African countries, in particular Kenya, have recognized the role of science and technology in long-term economic adaptation and development. Consequently, they have turned to national planning with emphasis on science and technology. In this respect, the goals of national planning are geared towards enhancing the transfer and acquisition of foreign technology and the promotion of local inventive capacity. In Kenya, the importance of these goals is reflected in the enactment of a new patent law embodied in the Industrial Property Act of 1989.

The legal profession occupies a strategic position in Nigerian society. In addition to performing the traditional function of protecting individual rights through litigation, lawyers actively involve themselves in the creation of legal institutions and concepts that promote development. Legal services profoundly affect and shape virtually all social, economic and political arrangements in the country. Nigerian society has become increasingly reliant on lawyers for its smooth functioning. The country anchors its hope for social and economic development on them.

The problem of diversity of laws remains a major, if indirect, obstacle to African economic development which has not been the subject of any concerted consideration or attention by African states. It is now generally recognized that diversity of laws is an impediment to international commercial activity. Diversity of laws also negatively affects commercial transactions between African merchants and foreign (non-African) contractors. Furthermore, diversity of international commercial laws among African countries is likely to impede the achievement of the objectives of the economic integration schemes.

This article is about the appropriate role of the judiciary in the constitutional debate over land redistribution in Zimbabwe. The possession of land in Zimbabwe has been the most volatile political issue since the war for independence. White ownership of the most productive land fuelled the war against Rhodesia. A constitutional settlement in 1979 resulted in a cease-fire, but the Declaration of Rights prohibited the new government from acquiring land for resettlement purposes except on a “willing seller, willing buyer” basis. With the expiration of the decade-long entrenchment of the Declaration of Rights in 1990, President Robert Mugabe declared his intention to honour a promise made eleven years before: to resettle peasant farmers on previously white-owned land. Since then, Parliament has amended the Constitution of Zimbabwe three times to allow the state to acquire property for resettlement and to give Parliament the power to fix the amount of compensation without judicial review.

The right to vote in Nigeria has a rather chequered history. Universal adult suffrage became a reality in Nigeria in the 1979 elections when women in the North were allowed for the first time to participate in elections. Originally the right to vote was thought of as a direct consequence of property interests rather than adhering to the person as a political right. It was only gradually that the vote was altered from a property and income right to a political right.

The doctrine of vicarious liability is easy to define but difficult to apply. In the recent Zimbabwean case of Fawcett Security Operations (Pot) Lid. v. Omar Enterprises (Pvt) Ltd., the Supreme Court held that a security company (the employer) who provided a security guard (the servant) to detect and prevent theft from the respondent's supermarket was not vicariously liable for the servant's subsequent theft of the very goods he was meant to guard. It is difficult to support this decision and its indirect effect is to call for a re-examination of this part of the law. Accordingly this article seeks to revisit the doctrine of vicarious liability under the Zimbabwean law of delict and to argue that (i) the decision in Fawcett Security was based on a wrong reading of the authorities; (ii) that the decision is inconsistent with the classical Roman-Dutch Law (as distinct from South African authorities); and (iii) that the decision fails to give effect to the real basis of vicarious liability under Zimbabwean law.