‘Worshipping a dictator,’ as a fictional hero of Chinua Achebe so aptly proclaims, ‘is such a pain in the ass’. ‘It wouldn't be so bad,’ this hero observes, ‘if it was merely a matter of dancing upside down on your head. With practice anyone could learn to do that. The real problem is having no way of knowing from one day to another, from one minute to the next, just what is up and what is down’ (Achebe 1987: 45). This conviction would have been shared by many Africans as the 1990s dawned. Political demonstrations and riots rocked most one-party states and military juntas between 1989 and 1991. People were fed up with erratic, self-serving, and corrupt – not to mention oppressive – governance.

This ferment coincided with a dramatic shift in the development establishment's view of what needed to be done to reverse sub-Saharan Africa's economic decline. On the one hand, the tarnished allure of socialism and the waning of the Cold War had eroded the Western powers' strategic interest in protecting friendly, yet mani-festly unpopular, African dictators. On the other hand, many authoritarian African regimes had succumbed to a capricious and predatory economic management. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) could attribute a decade of disappointing results from market-oriented structural adjustment primarily to this mismanagement, rather than to the inadequacies of their recommended policy reforms or the vagaries of the international economic order.