South African women's success in moving from active participation in the liberation struggle to active participation in government has been exceptional on a world scale. Their achievement is based in the long history of women's struggles against apartheid and for gender equality in the African National Congress. The result has been a political representation that is grounded in the experience of a united women's movement in the transition to majority rule and a firm policy consensus towards gender equality within the ANC. This has enabled women politicians to entrench gender equality goals within government discourse. Yet, the success has come with the price of a women's movement that has lost its strong leaders to government, and women politicians who lack the support of a strong women's movement. Thus, in the moment of greatest victory South African women lack the mass movement that propelled them to success, suggesting that the struggle is not done with yet.

Drawing on qualitative research with refugees in and outside formal settlements, this article challenges characterisations of Uganda's UNHCR-supported refugee settlement system as un-problematically successful. It shows that by denying refugees freedom of movement, the settlement system undermines their socio-economic and other rights. Refugees who remain outside the formal system of refugee registration and settlement are deprived of the refugee status to which they are entitled under international law. The article questions the conventional opposition between refugees living in and out of refugee settlements in the Ugandan context, revealing a more complex and interconnected dynamic than is often assumed. It suggests that those refugees with some external support may be able to escape the confines of remote rural settlements, where refugee agricultural livelihoods are seriously compromised by distance from markets, unfavourable climatic conditions, exhausted soil and inadequate inputs. It argues that refugee livelihoods face more rather than fewer challenges as exile becomes protracted, and concludes that the government and UNHCR's Self Reliance Strategy (SRS) has not yet managed to overcome the contradiction inherent in denying people freedom of movement, without supporting them effectively to meet their needs in the places to which they are restricted.

This paper evaluates the evolution and the implementation of the ANC government's commitment to fostering a black capitalist class or black economic empowerment (BEE) as a non-racial nation-building strategy. A substantial black bourgeois i.e. and other middle classes begun to emerge over the last decade, contrary to popular perceptions. The legitimating role assigned to the emergent black bourgeoisie by the ANC and the government is, however, threatens to turn the strategy into a nepotistic accumulation. This development is paradoxically threatening to re-racialise the country, widening black inequality gaps, and precluding the rise of a black bourgeoisie with a nurture capitalist agenda. Other equally powerful social groups have begun to challenge the prevailing strategy, compelling the government to explore a more accommodating strategy exemplified by the recent introduction by the government of ‘broad-based economic empowerment’. Should a less patrimonial, less racially and ethnically divisive BEE strategy emerge from this quasi-pluralist power play, such a change holds prospects for the creation of a ‘growth coalition’ capable of sustainable capitalist development and true empowerment of the black majority. That would be a positive development in terms of establishing and consolidating democracy in South Africa.

Elite corruption in Uganda constitutes an essential means of consolidating the present government in power. Political leaders have therefore shown little commitment to act to curb practices that could affect their political support. Instead, anti-corruption institutions have been influenced and controlled whenever they threatened to expose the corrupt ways of Uganda's state elites. Donors have also for many years been reluctant to use their substantial economic assistance to press the government to confront wrongdoing by state elites. They have not wanted to undermine a government which they have held up as one of the most successful in Africa in carrying out donor-sponsored economic reforms. But by giving large amounts of aid to a corrupt and quasi-authoritarian government, as well as being reticent in their public criticism of abuse of power and corruption, donors have abetted the actions of Uganda's leaders in weakening those bodies that could hold them responsible for abusing their public positions.

By the World Bank's reckoning, Mozambique is the poorest country in the world, with a gross domestic product per capita of approximately $80 in 1990, as well as one of the most dependent on foreign assistance, which accounts for two-thirds of measured G.D.P. Indeed, aid receipts per capita amounted to approximately $60 in 1990, almost double the figure for sub-Saharan Africa, as may be seen from Table I.

In recent years several democratically elected African governments have abolished primary school fees following pledges made during presidential election campaigns. Among these cases, Uganda's universal primary education (UPE) programme, launched in 1997, has received particular attention, due to the massive increase in primary school enrolment, as well the sustained increase in public spending on education that it has entailed. This paper asks whether the Ugandan government's policies in this area can be explained by the prior establishment of competitive elections in 1996. It provides several reasons to believe that the move to UPE has indeed been linked to democratic politics, and that this outcome has depended on the salience of education as an issue, as well as on the public's access to information about UPE. As a result, recent Ugandan experience helps show why the establishment of competitive elections might prompt an African government to spend more on primary education. However, it also suggests why in many African countries a democratic transition will have little effect on primary education provision.

This article was written before information on the great Ethiopian famine of 1973 had reached the outside world. Since I was not then aware of the catastrophe, the facts given here should not be regarded as a reconstruction of the causes of the famine. On the contrary, the deterioration in the conditions of the indigenous inhabitants had been known for some years – in fact, since the beginning of the capitalist offensive in the north-eastern lowlands of Ethiopia, namely the Awash Valley. I had already predicted the famine in late 1971 in two reports,1 and in discussions with officials of the Ethiopian Government.

In a context of increased competition over natural resources, large-scale investors are showing renewed interest in eastern Congo's mineral resources. At the local level this is resulting in fierce disputes over access to land and to mining sites. This article offers an empirical study of access in Luhwindja, where a multinational mining company has recently begun to exploit gold. We first sketch the context, examining the overlapping legal fields and analysing how various actors gain and control access to the gold mines. Next we study how the arrival of Banro Corporation in Luhwindja has altered power relations at the local level. Looking more specifically at the displacement of artisanal miners and the resettlement of local communities, we demonstrate how the company, local elites and the local population have engaged in a complex struggle for access.

Over the past twenty years, the focus of development policy has shifted from the state to the private sector. Privatisation is now central to utility reform in much of SSA. This paper sets out developments in water privatisation and reviews the evidence regarding its impact. Water privatisation has been carried out to some degree in at least fourteen countries in the region, and many other governments are at various stages in the privatisation process. However, in some cases privatisation has been difficult to achieve, and a few countries have successfully provided water under public ownership. Evidence on the impact of privatisation indicates that the performance of privatised utilities has not changed dramatically, but that enterprises have continued to perform well, or not so well, depending both on their state when they were privatised and on the wider economic context. The evidence points to internal improvements in terms of financial management. However, governments face considerable difficulties in attracting investors and regulating private utilities. Furthermore, privatisation fails to address some of the fundamental constraints affecting water utilities in SSA, such as finance, the politicised nature of service delivery, and lack of access for the poor. A preoccupation with ownership may obscure the wider goals of reform.

This article examines the politics of youth in Ijebu-Remo (henceforth Remo) from the 1950s to the present. The emergence of the politics of youth in the 1950s and 1960s drew on precolonial discourse and was closely associated with the emergence of Remo's anti-federal postcolonial political identity. Since Nigeria's political and economic decline in the mid-1980s, strong feelings of exclusion – strengthened further by the political sidelining of Yoruba-speaking politicians in national politics between 1993 and 1999 – have contributed to an increase of nationalist sentiment in Remo youth politics. This is enacted through secrecy, a reinvention and utilisation of ‘traditional’ cultural practice, and the growing definition of local identity through ethnic discourse. Traditionally, Remo youth and elite politics have legitimised and supported each other, but the cohesion between these groups has declined since the return to democracy in 1999. Rivalry and conflict over local and national resources have led to bitter intergroup fighting, and young men's strategies to combat social exclusion remain mostly individual.

As the state has moved back to the centre of analysis of political change and conflict, increasing attention has focused on its rôle in forming new classes and in structuring the possibilities of class action. As Nelson Kasfir notes, both Marx and Weber ‘saw the vital role the state could play in consolidating the class position of a dominant social group’.1 Neither, however, saw the state as the inherent locus of the process of class formation and of class domination. For Marx, the state was typically the instrument of a ruling class whose origin and basis was in control over the means of production. For Weber, power, class, and status were potentially independent dimensions of stratification.

The first three decades of African independence have been an economic, political, and social disaster. The number in absolute poverty is rising faster than anywhere else in the world, and is expected to exceed 250 million by the turn of the century. Once fine universities are in decay, and governments are chronically over-staffed and underperforming. This sad state of affairs is not simply a consequence of an unfortunate coincidence of collapsing commodity prices and mismanagement, but rather because of a fundamental flaw in the prevailing development paradigm. This was based on the erroneous proposition that state institutions derived from metropolitan models could be made the engine of development in the post-colonial era. In retrospect, it is all too obvious that the underlying cultural premises of these institutions were alien to the vast majority of Africans, and they started to crumble the moment the colonial administrators left.

In the 1970s politics in Tanzania was substantially a bureaucratic affair. Since the 1980s, however, economic liberalisation, multiparty democracy and governance reforms have on the one hand introduced measures conducive to building a legal-rational bureaucracy and a liberal civil society, and on the other accelerated political struggle for economic resources through personalised regional networks. Paraphrasing Emmanuel Terray, the first trend is described in this article as the manufacture of ‘air-conditioned’ politics, the second as the growth of ‘veranda’ politics. The article argues that donor reforms are not leading in a straight line to liberal governance, but neither is civil society simply being colonised by patrimonial networks. Rather, both ‘air-conditioned’ politics and ‘veranda’ politics are advancing simultaneously, inundating a previously bureaucratised political sphere. The dual character of this ‘re-politicisation’ makes the fate of governance reforms exceedingly difficult to predict.

As the news of President Moussa Traoré's overthrow spread through Mali in March 1991, large crowds of people poured into the streets of Bamako, Segu, Kati, and other towns to exact retribution, culminating weeks of popular unrest. They went after prominent officials, military officers, and members of the wealthy élite that had prospered during the 23 years of Traoré's authoritarian rule. Customs and tax offices, traditional centres of high-level corruption and embezzlement, were systematically burned, their files taken of scattered, their staff put to flight. Big merchants, accused of collaborating with the ousted régime and benefiting from state favours, saw their shops emptied and destroyed. Though disorganised and apparently beyond the control of any leadership, the crowds carefully spared vital economic installations — but not the Bamako offices of the Caisse centrale de coopération économique (C.C.C.E.), seemingly tainted by its rôle as the main channel for French financial aid to the Government.

Though policing is widely regarded as an inherently public good, in reality non-state policing is widespread in South Africa, doing everything that the public police force does. The paper examines the extent, nature and attitudes towards non-state policing in South Africa in its different forms, that is, autonomous citizen responses, ‘responsible’ citizen responses and commercial private security. The paper concludes by assessing the social and political implications of non-state policing.

The pursuit of an African Renaissance has become an important aspect of regional cooperation between South Africa and its neighbours. Transfrontier conservation areas, or ‘Peace Parks’ as they are popularly called, have been identified as key instruments to promote the African Renaissance dream, and are increasingly advocated and justified on this basis. By fostering joint conservation (and tourism) development in Southern Africa's marginalised border regions, Peace Parks are claimed to further international peace, regional cooperation and poverty reduction, and thus serve basic ideals of the African Renaissance. This article critically explores this assumption. Using the joint South African-Mozambican-Zimbabwean Great Limpopo Park as a case study, it argues that in reality the creation of Peace Parks hardly stimulates and possibly even undermines the realisation of the African Renaissance ideals of regional cooperation, emancipation, cultural reaffirmation, sustainable economic development and democratisation. So far, their achievement has been severely hindered by domination of national interests, insufficient community consultation, and sensitive border issues such as the illegal flows of goods and migrants between South Africa and neighbouring countries. Furthermore, exacerbation of inter-state differences induced by power imbalances in the region, and harmonisation of land use and legal systems across boundaries, are increasingly becoming sources of conflict and controversy. Some of these problems are so severe, we conclude, that they might eventually even undermine support for African Renaissance as a whole. Utmost care is thus required to optimally use the chances that Peace Parks do offer in furthering an African Renaissance.

From 1977 to 1979, Nigeria prepared itself for the coming Second Republic. Most important on the agenda was the writing of a new Constitution. The Supreme Military Council (S.M.C.) appointed a Constitutional Drafting Committee, and its Draft was debated by the Constituent Assembly, which included elected members from all 19 States, as well as a number nominated by the S.M.C. The Draft, along with the changes proposed by the Constituent Assembly, were presented in September 1978 to the S.M.C. which made further alterations. That Constitution provided the basis for the subsequent elections of July and August 1979, and the formal inauguration of the Second Republic took place in October.

This paper analyses the effects of privatisation and deregulation of the Dar es Salaam transport system. It starts with an account of the decline of the government-owned transport company and the first opening of the market to private buses in 1983. The analysis then moves to the progressive deregulation of the sector and its impact on transport supply. Competition between private operators in the oversupplied market manifests itself in non-compliance with safety rules, and inefficiencies in the fare structures. Labour relations with the private sector are then examined to illustrate the logic of the market. The results of a questionnaire answered by 668 workers suggest that the reaction of casual workers to exploitative conditions of employment characterises many aspects of the operation of the transport system. The impact of deregulation is therefore most clearly to be seen in the nature of labour relations within the sector, and it is argued that there is a need for state regulation to monitor and enforce conditions of employment within the private sector if service provision is to be improved.

What Geertz refers to as the ‘pigeonhole disease’ is nowhere more evident than in the persistent tendency of political scientists to locate state and society in separate conceptual niches: one inhabited by a potentially predatory species and the other by a defenceless and fully domesticated pigeon. Only where a recognisable entity is sharing the characteristics of a state system, whose boundaries are analytically separate from those of the social system, can political science claim a disciplinary domain of its own. The ongoing debate over the relative merits or demerits of state-centred approaches has only served to add further salience to the dichotomy between state and society, but with little agreement as to where the one begins and the other leaves off.

State responsiveness to pressures from women's movements in Africa has been limited. However, where inroads have been made, associational autonomy from the state and dominant party has proved critical. The women's movement is one of the most coordinated and active social movements in Uganda, and one of the most effective women's movements in Africa more generally. An important part of its success comes from the fact that it is relatively autonomous, unlike women's movements in earlier periods of Uganda's post-independence history. The women's movement, in spite of enormous pressures for cooptation, has taken advantage of the political space afforded by the semi-authoritarian Museveni government, which has promoted women's leadership to serve its own ends. Leaders and organisations reflect varying degrees of autonomy and cooptation. Nevertheless the women's movement has had a visible impact on policy as a result of its capacity to set its own far-reaching agenda and freely select its own leaders.