Africa’s Pasts and Africa’s Historians

Creation of local government districts has become an enterprise in Uganda, with many stakeholders having diverse opinions about the government's motives. This article examines the questions: What are the proclaimed and hidden or implicit intentions of the government? What evidence is available to provide reasonable interpretation of government action according to a particular rationale? By triangulating primary and secondary data and using a deductive approach, the study concludes that the initial intention of the government to create new districts to bring services and government closer to the people was consistent with the country's constitution and decentralisation policy. However, since 1997, and especially since 2006, other rationales have come to the fore, though not communicated as such in public policy statements. While we do not exclude ethnic rationale, the article finds more evidence that points to political patronage and a variant of gerrymandering (namely, that of splitting up districts while not redrawing boundaries).     

New Political Spaces and Public Sphere ‘Deliberativeness’ in Ecuador, 1822–2011

Widely adopted decentralisation policies have increased the significance of local citizen participation in Latin America, especially with regard to ‘new political spaces’, or spaces for citizen–government engagement distinct from both electoral democracy and non-electoral political activism. Since new political spaces tend to employ ‘deliberative democratic’ methods of decision making, their prospects depend to a considerable extent on the extent to which surrounding ‘public spheres’ enable or constrain deliberation. This paper focuses on the specific case of Ecuador, drawing upon theories of deliberative democracy and the public sphere to assess the likely prospects for new political spaces in Ecuador through an examination of the key aspects of Ecuadorian politics and society since independence from Spain in 1822.     

‘Ground-Truthing’ Chinese Development Finance in Africa: Field Evidence from South Africa and Uganda

A new methodology, Tracking Underreported Financial Flows (TUFF), leverages open-source information on development finance by non-transparent, non-Western donors. If such open-source methods prove to be valid and reliable, they can enhance our understanding of the causes and consequences of development finance from non-transparent donors including, but not limited to, China. But open-source methods face charges of inaccuracy. In this study we create and field-test a replicable ‘ground-truthing’ methodology to verify, update, and improve open-source data with in-person interviews and site visits in Uganda and South Africa. Ground-truthing generally reveals close agreement between open-source data and answers to protocol questions from informants with official roles in the Chinese-funded projects. Our findings suggest that open-source data collection, while limited in knowable ways, can provide a stronger empirical foundation for research on development finance.     

Quasilegality: khat,cannabis and Africa’s drug laws

Abstract

This article explores the concept of ‘quasilegality’ in relation to two of Africa’s drug crops: khat and cannabis. It argues that the concept is useful in understanding the two substances and their ambiguous relation to the statute books: khat being of varied and ever-changing legal status yet often treated with suspicion even where legal, while cannabis is illegal everywhere in Africa yet often seems de facto legal. The article argues that such quasilegality is socially significant and productive, raising the value of such crops for farmers and traders, but also allowing states to police or not police these substances as their interests and instincts dictate. It also argues that there is no clear link between the law on the statute book and the actual harm potential of these substances. Finally, it suggests that the concept has much wider use beyond these case studies of drugs in Africa in a world where global consensus on drug policy is cracking, and where many other objects of trade and activities find themselves in the blurred territory of the quasilegal.     

Debt,Uneven Development and Capitalist Crisis in South Africa: from Moody’s macroeconomic monitoring to Marikana microfinance mashonisas

The power, vulnerability and destructiveness of financial markets are out of control in South Africa, now among the most unequal, economically volatile and protest-intensive countries worldwide. While debt made itself felt in many sites, of interest in both criticising and promoting solutions is the ‘scale jumping’ required from South Africa’s national insertion into the world financial system, entailing the Reserve Bank setting very high interest rates, in turn leading to unpayable levels of consumer debt, and at a time when microfinance is suddenly discredited as a development strategy. Macro- and micro-financial problems fused in the course of the Marikana Massacre of August 2012, reflecting the local and global powers of the Moody’s rating agency and ‘mashonisa’ loan sharks. The over-indebted Marikana mineworkers, who led a strike which catalysed many wildcat strikes elsewhere, confronted the local crisis by displacing it into the national economy. This only heightened the contradictions that Moody’s punished with its September 2012 credit-rating downgrade. Without a genuine ‘debt relief’ solution at both scales, society will continue to unravel, as financialisation reaches its limits within one of the world’s most extreme cases of uneven and combined development.     

Universities and Knowledge-based Development in sub-Saharan Africa: Comparing University–Firm Interaction in Nigeria,Uganda and South Africa

Research on the changing role of universities in firm learning, innovation and national economic development has not extended systematically to low income countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on an empirical survey of firms and case studies of university practices, the article examines conditions of universities, firms and their potential for interaction across a national system of innovation in three countries, Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa, in order to contribute to such analysis. In so doing, it attempts to open up a research agenda in terms of the specific challenges African countries face.     

A home of one’s own: women and home ownership in the borderlands of post-apartheid South Africa and Lesotho

This study explores women’s practice of acquiring, “growing” and multiplying a “home of one’s own” in the borderlands of the Free State province of South Africa and Lesotho. It shows how a home of one’s own confirms that one is a person proper (motho, p. batho), thus distinguishable from any other entity (ntho, p. dintho). A woman establishes a home of one’s own as a domain of autonomy (ha ka) where she can reproduce persons for whom she provides a home (heso). After her death, such a home remains an incubator of personhood. As a process of apprehending self, this gendered practice does not necessarily require men’s involvement, which is important in a social landscape of many female-headed households. Their gendered conception of residential property, alongside the possibility to let or sell homes, enables women to support theirs and others’ aspirations as the crisis of unemployment in the borderlands deepens.     

Public Investments in Education and Children’s Academic Achievements

While the benefits of additional schooling in the developing world are widely recognised, the best use of scarce resources to improve academic achievement remains unclear. We compare public investments in school infrastructure, school improvement grants, teacher qualifications, and attendance incentives on independently-gathered measures of academic skills as well as grade progression for 8–11 year olds in India. We match a rich household survey containing a skills-assessment module, the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), with detailed measures of each district’s education resources from the District Information Survey on Education (DISE). We also include border-pair fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that incentives for children to attend school were associated with arithmetic, reading and writing skills, and grade progression. Investment in teachers were associated with greater probability a child could write and do more advanced math. Small improvement grants to schools were associated with better reading skills and writing ability. Investments in school infrastructure were only associated with improved writing ability.     

Migration diplomacy in the Global South: cooperation,coercion and issue linkage in Gaddafi’s Libya

Despite a recent resurgence in research on the politics of migration, foreign policy analysts have yet to approach cross-border population mobility as a distinct field of inquiry. Particularly within the Global South, scant work has theorised the interplay between migration and interstate bargaining. This article proposes the framework of migration diplomacy to examine how mobility features in states’ issue-linkage strategies, in both cooperative and coercive contexts. Drawing on Arabic, French and English primary sources, it empirically demonstrates the salience of its framework through an analysis of Libya’s migration diplomacy towards its Arab, African and European neighbours under Muammar Gaddafi.     

China’s Public Relations and Soft-power

China’s foreign strategy and foreign policy have changed tremendously. China began to build up soft-power of national culture and embark on public diplomacy, which aimed at: 1, increasingly exposing China to the world in terms of the state of affairs, policies and values, 2, creating a more objective and amicable milieu of opinions and 3, enhancing China’s international image. The author offers her personal perspectives on how to handle relations between pursuing public relations and building up national soft-power, how to advance national soft-power by public relations and the need to obviate ideological barriers.     

Women’s Empowerment and Wellbeing: Evidence from Africa

We use household survey data from Senegal to model the effects of empowerment within the home on married women’s wellbeing. The estimated effects of empowerment are at least as large as more conventional development indicators, such as household income. The size of the empowerment effect is robust to alternative estimation techniques, including an Instrumental Variables estimator.