ABSTRACT
Since the 1990s, many African countries have carried out legal reforms-adopting new constitutions and bills of rights, meanwhile implementing judicial review of legislative and executive acts. These were in response to the rule of law promptings and international financial institution (IFI) conditionality, which were part of a concerted international effort to rid Africa of biting and seemingly intractable poverty. Those efforts, however, affected only a modicum of political, legal, and human rights improvements on the continent. International actors justified their support for the rule of law initiatives by citing studies that demonstrated the importance of functioning, fair, and accessible justice institutions to ensure social cohesion and combat poverty. For example, the World Bank’s 2000 Voices of the Poor report pointed to the negative role played by the police, which it considered corrupt and responsible for harassing small traders (Piron 2006). Indeed, it is expected that the absence of the rule of law would impede investment efforts. The above simply assumes away our “chicken or egg” inquiry, attributing all African evils to an apparent shortage of “law,” presumably to be remedied by legal and institutional reform in the abstract.
