Professor ’Jìmí O. Adésínà, Department of Sociology, Rhodes University, Grahamstown.

This paper explores Africa’s experience with regional development programming before the crafting of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. This is in the light of prevailing amnesia on Africa’s efforts at regional development programmes; something that contrast with memory of Africa’s more political project: the OAU. The paper focuses on the Lagos Plan of Action (LPA, 1980) and Africa’s Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programme (AAF-SAP), as a corrective to this ‘silence’ and invention of history.

The paper examines the discourses central to LPA and AAF-SAP; their diagnoses of the crisis of dependent capitalism in Africa, and prognoses for shifting to a path of sustainable development. The paper examines some areas of strength and weaknesses in these efforts at crafting a continental development programme. The paper concludes with some notes on the continued relevance of diagnoses of Africa’s development crisis at the heart of the LPA and AAF-SAP, and their agenda for overcoming the crisis of dependent capitalism in Africa.

The loss of control over the nation’s water resources and the crucial function of water supply - as these steadily come under the control of private monopolies, the gigantic foreign companies and global banks – puts into serious dispute any notion and possibility of independence for a small nation like Namibia. The aim of this paper is to sketch out the global context within which the strategy of water privatisation is unfolding and to look at the way in which global and national institutions interact to produce water policies and technologies at a local level. Ultimately the aim and purpose of this study is to explain the cause and reflect on the consequences of privatising water services in a parched country such as Namibia.

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