Questions about the rôle and position of the African state are not new, but today they are being asked with increased emphasis. The reasons for this vary with the position and perspective of the questioner, but they often include a concern about capacity and performance, about styles and orientations of leadership, and about the measure of representativeness and legitimacy which African governments enjoy within the society at large. In short, a strong current of opinion believes that there is a problem with the African state, and this concern has recently led to much discussion as to what its proper rôle is or should be, as well as fostering a variety of proposed and actual interventions by international organisations and consultants to help ‘solve’ the problem.

This article discusses the political situation in the Sudan in the aftermath of the 1985 popular uprising which reinstated parliamentary democracy, and focuses on the major challenges which confronted the civilian leaders before their downfall, notably the economic crisis, the issue of Sharia law, the agonising war in the South, and the corrupt and inefficient party system.

King Hassan II of Morocco informed the French press in December 1988 that he was willing to talk to the Frente Popular para la Liberación de Saguia el-Hamra y Río de Oro, known as the Polisario Front, which had been waging a war of national independence during the previous 15 years. Although the Moroccan Sovereign insisted that the subsequent meetings which took place on 4–5 January 1989 in Marrakesh constituted ‘discussions’ rather than ‘negotiations’, they undoubtedly represented a breakthrough in what has been dubbed by many as the ‘forgotten war’, not least because the mere acknowledgement of the Front's existence was in itself a de facto recognition of the Sahrawi liberation movement.

The term ‘Ibadan School’ is used here in two senses, locational and generic, and refers to studies on, and students of, federal finance that have employed a distinctive approach. Some of the most dominant figures in this group are (or used to be) on the staff of the University of Ibadan, and when it was decided after independence in 1960 that Nigerians themselves should handle the recurrent problems of federal finance, the task fall on the laps of a number of western-trained, liberal, and orthodox economists.

Economists using a narrowly defined neo-classical model have derived the hypothesis, often treated as an empirically demonstrated proposition, that traditional African systems of ‘communal’ land tenure are inefficient when land has scarcity value. By way of contrast, individualised tenure, typically defined as demarcation and registration of freehold title, is viewed as superior because owners are given incentives to use land most efficiently and thereby maximise agriculture's contribution to social well-being.

After yet another period of unrest and spreading resistance among the black majority, the Pretoria régime struck back in February 1988. Seventeen organisations that had manoeuvred precariously on the margins of legal toleration were summarily banned – that is, prohibited from ‘carrying on or performing any activities or act whatever’–many of their leaders were detained, while the survivors were harried underground.