Word: niger
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Other Africans besides Amin are also beholden to Gaddafi. Libya is arming and training Moslem separatists in neighboring Chad and sending weapons to Eritrean rebels fighting Haile Selassie ("a lackey of Israel"). It has supplied guns to Guinea and money to Upper Volta, Mauritania and Niger. Libya also provides yearly subsidies of $125 million to Egypt and $45 million to Syria, with which it is joined in a new Federation of Arab Republics, and is a principal financial angel of the Palestinian guerrilla movement. More than 300 Libyan soldiers are serving with the fedayeen; five of them were killed...
Some of Africa's failures can be traced to the shortcomings of its leaders. As in most new countries, the first Presidents and Premiers were primarily freedom fighters, with scant experience in statecraft. Still, few nations have leaders more dedicated or imaginative than Tanzania's Nyerere, Niger's Hamani Diori and Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda. Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta, like Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie, is an elder statesman who has imposed a degree of stability on his heterogeneous country. Of the soldiers who now rule nine African nations, at least two-Nigeria...
...advice-phfft! It's their country." In Abidjan, capital of the Ivory Coast, there are more than twice as many Frenchmen as there were in 1960. Ministerial office suites are constructed with two offices of equal size, one for the minister, the other for his French "seconder." In Niger, as elsewhere, students in the French-controlled schools are required to study the same subjects at the same levels of proficiency as children in Paris. Complains President Diori: "Our schools are programmed for the one student who will go on to university, not for the 999 who should be studying...
Real progress will depend on many complex factors: more efficient farm tools, better nourishment, the conquest of debilitating disease. Most important may be education. As Niger's eloquent President Diori puts it: "What's left after ten years of independence? The need to learn, and the need to be prudent...
...resurrecting the legion, Paris apparently acted out of fear that if a pan-Islamic force gained sway in Chad, there would be trouble in other former French colonies on Chad's border-Niger, the Central African Republic and Cameroun. Backed mainly by the Saras, who account for just 17% of the population, Tombalbaye's one-party dictatorship was near collapse when he asked for French troops under a defense pact with Paris. The French garrison at Fort-Lamy was increased to 2,000 infantry, marines and air force men, but the legionnaires have handled most of the fighting...