ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a more general and comparative look at the problems of handback in Africa, concentrating not on the process by which the military itself determines on this as the optimum strategy, but on the difficulties that then confront the civilian successor regime. The return of the military to barracks invariably finds society divided roughly into two opposing political camps, the ‘pro-military’ and ‘anti-military’ groups, each based on divergent interests with a related network of external linkages. Comprising the civil service and public sector employees, this is the second major potential pro-military group with an active interest in the politics of the post-military state. The immediate conflict is between such opposition parties as are permitted to run and the restoration government, and it centres on which group will secure control of the government apparatus so essential for the distribution of scarce economic resources, political spoils and pay-offs.
