The shift from one-party to multiparty politics in many African countries has made the issue of democratisation a crucially equally important part of the development agenda. Efforts to create an economically enabling environment and build administrative and other capacities will be wasted if the political context is not favourable. This article focuses on political developments in Zambia to illustrate how a government elected on a ‘democratic ticket’ can become corrupted by the conscious development of a personality cult, and how the hunger for power can lead to the erosion of democratic values, electoral fraud, and the near breakdown of a relatively well-functioning multiparty system. A brief note on Zimbabwe is presented to amplify the Zambian case, and reform of the electoral system in Lesotho is outlined to suggest that the successful completion of elections on 25 May 2002 may serve as an excellent example of how, and under what conditions, ‘free and fair’, multiparty elections can be conducted in an African country.

There are a daunting number of maritime security threats and challenges in the north-western Indian Ocean region, both extant and potential. Indeed, the mere fact that the Indian Ocean constitutes the world’s largest swath of maritime space that is prone to the major menace of piracy (in the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden and in the waters off the north-east African coastline), as well as the sporadic threat of terrorism (by Islamic militias of Al-Shabaab in Somalia and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen), signifies that the region will arguably remain the maritime area with the greatest array of security challenges. However, while anti-piracy measures ought to have shaped regional policymaking, and the resources that a large and diverse group of states has devoted to addressing these maritime challenges have never been adequate to the task, largely successful coalition-building exercises and joint naval task-force operations have been encouraging. The transformation of Somali piracy from a haphazard activity into a highly organised, professionalised criminal enterprise is briefly elucidated by greed-grievance theory and supplemented by the theory of crime, also known as routine-activity theory.

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