Urban unemployment and underemployment are widespread problems in Africa, perhaps more so than on other continents. It is a truism, apparently accepted by most governments, that capital is scarce, and that the rate of development and employment creation are constrained by the relative scarcity of capital equipment and the slow rate of capital formation. And yet these two observations, challengeable but generally accepted as commonplace and obvious truths, co-exist in much of Africa with a paradoxical third statement: that much of the urban capital stock, particularly in the modern-service sectors – government, education, large-scale commerce, finance, etcetera – is utilised at a very low rate, typically of the order of 25–30 per cent of the potential maximum. This brief note speculates on the reasons for this state of affairs, and explores the consequences of adopting a possible policy designed to produce a significant change.

People of quite diverse social position and perspective have turned to economic growth as a source of political change in South Africa. Contained within the concept of growth, they maintain, are processes — capital accumulation and class formation, business enterprise and markets, changing skill and capital requirements – that, at the very least, allow some blacks a more secure and higher living standard, that may bring greater equality between the races, or more profoundly, confound traditional racial lines and privileges of quite diverse social position and perspective have turned to economic growth as a source of political change in South Africa. Contained within the concept of growth, they maintain, are processes — capital accumulation and class formation, business enterprise and markets, changing skill and capital requirements – that, at the very least, allow some blacks a more secure and higher living standard, that may bring greater equality between the races, or more profoundly, confound traditional racial lines and privileges. Indeed, some argue that growth undermines the foundations of the racial state. Many of those who posit a relationship between economics and politics, take the next logical step: supporting actions, including foreign investment, that foster economic growth and, presumably, political change in South Africa.

Legislation in the former British colonial territories exhibited a pair of paradoxes. First, it spoke in legalese, a patois that only judges and lawyers can read easily. Many laws concerning development, however, addressed ordinary citizens. Second, drafters invented and used a specialised style to reduce official and judicial discretion by making legislation more precise, but this frequently endowed officials with discretion as broad as the unbroken sky. In Africa, the uses of legalese seemed to war with the purposes for which it was developed.

The 1977–8 war in the Horn of Africa and its traumatic aftermath has brought Somalia to a critical junction. The expulsion of the Soviets in November 1977, following their overtures to Ethiopia, and the subsequent rout of the Somali army, along with Ogadeni guerrillas, by a combined Cuban–Ethiopian–Yemini force led by Russian generals, has left this nation demoralised, isolated, and ideologically sundered. A fluid and somewhat confused socio-economic and political situation, only made less chaotic by President Mohamed Siad Barre's powerful personality and will to survive, characterises this post-war Somalia.

The speeches and articles of Amílcar Cabral represent an attempt to think of imperialism and the colonial relationship in a new way. His published works sought to explain how a subsistence agricultural society was being transformed under the abnormal conditions attendant upon colonial domination. Superficially, Cabral does not present any new or particularly complex interpretation of colonialism. With the exception of a few rather brief essays, most of his work is a description of a guerrilla war fought against the last of the great colonial powers. Yet the appearance of the terms ‘mode of production’ and ‘productive forces’ indicates that his understanding of imperialism is founded on a new set of presuppositions. Cabral used these terms before they became common among the ranks of the ‘advanced left’, and at a time when the concept of the mode of production was essentially a possession of Soviet Marxism. In the early 1960s, Soviet visions of the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’ were achieving much the same effect as modernisation theory in the West. That most of Cabral's important essays were written at this time only emphasises the innovativeness of his work.

Corruption is a wide-spread phenomenon in the developing world. The term is usually reserved for ‘the practice of using the power of office for making private gain in breach of laws and regulations nominally in force’, or as more flamboyantly defined by M. McMullan, ‘a public official is corrupt if he accepts money…for doing something that he is under duty to do anyway, that he is under duty not to do, or to exercise a legitimate discretion for improper reasons’.1 Corruption is thus a description of activites emanating from and related to officialdom. Irregular activities among private individuals are a matter of private enterprise. They are not usually classified as corruption, but as straightforward theft, fraud, embezzlement, and the like.