A corpus on transition to democracy in Africa has been developed. This body of work has different constitutive elements: conceptualization, institutional arrangements, conditions for consolidation and the reasons for its reemergence in the 1980s as an agenda for political change (Ake 1994; Hyden and Bratton 1992; Gibbon, Bangura, and Ofstad 1992). Nigeria's experience of the transition to democracy has received more attention than that of any other country in the continent (Ihonvbere 1994; Campbell 1994; Reno 1993; Agbese 1991; Diamond 1991). However, the current preoccupations and dominant discourses have largely concealed the agencies in the struggle for democracy, even though civil society has received some attention. Likewise, there are very few empirical works. Similarly, the discursive community on transition has also privileged a particular form of democracy, liberalism, without questioning its gender bias. While there is an emerging literature on African women in political transition (Tripp 1994; Abdullah 1993; Campbell 1993; Nzomo 1993; Pepera 1993; Seidman 1993; Beall, Hassim, and Todes, 1989), compared with the dominant literature on the subject, it is inconsequential. Further, much of the literature on African women in political transition has treated women in isolation from the gendered structures of power and society. Moreover, in most of this literature as well as the dominant literature on transition, there is silence on the relationship between political and economic processes despite the similarity in their basic doctrine, liberalism and the linkage of these two issues in the donor community and by African governments (Beckman 1992; Bangura 1992). This article hopes to fill in some of the gaps noted by including Nigerian women's conceptual challenge to democracy; the traditions from which women draw their discourses; the male-bias of the state; women's participation in democratic struggles both at the level of politics and economics; and the limitations of the women's movement.

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While the Nigerian state, in association with multilateral institutions, seized the opportunity of the 1972-1974 drought and the resulting famine to introduce large scale mechanized irrigation schemes as "development" projects, the repercussions of such projects on the people so affected has been largely ignored. As the projects in Bakolori and Kano demonstrate, however, state intervention has had a negative impact and has led to massive displacement of communities. As a result, rural-urban migration has intensified with the consequence of increased social conflict, including the Maitatsine rising of the 1980s.

Considerable political contention has developed over the dams and large-scale irrigation schemes in northern Nigeria. The reasons are the resettlement of people that they require as well as their environmental effects, their economic inefficiency and other social consequences. This article discusses these issues with reference specifically to the Kafin Zaki Dam proposal, challenging the conventional image of an alignment of international organizations and domestic elites on one side and grassroots forces on the other. The conclusion is that the political contest is carried out essentially at the elite level and that state and international agencies at times do oppose mega-projects that displace people and disrupt ecological processes.