Governance

The box was half the height of the minister’s desk. At the start of the day it was full to the brim with South Sudanese banknotes.

1. Zambia was founded as a company state in 1889. It still is a company state, based on copper rents. These copper rents have historically determined the fortunes and misfortunes of the State.

Since Kenya attained independence in 1963, successive regimes have adopted a policy of separating the military from civilian institutions as a means of ensuring civilian rule and avoiding the participation of military or paramilitary units in the machinations of governance.

President Jacob Zuma recently returned from Russia, a strange place to be for many when you’re in the middle of a crisis at home, as many a commentator here in South Africa has observed. Maybe he and Putin were swapping stories of a new series of Survivor.

The Indian Ocean island nation of 22 million people is famous for at least two things: its unique pristine biological diversity as well as its recurrent political turmoil, the most recent turn of which ended last January with the election of a new President.

South African and African higher education institutions must redefine themselves away from being ‘ivory towers’, and with greater urgency pursue a new democratisation mission of their societies, given the spectacular failure of political leadership in the region to entrench genuine democracy.

Last weekend, Wole Soyinka, the doyen of African literature and an indefatigable soldier for freedom, thundered against “a culture of civic callousness, a coarsening of sensibilities and a general hum

Yes, Ghanaians are now waking up to the reality that Ghana is in another phase of its perennial ‘crisis of a neo-colonial state’. I heard this phase in the 1970s, but it never seems to go away. As Ghanaians, can we afford to live in our past glory? I am ashamed to say not anymore.

Usually, when you are summoned to a memorial service, the deceased’s memory and/or body is still warm, with mourners responding to the shock of a passing.

Economics is a slippery subject indeed.