Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) is an attempt to bring food security to 5 million people by providing them with social security to close the yearly hunger gap, coupled with development projects to lift them permanently out of poverty. The programme is an example of the new policy arrangements that aim to link relief to social security and development. This paper analyses the early implementation of the PSNP in two villages of the Amhara Region. The paper shows how the programme was in practice interpreted and used by local authorities to realise a related programme of voluntary resettlement, and how this locally changed the objective from helping the most vulnerable people, to reserving the benefits of the programme for the more affluent and economically potent households. It shows how local responses to food security policies were informed by institutional patterns, discourses about food insecurity and the articulation of policy with adjacent or past policy practices.

This paper draws on the recent experience of Kenya and Zimbabwe to demonstrate how power-sharing has played out in Africa. Although the two cases share some superficial similarities, variation in the strength and disposition of key veto players generated radically different contexts that shaped the feasibility and impact of unity government. Explaining the number and attitude of veto players requires a comparative analysis of the evolution of civil–military and intra-elite relations. In Zimbabwe, the exclusionary use of violence and rhetoric, together with the militarisation of politics, created far greater barriers to genuine power-sharing, resulting in the politics of continuity. These veto players were less significant in the Kenyan case, giving rise to a more cohesive outcome in the form of the politics of collusion. However, we find that neither mode of power-sharing creates the conditions for effective reform, which leads to a more general conclusion: unity government serves to postpone conflict, rather than to resolve it.

Evidence of political instability in Kenya emerged through the organised and spontaneous violence following the 2007 elections. Understanding the underlying reasons for popular contestations of power and involvement in violence depends on understanding Kenyans' perceptions of existing and desirable political institutions. By analysing recommendations made in the Constitution of Kenya Review Commission public hearings in each province in 2002, this article explores the viewpoints of those outside high politics in Kenya, teasing out the continuities and divergences in popular thought about political relations in Kenya at the end of the Moi years, and thus providing insights into how Kenyans understand their relationship with those in power, revealing that amidst diverse experiences, disillusionment pervades Kenyans' perceptions of political relations.

In August 2006 the chief of Udo, a small town in Edo State, Nigeria, was deposed and the town taken over by the ‘youth’. This event presents the classic fall of a ‘big man’ who had lost support, but also involved long-standing chieftaincy rivalries, electoral competition in the run up to the 2007 elections, and conflict over a nearby oil palm and rubber plantation. Through an examination of Udo's crisis, this paper engages with three key questions concerning contemporary communal politics in southern Nigeria: the manifestations of patrimonial power and resistance to it; the meaning and role of ‘youth’; and the impact of expatriate capital.

On 10 July 2003, a civilian coup was attempted in Anambra state in South-east Nigeria. Barely two months after Chris Ngige was sworn in as the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governor of Anambra, a team of armed policemen disarmed his security detail and took him into custody. The governor's attempted ousting made public the breakdown of his relationship with his political godfather, Chief Chris Uba, and sparked a debate on godfather politics in Nigeria. Using the case of Anambra, this article investigates the complex network of personalised relationships that holders of state power maintain with their national and local clientelistic constituencies. It explores the political underpinnings of the crisis and its links to national-level power dynamics, particularly within the ruling party and the Obasanjo presidency.

The powers of impeachment provided under the Nigerian constitution provide a means of checking the excesses of certain executive officers who enjoy the privilege of constitutional immunity against civil or criminal proceedings while they remain in office. Instead of being invoked in appropriate circumstances, however, this article shows that these powers have been abused. It examines cases of impeachment at the state level during the Obasanjo administration and shows how constitutional provisions were flagrantly breached. It provides evidence that the federal government was complicit in such cases, even though under the federal structure by which Nigeria operates, impeachment at the state level is exclusively a state business. It argues that the abuses are a symptom of imbalance of power between the executive and the legislature as well as evidence of the limits of constitutionalism in the face of politics.