Word: dahomey
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...civil servants, and 2) the envy of his neighbors. To solve the first, he is channeling 25% of the country's $263 million budget into education (v. only 10% for the army) and setting up 50 technical institutes and training schools. As for such neighbors as Togo, Dahomey, Niger and Upper Volta, he says: "I'm not interested in making the Ivory Coast an oasis of prosperity in the middle of a desert of misery. Sooner or later, my neighbors' difficulties will create trouble for me. And it's the desert that always engulfs the oasis...
Cheeses & Castor Oil. But Soglo's downfall really began when he tried to do something about Dahomey's stagnant economy. Though it lacks any natural resources, the Pennsylvania-sized country has an overabundance of disgruntled intellectuals who once were civil servants in other nations of French West Africa but were booted out when those countries achieved independence. Soglo launched an austerity program that embittered his top-heavy government's 12,000 civil servants, who crowd the cafes of Dahomey's commercial capital, Cotonou. He cut salaries by 30%, froze recruitment and promotion in the civil service...
With such paltry exports as palm-tree products and castor oil, Dahomey cannot pay for the large quantities of French meats, wines, cheeses and "Gervais" ice cream that are normally among the prized imports of Dahomey's elite. Nor can its poor people, who live mostly in thatched huts or in bamboo huts set on stilts in muddy lagoons, afford the $3,000,000 presidential palace that its rulers have built, or the four-lane, sodium-lit boulevard that runs along Cotonou's seaside edge into an empty field of sand and weeds...
Sidewalk Message. A reluctant France foots the bill for nearly one-fifth of its prodigal offspring's $29 million annual budget. When Soglo returned from a trip to France last month, he brought the message that "Dahomey will not in the least relax austerity...
...President. Soglo sought asylum in the French embassy, where visitors reported that he was "quite depressed." He will probably want to wait at least until next Christmas before organizing any resistance. At week's end, he flew to Paris, where he will join three ex-Presidents of Dahomey, all coup victims who are now living nicely in the city's fashionable arrondissements...