Public Administration and the Development of Africa: A Critical Assessment

Abstract

This article explores Africa’s development challenges from a public administration service delivery capacity perspective. The paper contends that African countries lack a well-coordinated central policy making machinery of government which has the capacity to set major development objectives of government and ensure service delivery consistency. The paper further notes that an efficient public sector is a prerequisite to any meaningful development in Africa. Public bureaucracies are viewed as the vehicles through which the struggle toward development and national building can be achieved. The paper has relied on documentary sources and the contribution represents a modest attempt to shed some light on the ongoing debate on the efficacy of Africa's public management institutions.

Sub‐Saharan Africa: Towards better governance and sustainability?

“…From the import substitution doctrine and African socialism to structural adjustment programmes and neoliberalism to social democracy and indigenous growth policies—all left their mark on Africa's political systems, and by implication, their public administrations that, typically underfunded yet often overstaffed and lacking both stability and competence, became vulnerable to corruption and predatory elite. As a result, African countries have lacked a well‐coordinated central policymaking and administrative machinery of government with the capacity to set objectives and ensure service delivery consistency (Nhema, 2016). In some countries like Nigeria, with its export‐oriented oil economy, the weakness of public administration systems is amplified by the resource curse of the Dutch disease, as Zartman (2008) argues 4…”

Decolonisation in the field of public administration: The responsiveness of the scholarship of teaching and learning

“…Subject coordinators can exercise their academic freedom when selecting key themes to be explored. Nhema (2016) is of the view that PAM can be rearranged to address the myth of reasoning and that politicians in power have set development paths when we know that they have been conditionally influenced by their colonial leaders to control a development path that was not favourable to their people. It is worth noting that African leaders have been masquerading under good governance and leadership, hence some scholars have applauded African leaders for implementing policies grounded on Western political thoughts.…”