ABSTRACT
Southern Africa is currently experiencing a profound transformation. The concept of the state as a transmission belt rests on the policies adopted by liberalising countries. Trade liberalisation, structural adjustment programmes and the elimination of capital controls can, if advanced too far, emasculate the state and deny administrations the ability to formulate and pursue defensive fiscal and monetary policies. A host of problems arising as a consequence of the "big-bang" approach, with its emphasis on the privatisation of state functions and the premature "retreat" of central and provincial government, needs discussing. Ecological security within the Mozambican sector of the micro-region is further undermined by the discharge of effluents from the two South African projects into a bay already saturated with other pollutants derived from an inadequate system to treat and dispose of human waste. There is a very important role that the South African and Mozambican states are failing to play.
