ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to explicate aspects of the problematique and how the state responds to the challenges arising out of it. It shows how the state in Africa has been reacting to its crisis of legitimacy and accumulation. The chapter argues that state reordering is a peremptory process imposed by the state's own inability to promote economic growth and manage the efficient distribution of social wealth, and that this is the result of constraining factors arising from the global economy and its crisis. The heart of the matter is that the lower classes involved in the informal economy are effectively exploited by people in positions of undisputed political and economic advantage. The independence struggle was waged around an economic agenda: land, trade, credit, industrial and other economic policy grievances. In most of the countries with gradualist regimes as well as those with structural transformation regimes, economic policy had not succeeded in promoting capital accumulation for the rising local bourgeoisies.
