In Africa, the state has been subjected to severe criticism ever since independence. Early on, it was attacked for being ‘overdeveloped’,‘dependent’,‘neo-colonial’, petty bourgeois’ and so on. However, much of this earlier criticism was within a nationalistdevelopmentalist framework that allowed, and indeed insisted on, a more prominent role for the state in nation-building and development processes. The issue then was not to rein in, let alone dismantle, the state but rather to make it assume its rightful, urgent and imperative role in nation-building and development. In more recent years, a new suite of epithets has been used to characterise the African state. The underlying premise of many of these epithets is that the state cannot or must not play a central role in Africa. This perspective has sanctioned the weakening of already weak states.

After years of focus on stabilisation, it is now generally agreed that economic growth and development should be placed squarely back on the policy agenda in Africa. This is partly because high growth rates and structural change are essential both to extricating Africa from the quagmire of its ‘lost decades’ and to meeting the aspirations of an increasingly vocal citizenry clamouring for a decent livelihood. Such a social agenda demands serious reconsideration of the role of the state in the development of Africa. This in turn demands redress with regard to the many institutional and structural imbalances that adjustment and the lost decades have added to the state’s historically problematic position in postcolonial Africa. In this chapter I argue that the slew of reforms of the 1980s and 1990s at best produced a maladjusted state–an anaemic regulatory state unlikely to perform the required functions of a developmental state. Because of the way that institutions have been evoked, designed and allocated tasks, there has been a tendency to present them largely as constraints on social actors (especially state actors) rather than as transformative instruments in the context of extreme poverty and underdevelopment. I indicate some of the consequences of these reforms. I argue for the need to move beyond the ‘regulatory state’produced by these reforms towards a developmental democratic state. I also touch upon some of the factors that favour such a project.