Until the late 1980s, decentralisation experiments in sub-Saharan Africa tended in the majority of states to reinforce central control rather than enhance local autonomy. However, recent moves towards political pluralism have brought a switch in emphasis to more meaningful types of local participation. These have taken the form of political decentralisation, understood in the sense used by Philip Mawhood to denote the devolution of powers to representative local councils, each with its separate legal existence and its own budget, and with the authority to allocate resources and to carry out multiple functions. However, a number of African regimés also intend to transfer power from the centre to officials of the central government in the field. They therefore attach a broader meaning to the concept of decentralisation, using it to cover both political devolution and the deconcentration of administrative authority. The two processes are, in fact, often complementary rather than separate.

This article examines the substance behind the claim that Cape Verde, a small archipelago state off the west coast of Africa, is the best country in Africa for political rights and civil liberties. Based on interviews conducted with 22 key informants in government, the judiciary, the legislature and civil society, it explores the electoral process, the political parties, the functioning of the National Assembly, civil and political rights, the judicial system, civil society and economic equality. It finds that Cape Verde's unique geography and history have played a key role in facilitating good governance, and an open and non-violent society that values the real political gains of 1991. However, democracy has not yet eradicated either gender discrimination, dependence on the diaspora or poverty.

Commonsense suggests, and academic studies agree, that an ameliorative business environment enables entrepreneurial activity and boosts enterprise performance. This paper examines the business environment in southeast Nigeria, using two separate but complementary studies. Defined in terms of infrastructure, access to credit, bureaucratic practices and regulatory policy, the business environment in southeast Nigeria is stressful, and so has the capacity to limit entrepreneurial activity. This stressful business environment, which is a nationwide phenomenon, poses obstacles to Nigeria's industrial development.

Intergenerational solidarity and reciprocity are fundamental building blocks of any society. Simultaneously, socio-generational groups constantly struggle for influence and authority. In Africa, disproportionately male, gerontocratic and patrimonial systems governing economic, social and political life lend a special explosiveness to the social cleavage of generation. This paper draws on the concept of the generational contract to explore whether Sierra Leone's civil war – labelled a ‘revolt of youth’ – catalysed changes in the power asymmetries between age groups. I argue that youth question fundamental norms of intergenerational relations, and challenge local governance structures demanding changes to the generational contract. Amidst a strong continuity of gerontocratic dominance and counter-strategies from elders, youth draw on organisational forms and a local human rights discourse to create spaces for contestation and negotiation. These openings hold potential for long-term rearrangements of societal relations.

It is well known that nationalist movements are generally accompanied by parallel movements of ideas that make it possible for its leaders to mould a new image of the dominated people. And as Thomas Hodgkin has shown, the need for African political movements to ‘justify themselves’ and ‘to construct ideologies’ has been particularly strong.1 Nationalist movements were to a large extent founded upon emotional impulses, which imparted a distinctive tone to the intellectual clamour that went with them and which continue to have a clear resonance after independence.

Few would disagree with the observation that the schools and universities of sub-Saharan Africa are perhaps the most important contemporary mechanisms of stratification and redistribution on the continent. They are not simply reflections of extant patterns of social and economic differentiation, but rather powerful independent forces in the creation of new and emergent groupings based on the variable possession of power, wealth, and prestige. Moreover, in using the word ‘contemporary’ we should not overlook the fact that formal educational systems are not a recent phenomenon in Africa. Schools existed on the western littoral in the eighteenth century, and their development in many parts of Africa, though slow up to the beginning of World War II, was of great significance. However, the African ‘educational explosion’ is largely a post-war phenomenon, and as a result we can no longer regard the school as an alien and intrusive institution perched precariously atop a range of predominantly ‘traditional’ societies. In most parts of Africa, the school is now as familiar a part of the local scene as the corrugated iron roof. Virtually everywhere, a whole generation would think it inconceivable to be without schools and, what is more, though Africa still remains the least formally educated of the continents, almost everyone now has a lively sense of the individual benefits that education can bring. As in other areas of social life, Africans perceive schooling in shrewd, pragmatic, and instrumental terms.

In his article on ‘Political and Economic Origins of African Hunger’ in this Journal, Vol. XIII, No. 4, December 1975, Michael Lofchie argues persuasively in favour of considering economic and political processes, rather than natural phenomena, as the major determinants of famine in Africa. He correctly demonstrates that the majority of analysts, be they academics or governmentai and relief officials, continue to view the question of famine in a limited and unsatisfactory manner.

In the last fifteen years, Tanzanian forest policy has embraced an agenda of biodiversity preservation coupled with privatisation that calls for the expansion of state oversight over forests and woodlands. Reflecting the hegemony of conservationist donors and international and local NGOs, and couched in a language of community conservation, this agenda decries peasant intrusion into forest reserves to burn charcoal for the urban market and to expand fields for agriculture. This agenda is a departure from over a century of state forestry that sought to exploit forests for domestic consumer and development needs, and to compete in export timber and charcoal markets. Following the Second World War, state forestry anchored peasants in selected forest reserves as licensed cultivators in the face of an ongoing labour shortage, in order to create tree plantations that replaced indigenous hardwoods with fast-growing exotic softwoods. This trend continued after independence as forestry was perceived as a means for agricultural modernisation and economic self-reliance, particularly after the Arusha Declaration. Current changes in forest policy prioritise forests more as ‘refugia’ for endemic plant and animal species, rather than as sources of timber and fuel, moving forest policy more in the direction of wildlife conservation, which has long aimed at excluding peasants and pastoralists from reserves. Recent evictions of peasants from forest reserves, and ongoing tensions between villagers, the state and conservationists, are the direct result of NGO pressure to protect forest reserves and to expand forest conservation into previously unreserved lands.

Some have tried to explain corruption in the Third World by reference to anachronistic traditions and to the special pressures on officials in developing countries. In this article, I argue that, at least in the case of Nigeria, the roots of corruption go deeper, to a materialism and a political fragmentation that are the products of a moment in development. After a schematic review of the relevant literature, I examine the causes of Nigerian corruption, and conclude with the suggestion that the future of good government depends on an expansion of the private economy.

AUTHORITARIAN leaders and single-party régimes of all shades increasingly came under great pressures between 1990 and 1993 to liberalise and permit more participation in the political process. This transformation, which was part of what Samuel Huntington described as ‘the third wave of democratisation’,1 stemmed from sustained efforts by domestic political forces in African states, albeit assisted by a variety of demanded requirements from international financial institutions and industrialised countries, as well as by the disintegration of the Soviet Union. According to the US Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, the ‘new resolve to establish new attitudes, arrangements and structures’ came directly out of the exhaustion of the cold war.2 In other words, the promotion of democracy in Africa was part of the so-called peace dividend.3 Expectations for political evolution throughout the world were so high that some analysts predicted the emergence of ‘an international democratic order’.4 As Keith Somerville has observed: ‘Africa entered the 1990S in a mood of hope and expectation’.5

In this article, I try to translate what America means to a MuKongo, the ordinary inhabitant of the province of Kongo Central in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The subject has the advantage of being to some extent marginal among Kongo beliefs, and therefore more readily isolable, but it is not without relevance to international affairs.

In the past several years there has been a proliferation of studies on coup d'états in Africa and the political role of African military structures. Armies have been analysed in terms of their social and ethnic composition, training, ideology, and socialising influences. Intense debate has focused around the overt and covert reasons for their intervention in the political arena. Simple and complex typologies of civil–military relations and of military coups have been constructed; statistical data – both hard and soft – has been marshalled and subjected to factor and regression analysis, in order to validate general or middle-range theories of military intervention. And once in power, the officer corps' performance has been examined in order to generate insights into its propensity to serve as a modernising or developmental agent.

African countries are among those receiving the most foreign aid per capita. Many detractors blame that aid for encouraging dictatorship and undermining democracy. This article takes a contrary view. It analyses the relationship between the amount of development assistance given to sub-Saharan countries in the 1990s, and changes in their political systems. There is empirical evidence that arbitrary, unrepresentative government diminished in Africa. The data also suggest a positive, though small, correlation between development assistance and democratisation in the 1990s. The issue now facing many African countries is how to consolidate and extend these reforms on their own, with less external support.

The pattern of rapid economic growth in the Ivory Coast since the early 1950s has been frequently described with some hyperbole, by foreign experts and Ivorian politicians, as an economic ‘miracle’. While most African nations, with the exception of the oil-exporters, have taken a rough ride on the economic roller-coaster during the past two decades, and while some like Guinea, Ghana, and Uganda, have followed a steadily downward trajectory, the economic fortunes of the Ivory Coast have improved consistently.

The proliferating literature on the emergent states of Asia and Africa stresses as its theme their newness and lack of political experience. New nation states have arisen often where none existed before, and their leaders have been confronted with a host of problems which they had not faced previously. Nowhere are such states thought to be more novel and inexperienced than in Africa, where a scant half century ago peoples lived in tribal communities, their economic and political context being demarcated mainly by family and kin groups. Lucy Mair's appropriately titled book, The New Nations, puts the problem pithily: ‘The new African governments are recruited from new men…The relationship of the leader with his followers, of ministers with their colleagues, with bureaucrats, with the general public, are new relationships.’1

The early independence period in Tanzania was not simply an ante-chamber to the post-Arusha Declaration period of Ujamaa. The state undertook to incorporate, for the first time, the people of Tanzania in the formal development planning structures in an attempt to marry national developmental objectives to local needs. Self-help, or ‘nation building’ as it was also known, was an attempt to bring consensus and dialogue to the planning process. The scale of self-help activity unleashed by its formal adoption as part of rural development policy caught the government by surprise, however, and raised fears over the level of control that local government in particular was able to exert over popular efforts in development. The gradual emergence of statism in Tanzania, in place by the end of the decade, was in large part the response of a panicking state, fearing an imminent crisis in its power to direct development policy, and maintain command over scarce resources.

This paper discusses land issues in a specific Ivorian context: that of a former no man's land located in lower Côte d'Ivoire. In this region, one does not find the autochthon-migrant dichotomy that generally structures the land issue in southern Côte d'Ivoire. This situation therefore offers an opportunity to document the conditions of access to land and inter-ethnic relationships in a situation characterised by the lack of autochthonous stakeholders. In this context, land rights and land transfers have been moulded by the interplay between migration flows, the dynamics of the smallholder plantation economy, and the rise of land markets. The picture that results is a patchwork, in terms of ethnic land control, where land rights are quite secure. The crucial land issue arises from the active land lease market, with a large acreage of land rented out to Burkinabè pineapple producers – again, without major conflicts. This situation is contrasted with the neighbouring Abouré country, where a conflict over tenancy practices arose in 2001.

This article examines the role of bilateral donors and conditional aid in Mozambique's successful post-war peace process. The literature on peacebuilding has tended to privilege the role of UN missions in explaining the outcomes of post-civil war peace processes. The important role that bilateral donors may play in determining these outcomes has not been thoroughly studied. In Mozambique, donors with country experience, knowledge of domestic political actors and constraints, and a shared commitment to a successful outcome, were indispensable to the success of the peace process. The article details this engagement, arguing that it was not UNOMOZ alone, but UNOMOZ as supported by the flexible responses of these donors, that provided an effective third-party guarantee of the peace agreement in Mozambique. It briefly discusses the broader implications of this finding for understanding international peacebuilding efforts.

This is a study of feuding and conciliation, fissioning and fusing, among the constituent segments of Accra's Muslim community. It articulates the argument of legitimacy – to build a new mosque, to choose a new leader, in effect, to direct the group – and in so doing, politically delineates the principle that by excluding rivals it is feasible to gainsay power for one's own group.

In the flourish of literature now attempting to explain transitions to democracy in sub-Saharan Africa a curious consensus has emerged concerning the relative importance of internal and external causes. It is almost uniformly maintained that the real causes were internal, and that international factors were merely supportive. Accordingly, John Wiseman claims in the introduction to his recently edited volume on democratic reform that changes in the global political environment ‘made things marginally less difficult for those in Africa seeking to democratise their political systems and marginally more difficult for those (mainly incumbent authoritarian elites) who sought to prevent them from doing so’, emphasis added.

This article takes issue with such reductionism of politics to the domestic level. Internal and external causes are interlinked and intertwined in such complex ways that what at first glance appears to be internal may on closer inspection reveal strong external influences. The attempt to determine the relative importance of each is thus deemed futile and prone to ideological bias. The assertion that exogenous factors are only inspirational and supportive implies that the international financial institutions (IFIs) and bilateral donors are neutral and disinterested observers of current events, rather than active and ideologically motivated participants in global and national debates and developments.