One journalists and blocking political candidates, denationalization has the particular usefulness of effectively taking the individual outside the realm of legal rights and into what is claimed to be an area of exclusive and discretionary executive power. In Côte d’Ivoire, Alassane Ouattara was just the most famous victim of a general citizenship crisis. But these cases are not confined to those countries that have become notorious for citizenship conflict. In Botswana, one of Africa’s longest-standing democ­racies, John Modise found his right to citizenship by descent denied once he founded an opposition political party. Although the government allowed him citizenship by natural­ ization, the presidency in Botswana is restricted to citizens by birth or descent. Born in South Africa of Batswana parents prior to the independence of Botswana, he had been brought up in Botswana. Expelled from Botswana in 1978 and declared an ‘undesirable immigrant’ once his political ambitions were apparent, he was deported and redeported to and from South Africa and its nominally ‘independent’ homeland of Bophuthatswana, spending years in a Kafkaesque legal limbo that effectively quashed his political aspirations. A complaint lodged with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights in 1993 was eventually decided in his favour in 2000; but too late to have any practical effect on his ability to run for public office. In Zambia, a new constitution adopted in 1996 by the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) government elected in 1991 introduced a requirement that both parents of any presidential candidate must be Zambians by birth. The intention, as everyone understood, was to disqualify former president Kenneth Kaunda from standing for the presidency in the 1996 elections on the ticket of the United National Independence Party (UNIP), since his parents had been missionaries from what later became Malawi. Even without this amendment, in 1994 the MMD government had abused citizenship and immigration laws to deport two other leading UNIP politicians, William Steven Banda and John Lyson Chinula, on the grounds that they were not citizens and were ‘likely to be a danger to peace and good order’. The African 16