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Kenya is on the short list of African states that have not experienced military rule. In a continent known for rampant praetorianism, this means only that the coup prevention strategies implemented by its civilian rulers have been successful...so far. The unscrupulous ethnic manipulation, politicization, bribery into the military's "circles of power," and the set-up of a powerful paramilitary as a counterweight to the army have done little to institutionalize civilian control. These strategies, inaugurated by President Jomo Kenyatta and taken to new heights by his successor Daniel Arap Moi, entailed neither military professionalization, military autonomy and political insulation, nor regime-legitimizing policies. The evidence of the case study suggests that the adverse effects of Kenya's civilian control strategies support Samuel Huntington's and Claude Welch Jr.'s hypothesis that only the professionalization and political insulation of the military are more likely to ensure its continued subordination to civilian control. The strategies implemented since independence epitomize the model of civil-military relations that Africa's fledgling democracies should avoid if democratic civilian control of the military is to take root on the continent.

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Long touted as an island of political stability and (relative) economic prosperity in West Africa, since December 24, 1999, Côte d’Ivoire* has joined the more common category in the sub-region: praetorian states mired in political uncertainty and unending turbulence. Indeed, on September 19, 2002, it came very close to collapsing altogether, a fate very few would dare to predict only a few weeks earlier. This stunning evolution started with the military regime of General Robert Guei, which lasted less than ten months. Eric Nordlinger’s definition of praetorianism as “a situation in which military officers [in the case of Africa non-commissioned officers as well] are major or predominant political actors by virtue of their actual or threatened use of force” fits Ivory Coast perfectly today. Political violence has already claimed thousands of victims. As witnessed in the recent resumption of fighting and bloody upheaval, the threat to the country and the entire sub-region has by no means disappeared - despite the Marcoussis and Accra agreements and continued efforts to end the crisis

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The 3 August 2005 military coup was Mauritania's best opportunity to turn the page on decades of the deposed quasi-military regime's destructive politics. This article critically analyses relevant aspects of the transition that ensued in the context of the prevailing models of military withdrawal from politics in Africa. It also examines the challenges that Mauritania's short-lived Third Republic faced. It argues that the transition process did not escape the well-known African military junta leader's proclivity to manipulate transitions to fulfil suddenly awakened self-seeking political ambitions, in violation of solemn promises. While there was no old-fashioned ballot stuffing to decide electoral outcomes, Mauritania's junta leader and his lieutenants spared no effort to keep the military very much involved in politics, and to perpetuate a strong sense of entitlement to political power. Originally designed as an ingenious ‘delayed self-succession’ of sorts, in the end, another coup aborted Mauritania's democratisation process and threw its institutions in a tailspin. This only exacerbated the challenges that have saddled Mauritania's political system and society for decades – unhealthy civil-military relations, a dismal ‘human rights deficit’, terrorism, and a neo-patrimonial, disastrously mismanaged economy.

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