Independent Botswana has developed on three main pillars: rapid and sustained economic growth (over the decade to 1992, for example, at 8.4 per cent a year, third-highest among all developing countries, and far in excess of any other in Africa); multi-party or liberal democracy; and an efficient central state, the main features of which have been identified and praised by observers. With growth, an accompanying build-up of a relatively strong governmental system took place, with activities especially focused on finance and planning. The civil service was maintained at a high level, according to Ravi Gulhati, by avoiding rapid localisation, by providing high compensation for officials, and by keeping well-defined lines of authority and accountability. Able people were placed in key positions and kept there for extended periods. The political elite fairly consistently sought expert advice from leading bureaucrats, and the two groups have displayed a closeness and mutuality of interest built upon their common involvement in cattle and commerce, and the not uncommon tendency for cabinet ministers to arise from the ranks of the senior bureaucracy.

For the best part of seven years, an increasing number of warring factions fought a vicious civil war for control of the West African state of Liberia. In August 1996, the fourteenth peace accord led to presidential and parliamentary elections in July of the following year. Charles Taylor and his National Patriotic Party (NPP), formed out of the original invasion force, emerged victorious with a landslide 75 per cent of the vote. Given the international reputation of Taylor as a brutal warlord whose sole aim had never wavered from the capture of power in Monrovia, Taylor's across-the-board victory appears difficult to explain. Having concluded that, despite problems and allegations, the election did seem more free and fair than not, the article examines the factors that probably influenced the electorate's choices. The results of this research show an election heavily dependent on an uncertain security situation. However, it suggests that, although a former ‘warlord’ has been rewarded, the voting was a reasoned ploy by the electorate to maximise the possibility of improved living conditions.

President Senghor of Senegal stands out among the statesmen of Africa not only for his literary achievements and his political acumen, but also for having made a major contribution toward the emergent doctrine of African Socialism. Senghor's reflections on that subject are based on his emotional and intellectual commitment to African values and realities, and on a thorough investigation of western and Communist thinkers. The result is an amalgam aimed at serving the future of Africa.

When we speak of ‘the state’ in Tropical Africa today, we are apt to create an illusion. Ordinarily the term denotes an independent political structure of sufficient authority and power to govern a defined territory and its population: empirical statehood. This is the prevailing notion of the state in modern political, legal, and social theory1, and it is a fairly close approximation to historical fact in many parts of the world – not only in Europe and North America, where modern states first developed and are deeply rooted, but also in some countries of South America, the Middle East, and Asia, where they have more recently emerged. The state is an inescapable reality. The military credibility of Argentina during the Falklands war, when it was by no means certain that Britain would prevail against its air force, is an indication of the reality of the state in some parts of the Third World today.

Using fieldwork data collected in Eritrea, Rome, Milan and Stockholm, and supplemented by human rights organisation reports and discussions with key informants in four cities in the UK, this article examines the extent to which the Eritrean national service and its concomitant Warsai-Yikaalo Development Campaign qualify as forced or compulsory labour as defined by the relevant international conventions.

Tanzania is one of the few African countries that has remained relatively calm since independence. However, its long history of ethnic, racial, and religious cohesion has begun to fray as the Government attempts to reform its ailing economy in accordance with World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities. This process offers an opportunity to explore the degree to which there is a causal link between liberal economic reform and social unity. This is especially relevant as many African régimes are implementing similar policy prescriptions in the form of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), the terms of which often depend on the minimal financial leverage that African negotiators have vis-à-vis the advanced industrial countries of the North.1 York Bradshaw and Zwelakhe Tshandu have argued that ‘the burgeoning debt crisis may represent the “new dependency” for many African countries which cannot acquire capital from other sources besides the IMF and the World Bank.’

Given a continuation of current trends, with increasing population growth and declining food production, Southern Africa (excluding South Africa) which could nearly feed itself during 1979–81, will be only 64 per cent self-sufficient by the turn of the century. Zimbabwe has a particularly important rôle to play in trying to prevent such a disaster. It is by far the most important exporter of food and cash crops in the region, and has been allocated the task of co-ordinating a food-security strategy for the nine member-states of the Southern African Development Co-ordination Conference, namely Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

The past decade has seen the rapid rise of concepts such as the ‘China Model’ and the ‘Beijing Consensus’, yet more recent trends suggest a waning of their popularity. This article finds that the problem with the literature on the China model lies less with the concept itself than with a tendency to apply the term in an atheoretical and unempirical manner. From 2005 until at least 2012, Ethiopian elites from the upper echelons downwards were indeed engaged in a conscious and voluntary attempt to emulate aspects of China's perceived developmental successes. Drawing on interviews with 46 such elites, as well as on theories of lesson-drawing and cross-societal emulation, the study suggests that China may act as an example to countries seeking to achieve rapid modernisation and to navigate the perilous waters of political and economic globalisation. It is only by historicising and contextualising the ‘China Model’ within the older story of selective incorporation by certain ‘latecomer’ countries, however, that its true influence – and limits – can be understood.

China's engagement with African countries is growing rapidly, spanning trade, investment and development cooperation. Some observers have suggested that poor operating standards among Chinese investors may contribute to the social ills associated with extractive industries and undermine host countries' sustainable development. Drawing on case study data from the copper mining sector in Zambia, this paper argues that the economic and political context surrounding Chinese investment risks undermining the effectiveness of local environmental, social and fiscal regulation. The analysis first explores particular characteristics of large-scale Chinese investment, including the prevalence of state-led financing and the challenges of effectively monitoring overseas Chinese projects. It proceeds to place these characteristics within the host country regulatory context, which in the case of Zambia features significant capacity constraints, political interventionism and a pervasive lack of transparency. The paper argues that, within a weak regulatory setting, Chinese investment may pose significant challenges for effective business regulation. Yet the resulting state-firm dynamics are by no means exclusive to Chinese investment. Rather, it is host country regulatory characteristics, in combination with certain features of investors' corporate governance, that together herald a new set of challenges for business regulation in developing African countries.

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.

Equity is complementary to the pursuit of long-term prosperity. Greater equity is doubly good for poverty reduction. It tends to favour sustained overall development, and it delivers increased opportunities to the poorest groups in a society. (François Bourguignon, speech at the launching of the World Development Report, 2006)

This paper studies the Rwandan case to address some of the challenges and pitfalls in defining pro-poor strategies. The paper first looks at the danger of a purely growth-led development focus (as in Rwanda's first PRSP), and evaluates the extent to which the agricultural sector has been a pro-poor growth engine. It then studies Rwanda's current rural policies, which aim to modernise and ‘professionalise’ the rural sector. There is a high risk that these rural policy measures will be at the expense of the large mass of small-scale peasants. This paper stresses that the real challenge to transform the rural sector into a true pro-poor growth engine will be to value and incorporate the capacity and potential of small-scale ‘non-professional’ peasants into the core strategies for rural development. The lessons drawn from the Rwandan case should inspire policy makers and international donors worldwide to shift their focus away from a purely output-led logic towards distribution-oriented rural development policies. In other words, the challenge is to reconcile efficiency in creating economic growth with equity, and perhaps, to put equity first.

Conservation non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have excited a great deal of comment and debate, generally quite divided, in diverse journals. Some advocate them as forces for good, others decry their clumsy dealings with rural peoples and the impoverishment their activities can cause. The debate suffers in two ways. First, it ignores a large parallel literature about the work of development NGOs. Second, there is a paucity of general knowledge about the state of the conservation NGO sector. We do not know where it works, what the main players are doing, or much at all about the extent or activities of the smaller conservation organisations. We do not know how much money the sector spends. In this paper we first briefly outline why work on development NGOs should be applied to conservation NGOs, and then offer an overview of the sector's activities based on a survey of over 280 organisations. We describe some of the basic contours of these activities, and reflect on the implications of our findings for existing writings about conservation NGOs and future research.

Since the early 1990s, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have established semi-autonomous revenue authorities (ARAs), organisationally distinct from ministries of finance, with some real operational autonomy, and with staff paid at rates substantially higher than those in comparable public sector jobs. This has been seen by some observers as a step to dilute the power of the central state executive. We demonstrate that this is a misreading of the story of revenue authorities in Africa. Both African governments and the international development agencies involved in the reforms see ARAs as a means of increasing central government revenues, and thus enlarging the authority of the (central) state. To date, there is little sign that the creation of revenue agencies has actually increased public revenues. It has, however, facilitated a range of reforms in the ways in which taxes are assessed and collected, and deflected pressures that might otherwise have emerged for substantial privatisation of tax collection.

A comparative literature on democratic transitions in Africa has sought out points of similarity across the continent in order to yield generalisations about the prospects for democratic consolidation. The underlying contention of this article is that history needs to be taken seriously in any such exercise, not least because politicians and voters alike are guided by their readings of the past. These, in turn, have a bearing on democratic prospects. The first part of this article demonstrates how, in the run-up to the 1996 Ghanaian elections, the opposition parties were guided by an assessment of their historic strengths. The parties which belonged to one or other of the great traditions – Nkrumahism and the Busia/Danquah tradition – regarded themselves as the natural rulers and treated the bearers of the rival standard as the principal threat under normal conditions. The ruling National Democratic Congress, which was regarded by each of them as a mere usurper of the natural order, exhibited a much more ambiguous attitude towards history. The second half of the article scrutinises the election results and seeks to establish the underlying patterns. Particular attention is paid to rural/urban and ethnic/regional voting patterns. The article concludes that while the opposition improved on its 1992 performance, its inroads were actually fairly limited. It further posits that the opposition parties of both traditions fundamentally misread the historical evidence and hence misjudged the scale of the task confronting them. It concludes by raising the possibility that the misfit between perceptions and electoral realities could prove destabilising to Ghana's fledgling democracy.

The management of ethnic problems has tended to be complicated by the complex ethnic situations which give rise to them. It is known for example that ethnicity rarely exists in a pure form, being usually combined with other conflict-generating cleavages, such as religion, race, class and regionalism, in mutually reinforcing ways. Ethnicity is also situational, fluid and intermittent, while ethnic boundaries are constantly changing. In addition, levels of ethnic consciousness and political mobilisation differ among groups, for reasons of different perceptions of relative privileges or deprivation, history of inter-group relations, effects of state policies or actions, dispositions and strategies adopted by other competing groups, and so on. For these and other reasons, common stimuli like democratisation, economic prosperity or decline, and transformatory social processes, all of which impact on ethnicity, produce different effects on ethnic groups.

These differences and complexities have implications for the management of ethnic problems and conflicts. For one thing, ethnic conflicts tend to be intractable, especially where their management does not take full account of their complexity. The temptation to proffer catch-all management formulae, such as federalism, bills of rights, secularity and so on, as if all ethnic conflicts can be dealt with uniformly or in one fell swoop, is the product of the fallacy of oversimplification. It goes without saying that conflict situations must be properly understood for the appropriate ‘therapies’ to be formulated and applied. If this is done, it will be found that more nuanced solutions are required to cope with the demands of the complex situations.

Domestic policy inadequacies have been targeted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the main reason for poor economic performance in sub-Saharan Africa generally.1 The structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) sponsored by these international financial institutions (IFIs) over the past decade have sought to rectify such policies. But many countries following their advice have continued to experience economic decline, albeit according to the World Bank, as a result primarily of their failure to properly implement the recommended reforms. It was argued in the late 1980s and early 1990S that governments pursuing strong adjustment programmes, even in the face of inhospitable world economic conditions, still outperformed weak reformers.2 This analysis does not hold with the same weight for all African countries. In the case of Guinea, external factors have been equally important in explaining its economic record under adjustment.

This paper analyses how macro-economic and agricultural policies, market fluctuations and demographic changes affected forests in the Humid Forest Zone of Cameroon in four periods between 1967 and 1997. For each period it examines how these variables influenced cocoa, coffee, food, and agroindustrial crop production and area, and logging. It concludes that government policies, market fluctuations and demographic changes all had a strong impact on forests. Pressure on forests increased after structural adjustment policies were initiated in the mid-1980s. Malthusian reasoning alone cannot explain the level of deforestation and forest degradation in Cameroon.

The relationship between language and politics in the African post-colony remains obscure and underexamined. Here we withdraw into a poorly lit area, an area of potentialities, where new political shapes may emerge as the outcome of half-conscious choices made by very large numbers of people. Language choices in the first place: the expansion of the Wolof language in Senegal, principally though far from exclusively an urban phenomenon, is to be seen in a context where the individual may speak several languages, switching linguistically from one social situation to another. Such multilingualism is general in Africa: the particularity of the Wolof case, at least in Senegal, is the extent to which this language has spread, far beyond the boundaries of core ethnicity, of a historical Wolof zone from the colonial or pre-colonial periods. And these individual language choices cast their political shadow.

The political consequences of this socio-linguistic phenomenon are as yet indistinct, but to see a little more clearly one should in the second place relate it to the subject of the politics of ethnicity. Language is of course an important element in any definition of ethnicity, and there is an evident overlap; but the politics of language is also a distinguishable subject in its own right. Where the assertion of ethnic identity can be identified as a possible weapon in the individual's struggle for power and recognition within the colonial and post-colonial state, the choice of a language is that of the most effective code in the individual's daily struggle for survival. Language choice in such a setting may be less a matter of assertion, the proud proclamation of an identity, than it is one of evasion, a more or less conscious blurring of the boundaries of identity. And in Senegal the government itself by its inaction has practised its own shadow-politics of procrastination.

Given that incomes in South Africa are distributed very unequally, it might be expected that the establishment of representative democracy would result in the adoption of redistributive policies. Yet overall inequality has not declined since 1994. The electoral and party system provides uneven pressure for redistribution. The fact that poor South Africans have the vote ensures that some areas of public policy do help the poor. The post-apartheid government not only inherited a surprisingly redistributive set of social policies (welfare, education and health care), but has made changes that entail even more redistribution. But these policies do little to help a core section of the poor in South Africa: the unemployed, and especially households in which no one is working. Other public policies serve to disadvantage this marginalised constituency: labour market and other economic policies serve to steer the economy down a growth path that shuts out many of the unskilled and unemployed. The workings of these policies remain opaque, making it unlikely that poor citizens will use their vote to effect necessary policy reforms.

New leaders are often assumed to be better able to push for policy and sector reform because they are less tied in by established patronage networks. The article discusses this assumption by examining public sector reform in three East African countries under different leaders. It finds that while neo-patrimonialism is an important reason why public sector reform is often blocked, this paradigm cannot explain why some public sector reforms are actually implemented. New leaders are not always new brooms, and whether they are so depends as much on formal conditions, such as the existence of a political coalition, as on informal neo-patrimonial factors. The article also finds that in some cases, old brooms can sweep too. When succession is institutionalised, as the Tanzanian case shows, even a relatively weak leader can carry out reform effectively in his second term because he does not have to consider re-election.