Is neo-liberalism widening the differences between West African family farmers and agribusiness enterprises? Should regional agricultural policies focus solely on increasing production or should we value agriculture's role in the management of natural resources and the provision of employment? If so, how can family farmers and their representative organisations be offered greater security of land tenure and a voice in policy-making?

The campaign for the 19 November polls to elect both mayors and representatives in 33 municipalities around the country began officially last week. Although other political parties are contesting the local elections, the race is really between FRELIMO - which has ruled Mozambique since independence - and the RENAMO Electoral Union (a coalition of 10 parties with the main opposition party, RENAMO).

Can the worldwide expansion of distance education help developing countries to realise their education goals? Could new information and communication technologies (ICTs) help attain the Education for All goals adopted at the Dakar education forum? How can public and private providers and donors work together to increase the quality and spread of distance learning? A report from UNESCO’s Division of Higher Education reviews recent developments in open and distance learning.

Understanding globalisation is key for the future of development. Increasingly globalised patterns of economic exchange and political interaction shape the possibility of reforms to benefit the poor. There is an urgent need to assess what challenges this new context poses for development. In particular, what are the challenges to the objective of poverty reduction implied by globalisation?

Each issue of Pambazuka News I read with great interest, in particular its section on corruption as that is my special field of studies and activities. The issue 127 (The Politics of Corruption) was of special interest because of your editorial. I am not so impressed by the continuity in which some states appear every year at the bottom of corruption lists (and others at the top). In my paper for a conference in Seoul, Korea I criticised the methodology used to establish the list which in my view cannot result otherwise than as it is published every year, whereas if we would use other sources and another methodology, we would reach totally different results. One university professor I met in Seoul, also working on this subject, told me that in his ranking Chile ends up heading the list as the "cleanest" country! Of course, I do no want to belittle the phenomenon as it exists in Africa, but we should be more honest in our research in order to obtain better results and a more trustful ranking of countries than is now presented by the CPI of Transparency International. The chosen methodology is something like a holy cow which cannot be touched let alone be killed.

You are doing excellent work.

I would have liked the editorial (Pambazuka News 131: Liberation and the Unfinished Business of Democratic Consolidation in Southern Africa) to go into the gendered dynamics of frustration beyond the new class now handing over their briefcases to ubiquitous body guards. The other day some young ladies came to the Pan African Movement and I said I was a radical feminist in the sense that I want to get to the root of the problem: Why are women marginalized and why are promises not kept? Why have the goal posts shifted on socio economic transformation? Why are Africans and poor women peasants for example getting impoverished by the day in the much-vaunted globalised order?

Compare and contrast the arms sales figures to Africa: small arms alone account for $22b, money poured into the coffers of the rich as we subsist on less than a dollar a day. It was understood in the heady liberation days that the main objective was to craft a better world. When in Mwalimu Nyerere's words Africans would control the "commanding heights of the economy". Indeed the anti globalisation refuseniks cry: Another world is possible. But how is it possible for me when that is the cry of young unemployed workers in the North joined by several NGOs funded by Northern NGOs, many supported by the same callous G8 governments known for their double standards, surviving on Northern per diems and filing financial reports to the North, breeding dependency.

Where is the African state, who is it accountable to now that it is run by "independent Africans"? Or are they? Is it the leadership style, modes of control or what is known as raison d'etat in French. Has the State subsumed the populace to which it owes its rise? As a Pan Africanist I still wonder why all the objectives of African unity are still but a remote possibility, the economic and geo political rationale notwithstanding. An article on Tito Mboweni in yesterday's Monitor in Uganda opens thus: "TM...is probably not alone in his scepticism about a single African currency ..." Yes, unfinished business, a creeping Orwellian nightmare. But not forever. A luta continua.

It is frustrating and an embarrassment that after more than 50 years of development aid to countries like Zambia, the poverty levels are rising instead of declining. While the Zambian leadership - past and present - may have their share of blame in our current economic and social malaise, we feel the donor community with their insistence on the neoliberal prescriptions should equally shoulder the blame, argues this editorial in the Lusaka Post.

A group of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) has accused the Canadian government's export financing agency of sending the wrong signal on corruption for not sanctioning companies that are convicted of illegal acts abroad. This came after Export Development Canada said it would not bar Canadian engineering company Acres International from future contracts. Earlier this year Acres was convicted in Lesotho of paying bribes to obtain contracts from the Highlands Water Project.

SciDev.Net has created a one-stop online guide where you can keep up to date with the latest progress of science in HIV/AIDS prevention and eradication. By bringing together topical coverage and background resources, the guide charts recent developments and explores promising new avenues of scientific research.

Children are being recruited and used as soldiers "on a massive scale" around the world, with groups in 15 countries handing weapons to youngsters in armed conflict, according to a UN report issued last week. The report names African countries like Burundi, Congo, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sudan and Uganda as countries that have been found to be recruiting or using children as fighters.

Members of Parliament have demanded an investigation into the alleged bribe scandal regarding the proposed Bujagali hydropower project in Jinja, east of Kampala. The legislators demanded to know the MPs who received bribes, saying these were serious allegations that were tarnishing the image of parliament.

The November 19 elections in Mozambique will take place in a context where current economic growth has brought little benefit to the majority of a population stricken by unemployment, poverty and the beginning of the transition from an asymptomatic HIV pandemic to one of full-blown AIDS, says a briefing from the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies. "In addition, the impact of recent political crises, largely connected to widespread corruption and reprehensible behaviour by the main political parties, cannot be ignored as factors influencing the election outcome."

In 2002, for the sixth consecutive year, developing countries made a net transfer of financial resources of almost 200 billion dollars to other countries, the United Nations Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan has said. Annan who spoke at the high-level dialogue of the general Assembly on financing for development, said such a situation lacked common sense. "Funds should be moving from developed countries to developing countries, but these numbers tell us the opposite is happening," he said.

The optimal inflation target is generally higher for a high-corruption country than for a low-corruption country. Therefore, an inflation target of 1.4 percent, that is common among developed countries, is generally not something to be emulated by developing countries, says an International Monetary Fund paper that examines the role of corruption in the design of monetary policies for developing countries.

A company connected to Mpumalanga minister for public works Steve Mabona got a multimillion-rand contract from his department - as did other companies associated with a Mabona relative. These contracts raise new and substantial conflict-of-interest questions about Mabona, whom the Mail & Guardian last week showed to have received R1-million from another contractor to his department.

Liberation movements in Southern Africa emerged from the anti-colonial struggle as political parties in government. Since taking power they have consolidated their position in both the political arena, as well as within most, if not all, state and parastatal structures. In securing a power of definition in the political arena they are shaping – to the extent of manipulating - public discourse to suit their ends. Why have the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), to a lesser but clearly visible extent the South West African Peoples Organisation (SWAPO of Namibia) - and also to some degree the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa - not displayed a more consistent commitment to democratic principles and/or practices? Why have they also largely abandoned their once-sacrosanct goal of socio-economic transformation aimed at reducing inherited imbalances in the distribution of wealth?

In examining these issues, contributors to a just published book volume probed beyond the myths and legends, which have long surrounded southern Africa’s liberation movements. They acknowledge that while these organisations were waging war on systems of institutionalised injustice, they did not always display sensitivity to human rights issues and democratic values. The struggle for a ‘good cause’ and the noble goals associated with it did not prevent them from falling prey to authoritarian patterns of rule and undemocratic (at times violent) practices towards real or imagined dissidents within their ranks.

Even the popular support for their struggle expressed by local groups was at times based more on coercion and the manipulation of internal contradictions among the colonised than on genuine resistance to the colonial state. There were varying degrees of internal repression inside the liberation movements shaping a mindset far from liberal. This is particularly true of the Zimbabwean and Namibian cases. But some of these anti-democratic tendencies are also detectable of late in South Africa too. A recent study suggests a high degree of political intolerance among South Africans who, it seems, dislike political enemies a great deal and perceive them as threatening.

An argument presented in this volume is that the political change which has occurred in those Southern African societies shaped by settler colonialism can be characterised as a transition from controlled change to changed control. A new political elite has ascended the commanding heights. It employs selective narratives and memories relating to their liberation wars as justification of their unquestioned continuation of rule obtained. They have constructed or invented a new set of traditions to establish an exclusive post-colonial legitimacy under the sole authority of one particular agency of social forces. The (self-)mystification of the liberators has played an essential role in this fabrication of political culture and ideology.

These elites have also developed militant notions of inclusion or exclusion as key factors in shaping their postcolonial identities claimed to be collective in the sense of ‘national’. Early post-independence notions of reconciliation and slogans like ‘unity in diversity’ have given way to a politically correct identity form. Those in (political) power apply their definition along narrow ‘we-they’ or ‘with-us-against-us’ lines. Simultaneously, the boundaries between party and government are blurred and replaced by a growing equation of party and government. Opposition or dissent is increasingly considered as hostile and the dissenter sometimes branded as ‘enemy of the people’. In a University of Amsterdam doctoral thesis of 2001 on Zimbabwe it is argued that power relations had changed, but ‘perceptions of power had not changed. The layers of understanding regarding power relations, framed by socialisation and memory, continued to operate.’ The new actors executed power in relation to opposition unchanged, ‘as their mental framework remained in the colonial setting’. Hence patterns from colonial rule of ‘citizens’ ruling the ‘subjects’ were repeated and reproduced.

With this tendency towards autocratic rule and the subordination of the state to the party, a reward system of social and material favours in return for loyalty has emerged. Self-enrichment by way of a system of rent- or sinecure-capitalism has become the order of the day. The term ‘national interest’ has been appropriated and now means solely what the post-colonial ruling elite decides it means. It is used to justify all kinds of authoritarian practice while the term ‘anti-national’ or ‘unpatriotic’ is applied to any group that resists the power of the ruling elite of the day.

These selective mechanisms for the exercise and retention of post-independence power are not too dissimilar from the commandist notions that operated during the days of the liberation struggle in exile. As Rhoda Kadalie - a frustrated former ANC activist - noted: ‘Many of my former comrades have become loyal to a party rather than to principles of justice. (…) Unfortunately it is true that those who have been oppressed make the worst democrats. There are recurring patterns in the behaviour of liberation parties – when they come to power they uphold the most undemocratic practices’. A similar sobering observation by another among the disappointed was quoted in The Guardian (16 May 2001): ‘It is interesting to see who still carries their own briefcase. These are people I’ve known for years when we were in the field. Some of them are still great but some of them have become very pompous. When you have a car and a driver and you’re travelling first class, some people change.’

These examples show that outside of the inner sanctum of the political arena critical voices have emerged. They include those of some who played roles as active supporters of the liberation struggle. A new and sharper debate has emerged. It deals increasingly with the post-colonial content of liberation. As a result, it questions the validity of the concept of solidarity based on a shared past, and calls for the end of the cultivation of ‘heroic narratives’. The much-celebrated attainment of formal independence is no longer unreservedly equated with liberation, neither with the creation of lasting democracy. Now, closer scrutiny is paid to both the inherited and self-developed structural legacies, which have imposed limits to the realising of real political, cultural, social and economic alternatives in the post-colonial era.

This involves a growing recognition that armed liberation struggles operating along military lines in secret underground conditions were not suitable breeding grounds for establishing democratic systems of governance. To be successful, the forms of resistance employed in the struggle were themselves organised on hierarchical and authoritarian lines. In this sense, then, the new societies carried within them essential elements of the old system. Thus it should come as no surprise that aspects of the colonial system have reproduced themselves in the struggle for its abolition and subsequently, in the concepts of governance applied in post-colonial conditions.

There is a parallel here to Alexis de Toqueville’s celebrated retrospective on the shortcomings of the French Revolution. It reflected the frustration provoked by the restoration of old power structures under Louis Napoleon after his coup d’etat in 1851 and provides relevant insights to our southern African cases. De Toqueville argued that the French revolutionaries in the process of implementing the structures of the new system retained the mentalities, habits, even the ideas, of the old state while seeking to destroy it. And they built on the rubble of the old state to establish the foundation of the new society. To understand the revolution and its achievement, he concluded, one has to forget about the current society and instead interrogate the buried one. His conclusion was that the early freedom of the revolution had been replaced by another form of repression. Revolutionaries in the process of securing, establishing and consolidating their power bases had sacrificed the declared ideals and substantive issues they were fighting for in the name of revolution.

This process is not confined to the sphere of conscious and deliberate effort. It is also a result of particular socialisation processes. The recognition of the relationship between power, discourse and political institutions and practices has much to contribute to the study of the politics under scrutiny. The conventional approach to see domination and resistance as an oppositional pair is misleading. Resistance cannot be idealized as pure opposition to the order it opposes. Instead, it operates inside a structure of power that it both challenges and helps to sustain. Hence, the seizure of state power and control over means of production does not secure a solution alone, since a change of economic and political structures of domination and inequality requires a parallel and profound change of their nature and effects.

It is in this context that the essays in this reader just published with the South African Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) reflect on the state of the democratisation process in post-colonial Southern Africa. Case studies are not limited to Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia, but include Botswana and Lesotho also for comparative insights into similarities and differences. As the sub-title to this volume suggests, there remains much in the way of unfinished business in regard to consolidating democracy in post-colonial southern Africa. This applies not only to the political process but also to our analytic understanding of the dynamics of the process.

These essays represent a start with a grappling of the issues. The recognition that the model of liberation democracy as developed in Namibia and Zimbabwe is inherently elitist and potentially authoritarian is a significant step forward in the debate. The debate needs to go on and be further developed. Other southern African cases, most particularly Mozambique, need to be scrutinised and brought into the analysis while a critical eye needs to be kept on South Africa as it completes its first decade of democratic rule. There is still much work to undertake for the scholarly community concerned with these issues – as well as the political and grass root activists still seeking emancipation.

* Please send comments on this editorial to

* This is a shorter revised version of an Introduction to Henning Melber (ed.), Limits to Liberation in Southern Africa. The unfinished business of democratic consolidation. Cape Town: HSRC Press 2003. The just published volume is distributed in Africa by Blue Weaver (Cape Town/South Africa, [email]booksales@hsrc.ac.za), in Europe from The Nordic Africa Institute (Uppsala/Sweden, [email]orders@nai.uu.se) and in the USA and Canada from Independent Publishers Group (Chicago/USA, [email]frontdesk@ipgbook.com).
The author has been the Director of the Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek from 1992 to 2000 and is the Research Director of the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala since then. He had joined SWAPO of Namibia in 1974.

The Department of Science and Technology and the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad) are co-hosting a conference on science and technology to find ways of unblocking impediments to its development on the continent. All the African Union member states will be represented at the five-day Nepad Ministerial Conference that started in Johannesburg on Wednesday.

Zimbabwe's High Court on Tuesday reserved judgment on the petition by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) to have the results of the March 2002 presidential elections annulled. The MDC, whose leader Morgan Tsvangirai lost to President Robert Mugabe, alleges that Mugabe's victory was due to a number of irregularities and are petitioning the court to declare the election invalid. If the MDC is successful, another election will have to be held within 90 days.
Related Link:
* Read the MDC legal team's reports on day one and two of the trial by visiting http://www.zwnews.com/electionchallengedaytwo.doc

The fight against corruption entered a new phase this week with the promise of an all-out attack on graft among Cabinet ministers, MPs and top civil servants. It follows the first phase of reforms which targeted the Judiciary.