The article analyses the relationship between the Anglican Church of Rwanda and evangelical Episcopalians in the United States. In 2000, the archbishop of Rwanda, Emmanuel Kolini, in a move that gained great support for Rwanda's post-genocide recovery, ordained several bishops to preside over congregations of orthodox, evangelical Americans who had severed their relationship with the Episcopalian Church of the United States over issues such as the blessing of same-sex marriages and the ordination of openly gay clergy. The result was the creation of the Anglican Mission in the Americas, a missionary province in the United States that acknowledges Kolini as its archbishop. Such actions have made Rwanda the current cause célèbre not only of AMIA but the wider evangelical community. While the relationship offers great support for Rwanda's recovery, the Anglican Church has presented to American evangelicals a misleading narrative of Rwanda's past and present political situation.

This article addresses the question of why Ethiopia's post-1991 decentralisation reform is not taking the desired direction of matching diverse needs with available resources and creating accountable, responsive and autonomous regional governments. Given regional governments' relatively diverse socio-economic positions, the intention of the reform to create autonomous regions with devolved administrative, fiscal and political power is appropriate. Nonetheless, the implementation of the elements of the reform – expenditure assignment, revenue assignment, intergovernmental fiscal transfer and sub-national borrowing – is flawed. Existing studies that question the effectiveness of Ethiopia's devolution focus on political or fiscal aspects, and fail to link the de facto centre-region political power relationship with intergovernmental fiscal relations. This article, based on detailed field research in three regional governments, argues that the flawed intergovernmental fiscal relations reform is best explained by the clientelistic relationship between central and regional political parties.

Religious modes of thinking about the world are widespread in Africa, and have a pervasive influence on politics in the broadest sense. We have published elsewhere a theoretical model as to how the relationship between politics and religion may be understood, with potential benefits for observers not just of Africa, but also of other parts of the world where new combinations of religion and politics are emerging. Application of this theoretical model requires researchers to rethink some familiar categories of social science.

Africa's police are usually assessed in terms of their adherence to democratic criteria. This results in inaccurate analysis because the police are actually governed according to presidential preference. This article uses the role of Africa's chief police officers to explore the relationship between presidents and their police, and the location of influence within the police. It identifies the significant variables shaping police governance in four countries with comparable institutional structures – Ghana, Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe – and confirms the negligible role played by public accountability.

Since the acceptance of multi-party democracy as the most viable alternative to autocracy and military rule in Africa, democratic rule has become the vogue. Nigeria's attempt at democracy was (and is) accompanied by patronage politics, whereby certain personalities exact great influence on the political process. This study spotlights Chief Lamidi Adedibu and his patronage style in Nigerian politics, and shows that Adedibu gained political ‘patronic’ prominence during Nigeria's Third Republic in the 1990s, through the provision of the survival needs of the poor majority who are, mostly, used as thugs for protection against challenges from opponents and for political leverage. Since then, he has remained a ‘valuable tool’ of ‘any government in power’ and politicians ready to provide the necessary goods for onward transmission to clients.

Malawi, like other countries in Africa, has a new land policy designed to clarify and formalise customary tenure. The country is poor with a high population density, highly dependent on agriculture, and the research sites are matrilineal-matrilocal, and near urban centres. But the case raises issues relevant to land tenure reform elsewhere: the role of ‘traditional authorities’ or chiefs vis-à-vis the state and ‘community’; variability in types of ‘customary’ tenure; and deepening inequality within rural populations. Even before it is implemented, the pending land policy in Malawi is intensifying competition over land. We discuss this and the increase in rentals and sales; the effects of public debates about the new land policy; a new discourse about ‘original settlers’ and ‘strangers’; and political manoeuvring by chiefs.