An African response to the new wave of afro‐pessimism

The Afro‐pessimism that has resurfaced in parts of the world has no foundation and has provoked strong objections on several grounds. First, the timing is inappropriate as a number of new development indicators suggest that a good basis is now being laid in Africa for a better future economic performance. Secondly, there is an upsurge of Afro‐optimism among African and world leaders with the advent of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad). But more fundamentally, the growth concept which forms the basis for bleak projections on Africa's ability to reduce poverty, is flawed and the presumed strong growth‐poverty correlation empirically discredited. Additionally, it is a fallacy to assume that the reforms of the past 20 years were consistent with the continent's long‐term development trajectories given that the continent was unresponsive, remaining poor and ‘structurally undevelopable’.

On the contrary, these reforms have been pronounced by a World Bank assessment team as being defective in objectives and design, operationally dysfunctional and an example of massive resource misallocation, all of which have collectively worsened Africa's poverty and income disparity conditions. Particularly ironic is the concept of ‘structural stability’ prescribed in the ‘Memorandum for a New Start for German African Policy’, as it falls short of engaging fully and comprehensively the broader spectrum of structural distortions, weaknesses and rigidities, including the lack of economic structural transformation which is critical for achieving sustained economic growth and significant poverty reduction. The international community will now have to look at channelling resources to reshape, support and refine Africa's own initiative — Nepad.     

E-Governance to Cut Corruption in Public Service Delivery: A Case Study of Fiji

Experience in a number of developed and developing countries has shown that E-Governance initiatives can promote greater transparency with the goal of cutting corruption. This article examines perceptions of public service delivery in Fiji to explore the potential of E-Governance to cut corruption and improve governance. Based on a survey of community perceptions and a review of selected literature it suggests that service-delivery oriented IT initiatives can contribute to an effective, multi-pronged strategy to cut corruption in the Fiji public sector.     

Thermally induced entrance wound-like defect of the skull

A case of death due to car fire is described where the carbonised skull of the cremated corpse showed an ovoid defect of the cranial bone. The question arose whether this formed fracture was caused by a gunshot. But the reconstruction of the cranial remains with detached parts of the tabula externa provided evidence that the suspicious defect was to be classified as an uncommon heat-induced post-mortem artefact.     

Institutional effects on democratic transitions: Neo-Patrimonial regimes in Africa, 1989–1994

The outcomes of political transitions during the late 1980s and early 1990s varied considerably across sub-Saharan African countries. In their well-received book, Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle (1997a) concluded that the differences in sub-Saharan Africa's incumbent neo-patrimonial regimes shaped contingent factors such as political protests and military interventions that were important to transition outcomes, but did not themselves directly influence the success of transitions. Shortcomings in their statistical analysis, however, cast doubt on this conclusion. This article presents an ordered logit analysis of Bratton and van de Walle’s rich data set that corrects these flaws. It concludes that institutions did more than merely shape contingent events; they had powerful and independent direct effects on the outcomes of political transitions in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Frederick Solt is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With the support of a Fulbright-García Robles grant, he is currently conducting dissertation fieldwork on subnational democratization in Mexico. I would like to thank Guang Guo and Evelyne Huber, as well as theSCID editors and anonymous external reviewers, for their helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this work.