Since the late 1980s, many African countries have been reforming their civil services as a part of the process of state redesign. Unfortunately, these reforms have not been very successful because of faulty diagnosis and prognosis. They have failed to tackle the major problems confronting African civil services. These include serious human resource management issues of leadership, merit pay and related governance reforms, the appropriate strategy for mobilising resources for civil service reform (CSR) and for implementing such reforms. These issues must be adequately addressed before African countries can make significant progress in CSR and in development.

As far as corruption in Africa is both conspicuous and generalised, it has to be studied from the viewpoint of the participants. This article starts with six general theses on corruption in Africa, which place it within a broader ‘corruption complex’, and emphasise its routine nature, the stigmatisation of corruption despite the absence of effective sanctions, its apparent irreversibility, the absence of correlation with regime types and its legitimacy to its perpetrators. Corruption is then shown to be socially embedded in ‘logics’ of negotiation, gift-giving, solidarity, predatory authority and redistributive accumulation. Any anti-corruption policy must face up to these realities.

The collapse of Mobutu's Zaïre in 1996/97 was the result of an unprecedented correspondence of domestic, regional and international interests. The Zaïrean state was established and sustained during the Cold War with Western support as a bulwark against communism and source of raw materials. It maintained itself after the Cold War by playing on external fears of state collapse and by supporting French regional interests. By 1996, with the failure of French credibility and US refusal to intervene, it had no reliable external protector. Internal support was non-existent, and an opposition alliance was constructed under Kabila's leadership. Regional states, notably Rwanda and Angola, intervened to protect their own security. Though successful, this regional alliance itself proved to be unstable, leading to a recurrence of war in 1998.

In the 1990s, there has been a marked upsurge in scholarly and practical interest in the relationships between urban development and environmental protection in Africa. It is apparent that analyses which take simultaneous account of economic, political and environmental aspects of urban development issues are an essential and yet under-represented facet of this upsurge. This article argues for a regional political ecology approach to African urban environmental issues, as a means of addressing the intertwined impacts of neo-liberalism, democratisation and environmentalism in African cities. The construction and materials supply industry in Zanzibar city serves as an empirical referent.

The failure of structural adjustment programmes to promote industrialisation in Africa may be at least partly explained by the fragmentation of African business systems. In Africa, the parastatal, foreign-dominated formal and indigenous informal sectors are poorly integrated, largely as a result of the institutional environment in which they have developed. The lack of supportive financial, state and social institutions inhibits trust and accountability, and impedes the access to capital, labour market flexibility, and sub-contracting, which are needed for modern industrial development. More research is needed, both detailed studies of business systems in individual African countries, and cross-country comparisons of the linkages between the economy and the wider social and institutional environment.

Against enormous odds, non-violent action proved to be a major factor in the downfall of apartheid in South Africa, and the establishment of a democratic black majority government, despite predictions that the transition could come only through a violent revolutionary cataclysm. This was largely the result of conditions working against a successful armed overthrow of the system, combined with the ability of the anti-apartheid opposition to take advantage of the system's economic dependence on a cooperative black labour force. This article traces the history of nonviolent resistance to apartheid, its initial failures, and the return in the 1980s to a largely non-violent strategy which, together with international sanctions, forced the government to negotiate a peaceful transfer to majority rule.