Socialism and the ‘Soft State’ in Africa: an Analysis of Angola and Mozambique

Abstract

The overthrow of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia in 1974, and the independence of Angola and Mozambique in 1975, as well as Zimbabwe in 1980, seem to have strengthened the case for classifying African régimes on the basis of their ideology.In a collection of mainly country-studies of socialism in sub-Saharan Africa edited by Carl Rosberg and Thomas Callaghy in 1978, various explanations were advanced about why the so-called ‘first wave’ of radicals failed to transform African societies successfully, and a common theme was the major rô played by ideology in differentiating ‘African’ from ‘scientific’ socialist régimes.1 In 1981 David and Marina Ottaway contrasted the ‘African socialism’ of Guinea, Zambia, and Tanzania with the ‘Afrocommunism’ of Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia, and contended that ideology was the best indicator of the clear differences that existed in both their institutions and policy choices.2 In 1982 Crawford Young placed African régimes in three ideological categories: ‘Populist socialist’, and ‘African capitalist’.3

Corporate Governance and Human Resource Management

“…However, within the corporate governance tradition, there are two dominant strands: rational hierarchical approaches that are founded in the orthodox economic tradition, and heterodox socio-economic alternatives. However, what is particularly confusing is that quite a body of the existing literature treats different institutional approaches as somehow interchangeable, sometimes including the quite different sociological approaches of writers such as Scott [1988] into the general mix. Traditional economic accounts have been termed 'rationalhierarchical' in that they assume that institutions incentivise or disincentives rational actors, whilst a single institutional feature dominates all others [North, 1990[North, , 1994[North, , 2006.…”

“…Wearied of endless colonial wars, the 1974 Revolution of the Carnations led to the end of fascist rule in Portugal and immediate decolonisation [Harsgor, 1980]. Many settlers fled and the incoming revolutionary governments experimented with state socialism [Rocha-Trindade, 1995, Sidaway and Simon, 1993, Scott, 1988; in the case of Mozambique and Angola, this was followed on by civil conflicts, with the rise of rebel movements nurtured and sponsored by apartheid South Africa and the CIA. The end of the cold war led to the end of such conflicts, and democratisation in all the former Portuguese colonies, accompanied by radical neoliberal reforms Haines, 1998, Wood, 1999].…”