Nigeria was under military rule from 1966 to 1979, and from December 1983 to date; it had a short civilian interregnum from 1979 to 1983 during the era of President Shehu Shagari.

This rather long period of military administration in Nigeria brought along with it changes in the scope of substantive criminal law as well as procedural changes. This can be partly explained on the ground that the criminal law must react and adjust to societal changes and formulate its own rules to combat them. However, an assessment of the attitude of the military to criminal law might suggest that certain fundamental rules have been sacrificed for despatch.

This article is an attempt to highlight the contribution of the military administrations to the development and scope of criminal law in Nigeria. The approach is to examine the various important criminal law enactments of the military era with a view to see their impact, if any, on the hitherto existing rules and system of criminal law.

A country's water resources are important not only for the continued well-being of its population but also because water is a critical element in its economic development. Water is vital for human, animal and plant life. Life cannot exist without it. Most domestic needs in developing countries are satisfied through direct access to natural sources. The World Health Organisation in 1976 estimated that only 38 per cent of the total population in developing countries had access to safe water supplies. This means that 62 per cent of the population resorted to lakes, rivers, streams and wells for domestic requirements. Many industries abstract water from rivers and lakes for their industrial processes and often return it to those sources as trade effluents. Water is a critical factor in agricultural production. In turn agricultural activities create by-products such as sediment loads and chemical residues with adverse impact on water quality.

It is obvious therefore that a country must ensure that its water resources are rationally utilised and managed. Such utilisation and management entails the creation of normative and institutional structures, first, to regulate the allocation of an often scarce resource to competing legitimate demands and, secondly, to anticipate, prevent and control the adverse consequences of resources utilisation. This article examines the nature of the legal mechanisms instituted by selected African countries, viz. Zambia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Sudan and Kenya, for the control and prevention of water pollution. The objective is two-fold: first, to determine the adequacy of existing legal regimes and, secondly, to suggest how deficiencies in existing frameworks may be rectified.

A victim of crime is any person who is hurt physically, mentally, financially, or economically as a result of criminal conduct. He may sustain permanent physical or mental incapacitation as a result of such conduct. His health may be impaired. His property may be permanently lost, destroyed, or damaged. His reputation in society may be irreparably damaged. His business or professional interests may be ruined. His social standing may be shattered, and this is especially true of victims of sexual offences. His family's welfare may also be dealt a heavy blow, and this is especially so where he or she dies or where his or her ability to support them is diminished or totally extinguished. For the most part, the victim is innocent, going about his activities lawfully and peacefully.

Evidentiary rules applicable to rape and other sexual offence cases, inherited from nineteenth-century England and based on Victorian notions of women's behaviour, are alive and well in twentieth-century southern Africa. These are the cautionary rules which require a trial judge to warn him or herself of the danger of convicting a rape accused without corroboration, or independent evidence supporting the testimony of the complainant. These rules are applied because the evidence of the complainant in a sexual case is considered to be “suspect”: she is variously said to be prone to lie for reasons of her own, prone to fantasy, and prone to exaggerate. Although the cautionary rule of corroboration is still applied in many countries, most progressive and feminist thinkers consider them to be “a lingering insult to women”. In this article I will canvass the cautionary rules on evidence in sexual cases in southern Africa and attempt to show that they are not only based on outmoded stereotypes, but are also particularly unsuitable to southern Africa.

A pledge is a customary law transaction where the pledgor (borrower) surrenders possession of his property to the pledgee (creditor) “to hold and use until the debt due is paid, an article borrowed is returned or replaced, or obligation is discharged”. Like other customary transactions, pledges have not remained static: social and economic changes in Ghana as well as statutory intervention (which in itself is generally the result of such changes) have contributed to their development. In some respects, pledges are similar to the common law transaction known as mortgages but there are essential differences between the two. However, now the same law would seem to govern both transactions because by virtue of the Mortgages (Amendment) Decree, 1979 (A.F.R.C.D. 37):

Every customary loan transaction in respect of which any farm-land is given

There is no doubt that the investment climate in every country is conditioned to a great extent by non-legal factors. Nevertheless, many developing countries have, to varying degrees, relied on legislation as a means of attracting foreign investment. When Cameroon attained independence in 1960, it enacted an Investment Code that same year with the aim of attracting investment which the young state needed so much for the realisation of its development objectives. When after two decades the said Code no longer responded to the needs of the state, a new one was instituted on 4 July, 1984. The common feature of Investment Codes is that they contain various incentives aimed at channelling investments to areas which the authors regard as top priority. In this article, an attempt will be made to show to what extent the Cameroonian government has succeeded in its effort to direct investments to desired regions of the country through a statute wherein incentives cohabit with regulations on matters such as imports, exports, price fixing, foreign exchange, etc., which foreign investors consider as repellent. The study is subdivided into two parts. The first part is based on the Investment Codes and the second deals with the country's regulatory environment.