DAVID AND HELEN KIMBLE PRIZE

The David and Helen Kimble Prize was established in memory of David and Helen Kimble, who co-founded the journal in 1963, when both were living in Dar es Salaam due to David’s appointment as a professor of political science at what was then the Tanzanian campus of the University of East Africa. However, the original idea for the journal had been conceived while both were living in Ghana. David and Helen jointly edited the journal in its formative years, thus establishing it as one of the leading academic journals in African Studies. The journal’s home for its first thirty-five years was in, among other places, Tanzania, Morocco, Lesotho, Malawi, and finally, England. David passed away in 2009; Helen continued to take an active interest in African affairs until her death in December 2019.

We are delighted to announce that the winner for 2024 is Sa'eed A. Husain, for his article, Party ideology in Nigeria’s Four Republics: a case of right-wing convergence, published in volume 62, issue 1 (2024), pp. 1- 23, vol. 57, issue 3. Sa'eed's article maps the development of the left/right cleavage in Nigeria's party system, examining the evolution of economic pledges in the manifestos of parties that took power across Nigeria's four attempts at electoral democracy. His paper finds that relative to the deeper levels of economic disagreement voiced in earlier periods, the governing parties of Nigeria's Fourth Republic are now largely unanimous in the enunciation of their economic visions. Evidence of such convergence troubles a strict insistence on either the polarisation or ‘absence’ of economic ideology among governing parties in Africa's largest electoral democracy...