THE MILITARY,CIVIL SOCIETY AND DEMOCRACY IN ZAMBIA

The lure of regionalism has had profound effects on the foreign policies of African countries. It is contended that such collaborative efforts will serve as building blocks of a future African Economic Community and African Union. This article explores the experiences of SADC and ECOWAS, prominent African subregional organisations. With the domestic state that is more vulnerable to transnational and international developments, globalisation erodes the capacity of the state to pursue broad-based projects and undermines and transforms international relations. This leads to the ‘new security dilemma’ with the state system becoming the key source of insecurity in the contemporary world. The search for security increasingly involves the resort to different forms of exit from the system. State-centric regional co-operation thus becomes less important and in some cases obsolete. The experiences in Africa suggest a call for a more modest expectation of what regional integration can realistically achieve.     

CORRUPTION,PERCEPTION AND FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT

Bribery undermines human development and a transition to stable democratic rule. It props up illegitimate regimes as corporations bid for contracts by bribing, in a seeming race to the bottom. The world's wealthy are slowly waking up to this and criminalising this scandalous practice of bribing foreign public officials. However, such measures, if enforced, need to be combined with domestic anti-corruption strategies in the South. If this opportunity is missed, the risk of investing private capital in marginalised economies perceived to be highly corrupt is further upped, making investment-driven economic growth possibly even less unattainable.     

THE NEW SANDF RANK INSIGNIA

The SANDF has missed a critical opportunity to enhancing a unified corporate identity with the introduction of their new rank insignia. Cultural and organisational symbols reflect and create corporate identity. Military uniforms are important symbols in expressing affiliation and loyalty. Rank insignia are important indicators of further sub-group identity. The SANDF was formed out of the integration of various armed forces in 1994. The newly formed SANDF recognised the need for new symbols to reflect their new identity—a break with the past—and to enhance their unified identity. New rank insignia were introduced in 2002, with different symbols for the different services. The author argues that this will create greater service-bound identity, and encourage less unity in the corporate identity of the SANDF.