Until the late 1980s, decentralisation experiments in sub-Saharan Africa tended in the majority of states to reinforce central control rather than enhance local autonomy. However, recent moves towards political pluralism have brought a switch in emphasis to more meaningful types of local participation. These have taken the form of political decentralisation, understood in the sense used by Philip Mawhood to denote the devolution of powers to representative local councils, each with its separate legal existence and its own budget, and with the authority to allocate resources and to carry out multiple functions. However, a number of African regimés also intend to transfer power from the centre to officials of the central government in the field. They therefore attach a broader meaning to the concept of decentralisation, using it to cover both political devolution and the deconcentration of administrative authority. The two processes are, in fact, often complementary rather than separate.

Against the backdrop of Africa's recent transitions to multi-party democracy, two countries stand at opposite ends of a spectrum of success and failure that ranges from the apocalyptic to the nearly miraculous. At one extreme, South Africa, the site of what has been described as ‘one of the most extraordinary political transformations of the twentieth century’, where the people ‘have defied the logic of their past, and broken all the rules of social theory, to forge a powerful spirit of unity from a shattered nation’. At the other end of the scale, Rwanda, a synonym for abyssal violence — a name that will go down in history as the epitome of an African Holocaust. Burundi, though spared the agonies of her neighbour, has not fared much better. There a remarkably successful transition was abruptly brought to a halt by an attempted military take-over, setting off an explosion of ethnic violence on a scale consonant with her reputation as a leading candidate for the title of genocidal state.

Cameroon's upheavals since 1990 have not been widely reported among the more visible and violent African state-society conflicts. Their anonymity on the continent's political agenda is understandable, since by the formal, most visible indices, little has changed since pluralist pressures appeared. The ‘Gaullist’ monolith state remains fundamentally in place after 25 years: the constitution retains the unitary executive stamp of 1972, against federalist and devolution challenges, although multi-party politics were legalised in 1990. This and a new press law have been the régime's major concessions to emerging opposition forces, and led to presidential and national assembly elections in 1992.

The South African elections of 1994 constituted one of those rare historical moments when humankind made a significant step forward. The peaceful culmination of a liberation struggle, which for years many had feared would end in a bloodbath, registered not only a triumph for the democratic ideal but the resounding defeat of racism as an organising principle of government. If its more recent reference point was the collapse of dictatorial régimes throughout Eastern Europe during 1989–90, it can more distantly be identified as following in the grand tradition of 1789, confirming and extending and elaborating the ‘rights of man’. Yet historical ‘progress’ rarely unfolds in an uncomplicated way, and — however momentous and however much the external world may be willing it to succeed — South Africa's new democracy, by fairly general agreement, faces daunting tasks.

The literature on drugs in Africa includes policy statements by government officials which, by and large, follow the line set by international organisations created to design counter-measures to drug consumption and trafficking, such as the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) of the United Nations. At this level the debate revolves largely around the effectiveness of different preventative strategies; control programmes and the performance of agencies are evaluated, and authors often bewail the perversion of moral values in the countries concerned, while appeals for financial assistance figure frequently in the media. Much less well known are the oral traditions and the popular culture in which the drug users, traffickers, and barons are ascribed certain roles. I would like to compare the material contained in these different bodies of work with my own field observations from the drug ‘scene’ in both high and low density areas of Lagos.

The success of World Bank policy has recently been proclaimed in Adjustment in Africa: reforms, results, and the road ahead (New York, published for the World Bank by Oxford University Press, 1994), which maintains that the Bank's macro-economic policies have improved economic performance, and that, in general, the greater the degree of implementation, the better the results. My review of this policy research report is intended to show that the presented data fail to support this claim and even bolster the contrary thesis.

As members of the Debt Crisis Network of Charities and Non-Governmental Organisations, my colleague, Bill Peters, and I, Co-Chairmen of the Campaign for Jubilee 2000, were invited to the annual presentation in London of the World Bank's very detailed Debt Tables that are prepared with great care each year by Malvina Pollock and her team in Washington. They draw on statistics from 129 (116 in 1992–3) third-world governments, which are dealt with country by country in four pages of analysis in Volume 2, having been aggregated in Volume 1 to give totals for each major area, and for different income groups. Both sets of figures include lengthy and informative introductions analysing the changes and structures in debt and finance for developing countries during the last year.

With five years to go until 2000 is upon us the debt campaign is at present concentrating on two elements important for success. The first is capturing and extending what might be described as grass-roots interest: signs already have appeared of some sympathy with, and even support for, the campaign among economists, bankers, civil servants, diplomats, and politicians; discreet encouragement from the inner courts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank has been recorded. The second is a change in the international, political, and intellectual climate to favour remission.

International concern over the pathology of political corruption increases apace. The last five years have witnessed a proliferation of organisations, conferences, and meetings dedicated to analysing the phenomenon as well as proposing workable policies of containment and control.This rising concern is a consequence partly of accelerating globalisation which not only increases awareness of the incidence and appalling scale of corruption but, more seriously, allows the contagion to infect the international system of trade and finance as a result of the activities of organised crime syndicates, money launderers, arms dealers, and the like. Furthermore, the ending of the cold war has meant that the ‘great’ powers are now having to confront the consequences of their longstanding indulgence, in the interests of political expediency, of sundry seedy dictators and their cronies; kleptocrats who seemed to devote much of their incumbency to transferring millions of dollars, sometimes billions, from the public treasury into Swiss bank accounts.

The Government of Uganda headed by President Yoweri Museveni, which came to power in January 1986, has made impressive progress since then in bringing about peace and national reconcilication, and in restoring the rule of law. It has turned the economy round from what might be described as ‘free fall’ to steady growth, albeit still heavily dependent on foreign aid. It has returned expropriated properties to their Asian owners, and has begun to attract foreign investment. Above all it has restored hope and given Ugandans back their pride. These are no means achievements, and place the country firmly among the few in Africa in recent years which have managed to bring about a real improvement in the overall quality of life for their citizens, albeit from a very low base. This would in itself be sufficient reason for looking more closely at what has been happening there. But, after all the disappointments of the past, it is also legitimate to ask whether these dramatic improvements are likely to be sustainable.

The preliminary results of on-going research in Burkina Faso, undertaken in collaboration with the University of Ouagadougou, suggest that the lack of titled land and land markets does not necessarily imply serious economic disadvantages, such as little investment or low productivity, and that the transaction costs of moving from a traditional to a modern system of land tenure would be far higher than if old arrangements continued to operate.