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In the developing world, politicians often use public office to redistribute resources to their core constituencies. This form of clientelistic exchange motivates ethnic voting in Africa and may also shape broader attitudes toward the state. But does clientelism retain its power as cross-ethnic contact increases, or might new forms of political linkage emerge? This article uses public opinion data from urban Nigeria to investigate how social position affects trust in elected local officials. The article finds that local ethnic minorities are less trusting of local officials, but this trust deficit does not diminish as cross-ethnic contact rises. For members of locally dominant ethnic groups, however, greater cross-ethnic contact and lessened ethnic attachment dampen expressed trust in local elected officials. The article argues that ethnic clientelism is resilient in urban contexts but that scholarship must take a more nuanced approach to assessing membership in clientelistic coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can governments in low-trust settings overcome their credibility deficit when promoting public welfare? To answer this question, we evaluate the effectiveness of the Liberian government's door-to-door canvassing campaign during the 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic, which aimed to persuade residents to voluntarily comply with policies for containing the disease. Combining data from an original representative survey of Monrovia during the crisis with variation in the campaign's reach and using multiple identification strategies, we find that the informational campaign was remarkably effective at increasing adherence to safety precautions, support for contentious control policies, and general trust in government. To uncover the pathways through which the campaign proved so effective, we conducted over 80 in-depth qualitative interviews in 40 randomly sampled communities. This investigation suggests that local intermediaries were effective because their embeddedness in communities subjected them to monitoring and sanctioning, thereby assuring their fellow residents that they were accountable and thus credible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leveraging comparisons within and across cases, this article investigates legal mobilization for social rights in Colombia and South Africa. This kind of rights contestation represents a new phenomenon, in which both ordinary citizens and judicial actors have come to view problems related to access to health care, housing, education, and social security through the lens of the law. Research on legal mobilization has tended toward one-sided examinations of this complex phenomenon, focusing primarily on either legal claims-making or judicial decision-making, and neglecting to fully theorize the relationship between the two. Drawing on an analysis of rights claims and 178 interviews, this article aims to correct these imbalances. In doing so, it offers a generalizable model that accounts for the social construction of legal grievances and the development of judicial receptivity to particular kinds of claims, and explains both the emergence and continuation of legal mobilization for social rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars argue that access to information about a politician's programmatic performance helps voters reward good performers and punish poor ones. But in places where resources are made conditional on collective electoral behavior, voters may not want to defect to vote for a strong legislative performer if they do not believe that others will. We argue that two conditions must hold for information about politician performance to affect voter behavior: Voters must care about the information and believe that others in their constituency care as well. In a field experiment around legislative elections in Benin, voters rewarded good programmatic performance only when information was both made relevant to voters and widely disseminated within the electoral district. Otherwise, access to positive legislative performance information actually lowered vote share for the incumbent's party. These results demonstrate the joint importance of Salience and voter coordination in shaping information's impact in clientelistic democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do voters evaluate women candidates in places where traditional gender norms are strong? We conduct a survey experiment in Malawi to assess both whether citizens discriminate against women candidates and how other salient candidate characteristics—political experience, family status, policy focus, and gendered kinship practices—interact with candidate gender to affect citizen support. Contrary to our expectations, we find citizens prefer women candidates ceteris paribus, and women and men with the same traits are evaluated similarly. Yet, we find two unexpected ways women candidates are disadvantaged in the electoral process. First, we find that citizens prefer candidates who are married with young children, a profile much more common among men than women candidates in practice. Second, we find pervasive qualitative reports of negative campaigning that likely affected citizens' evaluations of actual women candidates, while not affecting evaluations of hypothetical candidates. We discuss how our results speak to the ways gender biases operate in practice across political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authoritarian regime in Angola seeks to control every dimension of life in the country interfering with a set of fundamental rights such as the freedom of assembly, of movement and of expression. However, by their very fluid nature, by the inherent massing and anonymity, the contexts of mobility not only offer a set of social interactions rarely allowed in the current political panorama, but also provide an escape to effective surveillance and monitoring from authorities. Furthermore, the multidirectional encounters that mobility enacts — with people, situations, events, spatial mnemonics — create the conditions for the acknowledgement of an individual and collective plight. The absence of a likely public space for the discussion of certain compelling issues transforms the contexts of mobility into ephemeral moving assemblies, into unconventional sites of resistance where a sociopolitical culture is hatching. Collective transport's ambiguous anthropological qualities configure a highly productive ethnographic setting for the surreptitious researcher and an inescapable context if one is to assess Angola's current reality. By depicting the social life of Angola's public transport I will unveil the several mechanisms and possibilities behind these moving assemblies examining how mobility and sociopolitical mobilization intertwine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governance in post-colonial Africa has been challenging. Most of the nationalists and political elites that emerged as leaders of post-colonial African states appeared unready for governance when independence was granted, leaving most of the emergent states in the hand of unprepared leaders who grope in an unfamiliar jungle of Western-styled politics and governance. The consequences of this adventure for the development of post-independence Africa have been grave. Adopting a historical approach and using content analysis, this paper examines the source of problematic governance in post-independence Africa and the challenges to rethinking it. It interrogates measures for liberating African states from the difficulty of reengineering governance. It observes that some common factors mostly celebrated as positively impacting African states, in no small way, serve as limitations to rethinking governance in the continent and concluded that rethinking governance in Africa is not impossible. Some of the encumbrances to rethinking governance are transitory, which would change once the supporting dynamics change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Kwasi Wiredu's arguments on democracy and consensus. In Cultural Universals and Particulars, Wiredu presented consensual democracy as a better means of decision-making process than majoritarian democracy in traditional African life and governance. He defended this claim with two main arguments: (i) that consensus takes care of the interests of the minority, and (ii) that consensual democracy permits substantive representations. Contrary to Wiredu's claim, this article argues that the implication or challenges of majoritarian democracy identified by Wiredu do not necessarily (i) undermine majoritarian democracy, and (ii) make Wiredu's suggested decision by consensus a workable means of decision-making in present African society. Our aim in this paper is not to defend majoritarian democracy as a plausible position; rather, the bulk of the paper is devoted to a critical assessment of Wiredu's defense of consensual democracy. The paper argues that at a certain level of discussion, Wiredu's idea of consensus (consensual democracy) shares some similarities and also faces similar challenges to (majoritarian) democracy. The paper concludes that, logically speaking, democracy and consensus are not mutually exclusive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing theories of electoral targeting focus on voter partisanship and thus are at odds with the significant vote switching and weakly institutionalized parties that characterize young clientelistic democracies. We propose and test a theory of group-level targeting driven by groups' capacity to coordinate votes and parties' differential information about such capacity. Unlike current theories, ours assumes that most groups are nonpartisan and respond to prior targeting as a function of their coordinating capacity, often reflecting broker effectiveness. We empirically exploit the context of Senegal where new incumbent parties are less well-informed than outgoing incumbents about groups' coordinating capacity but, to maximize future support, learn from local vote tallies and refine targeting strategies over time. Using village-level electoral and public goods data, we show our theory can account for new incumbent parties' learning and targeting patterns across groups and over time, thus contributing to understanding electoral targeting in young clientelistic democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among studies on prospects and challenges of democratization in the developing world with particular reference to issues of democratic sustenance and consolidation, a very limited body of work understudies Africa. Today, some states in Africa where liberal democracy was thought to be taking root have witnessed its truncation either through military putsches and/or social revolution. In some instances, many of these countries unconsciously have found themselves in crises so severe that they herald a bleak future for democratic practice. Accordingly, this study considers the problem with the consolidation of liberal democracy in Africa dual focused. It assumes that liberal democratization presents a systemic dilemma in the legitimation crisis that it poses for Africa. And, as a result, a set of endogenous factors, which over time have characterized contemporary African socio-political dynamics, nurse the consequent problem of a lack of democratic consolidation. However, experts and policymaking elite have long sought to mitigate this complex mix of disruptive forces within the polity by bringing the African logic of modernization into the realm of liberal governance. To this end, this study not only calls for the insertion of excluded African political thought and history into the discourse on regime legitimacy, but also transcends mono-causal stereotypes for democratic non-consolidation in Africa with a dialectical evaluation on the continent's need to reinvent liberal democracy in line with local peculiarities and critical interests of its socio-political base, without sacrificing extant democratic rights, values, and principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does government bias affect prospects for peace agreements in communal conflicts? Government bias has been shown to have a strong impact on the incidence and dynamics of localized ethnic conflict, but the way that it affects conflict resolution remains underexplored. I argue that government bias makes the conflict parties less likely to overcome the commitment problem, because they cannot trust the government's willingness to guarantee or uphold any agreement they reach. Consequently, bias reduces the chances that the parties are able to reach a peace agreement. A systematic comparison of four cases in Kenya provides support for this argument. I also distinguish between bias related to strategic interest and bias related to relationships, and find that the former is more durable, whereas the latter is more likely to be influenced by political turnover, thereby opening up possibilities for peacemaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Review: Promoting the African Union

The past haunts Africa. Futuristic policies on Africa are based on critical assessments of present possibilities rooted in Africa’s rather unique and rich history and geography. Therefore, Africa appears to be a continent with a past but not a future. As the 21st century and the third millennium loom on the horizon, it is an auspicious time for a fresh examination of the past, present and future prospects of the human condition in Africa against the background of relevant positive and negative international developments. A fresh understanding is needed of what is happening in Africa today and what it will mean not only for the continent but also for the rest of the world in the next century and beyond. The quest for that understanding defines the context of this essay’s focus on the social history of four generations of Africans and how the latest among them is poised to socially reconstruct a new Africa with far reaching implications on community and national life in Africa and on international politics in the next century and beyond.

What types of leaders are effective in organizing public goods that require community contributions? In many settings, both citizens and state agencies provide financing, labor, and oversight of local projects. This article analyzes the effects of elected Members of Parliament (MPs) and hereditary chiefs in facilitating co-produced public goods in Zambia. MPs have electoral motivations to provide public goods but may not be well-positioned to organize community contributions. Chiefs lack electoral incentives but typically have long time horizons and local social connections. I analyze the effects of both types of leaders on the provision of co-produced public goods through a natural experiment. I take advantage of lapses in leadership following the deaths of leaders in office to show that chiefs have a significant effect on co-produced public goods but MPs do not. Auxiliary analysis suggests that chiefs' effect on community contributions depends on the length of their time horizons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who are Africa's swing voters? This article argues that in settings where ethnicity is politically salient, core and swing are defined by whether ethnic groups have a co-ethnic leader in the election. For members of ethnic groups with a co-ethnic in the race, there is typically less uncertainty about which party or candidate will best represent the group's interests. For members of groups without a co-ethnic in the race, uncertainty is often greater, making these voters potentially more receptive to campaign persuasion and more likely to change voting intentions during the campaign. Consistent with these expectations, panel data from Kenya's 2013 presidential election shows that voters from groups without a co-ethnic in the race were more than two and a half times more likely to change their voting intentions during the campaign period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 2011 and 2014, there were 5 times as many protests per annum in Africa as there had been in 2000. The majority of these protests were related to deteriorating economic conditions, poor service delivery, inadequate wages, and economic inequality. These protests, which we term "valence protests," do not fit easily into typical narratives about contentious behavior: they are neither social movements, nor revolutionary, nor a manifestation of organized labor—instead, many of these protests are a collective expression of a valence issue of which the government is well aware. We argue for a different conceptual framework for valence protests and contend that they are a way for politically engaged citizens to express their political preferences when voting is insufficient. Using Round 5 Afrobarometer data, we find empirical support for this claim. We also find that citizens more readily communicate political preferences through protest in countries governed by dominant parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political competition is expected to become less particularistic as prosperity rises and a middle class emerges. But particularistic linkages persist despite rising wealth in urban Ghana. Politicians are unable to commit to campaign promises with voters who want large-scale public policies, many of whom are in the middle class. This creates incentives to avoid mobilizing many of these voters and to ignore their preferences. As a result, voters who want major public policies rather than patronage differentially refrain from participation, allowing poorer voters to dominate the electorate and party organizations. This may only reinforce politicians' disincentives to make policy appeals, and stall the emergence of more policy-based electoral competition even as the middle class grows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do men and women representatives hold different legislative priorities? Do these priorities align with citizens who share their gender? Whereas substantive representation theorists suggest legislators' priorities should align with their cogender constituents, Downsian-based theories suggest no role for gender. We test these differing expectations through a new originally collected survey data set of more than 800 parliamentarians and data from more than 19,000 citizens from 17 sub-Saharan African countries. We find that whereas parliamentarians prioritize similar issues as citizens in general, important gender differences also emerge. Women representatives and women citizens are significantly more likely to prioritize poverty reduction, health care, and women's rights, whereas men representatives and men citizens tend to prioritize infrastructure projects. Examining variation in congruence between countries, we find that parliamentarians' and cogender citizens' priorities are most similar where democratic institutions are strongest. These results provide robust new evidence and insight into how and when legislator identity affects the representative process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post 1990s era of multiparty democracy in Africa, concerted attempts towards power retention by incumbents through 'Third-termism' has presented the most daunting challenge. Employing the development theory of testing case studies, this article examines progress made on the continent since the adoption of competitive multiparty democracy since the 1990s. Citing democratic stagnation in Togo, Gabon, Cameroon and other related states, the research reveals that sitting regimes have mastered the art of undertaking constitutional electoral processes without changing the outcome. This is a phenomenon that appears to have escaped the attention of researchers and analysts. The conclusion drawn is that, the quest for 'Third-terms extending periods in power by long-serving incumbents and some surviving siblings has become the syndrome that reflects the embedded deep states which are immune to electoral challenge for the foreseeable future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 1963, some three months before sports administrators from around the world were to descend on Nairobi for the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) annual session, the meeting was in jeopardy. Government officials in Kenya announced that in protest against white minority rule on the African continent, delegates from Portugal and South Africa were to be denied entry visas. Their decision culminated in the eleventh-hour transfer of the IOC session from Nairobi, Kenya, to Baden-Baden, West Germany. Kenyan politicians, on the cusp of ousting British colonial control, were using the Nairobi IOC gathering of 1963 to advance the anti-colonial resolutions of the newly established Organization of African Unity (OAU) in solidarity with Africa's independent states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, African courts have played an important role in the conduct of free and fair elections. In Kenya, the Supreme Court nullified the presidential election of the incumbent. These rulings challenge the conventional wisdom that courts in hybrid regimes always support power holders despite blatant evidence of electoral fraud. Furthermore, these sparks of judicial resistance deserve our scholarly attention as they have the power to start the democratization process or limit further autocratization. Hence, this paper seeks to understand the conditions under which courts are able to resist incumbents' pressure to legitimize electoral malpractice and side with the opposition. I argue that institutional reforms incentivize courts to resist the incumbent's pressure and to rule in favor of the opposition during electoral disputes under two conditions. First, institutional reforms must reinforce de jure independence by enacting effective legal and constitutional mechanisms that prevent the executive branch from undermining the separation of power. Second, institutional reforms must mobilize judicial support networks by granting them the tools to engage in strategic and repeated litigation. I test this novel theory by leveraging original qualitative and quantitative data from Kenya. Using process tracing, I show how the 2010 constitution created an environment where the courts had no other choice than to annul the election of the incumbent – President Kenyatta – in 2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relative distribution—whether one is favored or disfavored by government—seems to matter to voters in many African countries. But why? I demonstrate theoretically that voters who do not have information about government revenues, and who cannot determine whether their allocation represents an absolutely high share, can compare their goods with others’ to generate a rough prediction of whether they would be better off under a challenger. In this model, relative distribution is a heuristic, whose relevance is conditioned by available information. I test the model among a sample of Ugandan lab participants, who, when not told how much a “leader” had to distribute, were significantly more likely to reelect the leader when their payout was greater than another player’s. Those given information about the size of the pot, however, no longer responded to relative distribution. I show external validity by demonstrating that the incumbent’s ethnicity, which strongly predicts whom he favors, is less important to respondents on the cross-national Afrobarometer when they report easy access to information on government revenues; other types of information do not show a similar effect. Unfortunately, though rational under low information, voting on relative distribution is not optimal under all conditions: Those who are favored by a highly corrupt leader are most likely to reelect him when they are relying on relative distribution to make their choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates that ethnic segregation is a key determinant of local public goods provision. We argue that this results from politicians' strategic engagement in ethnic favoritism: Only when ethnic groups are sufficiently segregated can elites efficiently target coethnics with local public goods. We test this expectation with fine-grained data from Malawi on the spatial distribution of ethnic groups, geolocated distributive goods (water wells), and the ethnic identities of political elites. We find that members of parliament provide more local public goods to their electoral districts when ethnic groups are geographically segregated but that this increased investment is primarily targeted toward coethnics. Thus, while segregation promotes overall public goods provision, it also leads to greater favoritism in the distribution of these goods. Our logic and evidence provide an elite-driven explanation for both the considerable variation in ethnic favoritism across contexts and the underprovision of public goods in ethnically diverse settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflicting preferences between the state and society underpin most accountability mechanisms by providing a credible way for society to impose costs on the state. Adapting a classic bargaining framework, we argue that broader conditions can support state–society bargaining. Policies that both the state and society value can also enhance society’s negotiating power, provided society has a relatively lower valuation and is more patient than the state. By threatening to sabotage their own interests but hurt the impatient state even more, citizens can compel the state to deliver broader policy benefits. We illustrate this logic with the case of polio vaccination in northern Nigeria, where entire communities have resisted the vaccine as a strategy to bargain for more desired services. To resolve and preempt noncompliance, the Nigerian government has enhanced service delivery in other areas, demonstrating the opportunity for improved accountability in the presence of shared-interest policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written as an original introduction for the first Turkish-language edition of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, published in 2015 in Ankara, the author provides critical context for Walter Rodney's historically significant and best known work, very much still relevant now almost 50 years later. Extending Rodney's anticolonial interpretation of modern global history and its underlying exploitative relationalities to Turkish-language speakers is an important contribution of this translation, and the introduction aimed at introducing a new audience to Rodney, his life and background, his college and early professional years, his work in Tanzania, Jamaica, Guyana. In the process, a dense political description of the anticolonial 1960s and 1970s contexts Rodney lived in and influenced emerges across the Caribbean, Europe, North America and especially in Africa, where this book was written. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of trust between military officers and opposition forces in fostering mass defections of military personnel during pro-democracy uprisings. The current literature on military defection emphasizes the role of either opposition characteristics, or government control policies. Combining the two, however, takes better account of defection as an interaction between officers and the opposition. Through an analysis of civil–military relations during mass uprisings in Benin (1989–1990) and Togo (1990–1993), this article finds that loyalist stacking creates a core of military personnel with a strong stake in regime preservation, while counterbalancing leaves open the possibility for a military-opposition alliance. Alliance also depends on civic resistance campaign characteristics (the unity of the movement, its nonviolent character, the presence of opposition leaders with social ties to military personnel) and promises to military personnel that acknowledge the latter groups’ interests. These findings provide a new theoretical framework for understanding military actions during regime crises. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The adoption of democratic decentralization across the developing world has been critiqued by scholars and practitioners for both macro-level institutional shortcomings and, on a more micro scale, for falling prey to elite capture. This article draws on interviews with over 350 local authorities in decentralized Senegal to call attention to a third level of analysis: the meso-level of the local state itself. Though local elites dominate positions of authority everywhere, the article argues that local government performance varies subnationally as a function of elites’ relations among each other across villages. Where denser cross-village social ties generate higher cohesion among elites, individual opportunism is constrained and local government performance improves. Where such cross-village relations are weaker, elites see local institutions as a zero-sum game among villages. The composition of local social relations, in other words, drives better or worse governance at the local level. Because West African cross-village relations are largely determined by historical settlement patterns, notably the presence or absence of a precolonial state, the article suggests that local political strategies are historically constrained. The link between history and local government performance documented here holds important implications for the nature of political representation and local development outcomes following the recent wave of democratic decentralization in sub-Saharan Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What determines partisan portfolio allocation in African democracies? Despite the vast literature on government formation in Europe and Latin America, there have been no studies of partisan portfolio allocation in Africa. Although coalition governments are increasingly common in Africa, most studies focus on national leaders, and, thus, we know little about how ministerial posts are divided among cabinet parties. Using an original dataset of coalition governments in Africa from 1990 to 2014, we show that existing theories of partisan portfolio allocation can be successfully applied to African democracies. We find that African parties receive ministerial portfolios in rough proportion to their size, that formateur parties in Africa receive more ministerial portfolios than their European counterparts, and that the “formateur bonus” is greater in Africa’s presidential democracies than in its parliamentary ones. Our analyses suggest that scholars can benefit from paying more attention to both coalition governments and legislatures in their analyses of African politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-colonial era in Africa has witnessed the emergence of the "hegemonic presidency," which has been variously referred to as the "imperial presidency" and the "Big man/Big woman syndrome." Essentially, the phenomenon entails the illegal exercise of presidential powers beyond both the constitutional and statutory boundaries. Against this background, this article examines three major interrelated issues. First, it interrogates the historical development of the phenomenon. Second, it probes the factors that have caused the emergence of the "hegemonic presidency." Third, the study suggests some ways in which the phenomenon may be curtailed. In the case of the historical development of the phenomenon, the "hegemonic presidency" has its roots in colonialism, especially the ubiquity and the unfettered exercise of power by the chief colonial administrator--e.g. the governorgeneral. As for the major causes of the phenomenon, they include the constitution, statutes, weak public institutions, especially the legislature and the judiciary, and the acts of ultra vires, which are consequences of presidential arrogation of power. Finally, the article suggests various ways for curtailing the phenomenon, including constitutional redesign to limit the appointive and financial powers of the presidency and the strengthening of public institutions, particularly the legislative and judicial branches, so that they can play their effective rules as countervailing forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Whenever a senior politician falls seriously ill and the media learn of this, the politician’s health problems are likely to become the subject of news reporting. Impressionistic but still plausible evidence would suggest that this kind of story ‘makes the news’ significantly more often than it did in decades gone by. Yet media studies academics have devoted precious little attention to this topic with the result that important questions about the nature of news coverage whenever politicians fall ill and what the consequences of that coverage might be remain unexplored. This article makes a start in filling that lacuna by exploring the Nigerian press’s coverage of the illness and eventual death of former Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua. The key issues that defined the crisis are identified. Furthermore, we argue that (intentionally or otherwise) the news media’s coverage mattered because it legitimized the transfer of power away from President Yar’Adua months before power was officially handed over to his successor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In advanced industrial democracies, evidence suggests a positive relationship between inclusive public policy, collective behavior, and political participation. Yet Africa, which generally exhibits high levels of collective behavior, often has exclusionary policies and variable rates of political participation. Using Afrobarometer data and qualitative case analysis in Zambia, this paper argues that the links between collective behavior and political participation differ in African countries due to lower government capacity and weaker structures of accountability linking politicians to policy outcomes. Employing a policy feedback framework, it demonstrates that the policy context in which collective behavior emerges determines the extent to which it influences political participation. Specifically, low levels of service provision generate higher levels of collective behavior, indicating that communities organize in response to need. The extent to which this collective behavior results in political participation, however, depends in part on citizens' political efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The domain of traditional rulers in pre-colonial Africa was the state, defined by either centralization or fragmentation. The course of traditional rulers in Africa was altered by colonialism, thereby shifting their prerogative to the nonstate domain. Their return in post-colonial Africa has coincided with their quest for constitutional "space of power." In effect, traditional rulers are excluded from modern state governance and economic development. They have remained without subjects in post-colonial Africa. Thus, the fundamental question: How and why did traditional rulers in post-colonial Africa lose their grip over their subjects? In explaining the loss of traditional rulers' grip over subjects in their domains, this essay refers to oral tradition and published literature, including official government documents. Empirical evidence is drawn from Nigeria and other parts of Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]