African states and studies are in a profound period of revisionism as the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s yields to the ‘adjustment reforms’ of the 1990s. The relative optimism and expansion of the initial years of independence have long since been superseded by pessimism and contraction as successive energy, drought, debt, and devaluation shocks have resulted in impoverishment and inequalities. The former has affected ‘vulnerable groups’ in particular – women, children, elderly and peripheral communities1 – while the latter has occurred both within and between states. A few classes and countries have thrived despite or because of the continental crisis – more bourgeois fractions and more informal sectors on the one hand and, on the other, Botswana, Mauritius, and Zimbabwe. Africa at the end of the 1990s will likely be more marginal, vulnerable, and unequal than ever, as indicated in the final section, hardly the revolutionary, nationalist scenario anticipated after World War II, but more realistic and realisable none the less.2

After coming to power in 1985 via what might be described as a ‘palace coup’, General Ibrahim Babangida quickly earned himself the sobriquet of the ‘Maradona’ of Nigerian politics. In October 1989 the President surpassed his own record of unpredictability and unorthodoxy, and surprised even the closest watchers of his military régime by announcing that two parties would be established by fiat and provided with initial funding in the context of the agreed programme of transition to democratic civilian rule, laid out between 1986 and 1987, and scheduled to terminate with the inauguration of the Third Republic in 1992.

The idea of Black Consciousness heralded an era of alternative political awareness in the late 1960s. A self-empowering, vibrant, reconstructionist world-view emphasised the potential rôle of black initiatives and responsibility in articulating the power of the powerless. Between 1968–76, the Black Consciousness Movement (B.C.M.), as it became known, was one of the most important developments in South Africa, not only as the result of the self-confident protest and rebellion that it unleashed, but also ‘because of the questions it posed about the nature of oppositional politics in South Africa and its relation to the nature of South African society’.1

Analyses of the South African state during the 1970s and 1980s all tried to come to grips with the rôle of the Security forces.1 Research justifiably ran in different directions, but the National Security Management System soon became an essential part of recent work,2 albeit remaining very much of a mystery.3 Since we need to know how it originated, developed, and operated in practice, as well as its legacy, this article attempts to describe the N.S.M.S. and offers avenues of interpretation.

Many African states have been operating under tight structural-adjustment restrictions for close to ten years. The policies of the International Monetary Fund make heavy demands on public-sector capability and political leadership, particularly as regards pricing and trade practices, banking and finance, economic monitoring and data analysis, macro and sectoral planning, as well as policy formulation, initiation, and implementation. The aim is to create a very strong private sector operating under market conditions, and an effective, though not necessarily large, public sector committed to rational, strategic economic growth. For many African régimes there also will be increasing motivation towards both decentralisation and pluralism. In short, the post-structural adjustment state, rather than withering away, needs to be selectively strengthened and to have an increasingly sophisticated capacity to manage development activities at both the national and local levels.1

Since Italy's defeat in World Ward II, Ethiopia has pressed its claim to Eritrea. Following an abortive federation imposed by the United Nations in 1950, Haile Selassie annexed the former Italian colony in 1962, and for the last three decades Eritreans have fought for their independence.