the burden of national debt. His words on AIDS in a country with one of the highest rates of the disease on the continent were direct and appropriate: “AIDS is 100 percent preventable – if we are willing to deal with it openly and honestly,” he said. “In every country, in any culture, it is difficult, painful, at the very least, embarrassing to talk about the issues involved with AIDS.”

A fine talk, but Nigerians must have wondered how heartfelt the words were. One of the ways he wants to help eradicate AIDS – the United States last month offered $1 billion in annual loans to help purchase anti-AIDS drugs for sub-Saharan Africa – would add to the national debt problem he deplored.

The Clinton administration has at other times proposed more funding to fight AIDS in Africa, but spending on foreign aid, even if it represents less than 1 percent of the federal budget, rarely is popular in Congress and is not likely to get more popular as November approaches. A presidential trip highlighting the tragedy of AIDS in Africa might have been more helpful a couple of years ago – though the problem has been widely reported for several years, it does not show up at all among those lists of voter concerns that candidates are eager to address.

In that way, the president’s tour was an essential reminder of the major international problems that this nation has had the luxury of ignoring. But like the seemingly intractable objections to a Middle East peace accord, Africa’s areas of poverty, acute health care shortages and endless civil war cannot be solved easily or in the final months of an American president’s ter of office, no matter how badly that president desires a legacy.