American Society for Public Administration - Vol. 28 No. 7 - July 2005

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Peter Fuseini Haruna

Given the degree to which public integrity has sunk in African public administration, is there hope of recovering the ethic of public service in Africa? The answer is no if policy makers, scholars and practitioners continue with business as usual, emphasizing macro-structures and abstract rules and regulations at the expense of the human condition.

In the first half of the twentieth century, colonial governments in Africa erected rule-governed, compliance public administration structures that Africans tried to evade or even subvert. In the second half of that century, African governments pursued pseudo-nationalistic policies that reinforced the colonial structures, resulting in pathological and disconnected bureaucracies largely inimical to the public interest.

Recent administrative reforms have paid a mere lip service to the ethic of public service, focusing attention on the market, managerialism and money to little or no avail. If Africa continues along this path, there is little hope, either for recovering the ethic of public service or safeguarding the public interest and restoring public trust and confidence in public administration.

The chances of recovering the ethic of public service and building public integrity are brighter if a fresh start can be made, but how? A problem well defined, they say, is a problem half solved.

Unfortunately, the tragedy of African public administration is that the problem is neither well identified nor well defined. Rather, there is persistent misdiagnosis of what the problem is. African governments, along with donor partners, often mistake symptoms for root causes of the poor administrative condition. A few examples will suffice: Laziness, absenteeism and corruption are perceived as inherent traits of African public administration and treated as root causes of administrative failures. Corruption is of particular interest because it is estimated to cost Africa nearly $150 billion a year. Nigeria, Uganda, Cameroon, Tanzania and Kenya are among the most corrupt according to Transparency International's annual corruptions perception index.

The question is no longer the extent of corruption and its impact on the body-politic even if that is relevant. The more important question is why corruption has defied all administrative, legal and political measures taken to eradicate it from African society.

The answer to the above question is simple and direct: Africa continues to provide the right solutions to symptoms, not causes of problems. African public administration itself bears an important part of the responsibility for the misfiring of the approach to the ethic of public service.

In large part, this is understandable because as problems arise, public administrators turn to familiar but fruitless instrumental techniques: structures, rules and regulations. Since 2000, Africa has pursued this approach faithfully with little impact.

The Charter for the Public Service in Africa was adopted in 2001 at the Third Pan African Conference of Public Service Ministers as a framework of fundamental administrative principles to which civil service laws, regulations, institutions and practices should conform.

The African Union concluded its Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption in 2003, requiring that all public officials should declare their assets when they take office, that governments should take powers to seize bank documents where necessary and that those convicted should have their assets confiscated.

Integrity and accountability in public affairs and administration are among the key principles of the New Partnership for African Development, and the African Peer Review Mechanism was established to assess conformity to the convention. Despite these initiatives, ethics standards for African public servants are hardly uniform, often outdated and poorly institutionalized with very little chance of recovering and nurturing public integrity.

The case of Ghana is instructive because of rising public expectations for better services and the demand from both bilateral and multilateral donor partners for higher standards of accountability. In fact, Ghana implemented several reforms throughout the 20th century to build institutional legitimacy and improve government performance.

More recently, Ghana recognized the degree to which the image of the public service had sunk and implemented a "zero-tolerance" policy for corruption in 2001 as a way of restoring public confidence and trust in public affairs and administration. Ghana has shown itself to be genuinely determined to conduct the affairs of state in a constitutional, liberal and democratic fashion. There seems to be respect for constitutional, legal and moral limits to government power and authority and fundamental rights of the individual as enshrined in the 1992 Ghana Constitution and the rule of law. Ghana was one of the first to volunteer to be assessed under the African Peer Review Mechanism. Thus, Ghana has been willing to put its adherence to the norms of good governance to test under international scrutiny.

However, Ghana faces several problems. Despite the creation of independent oversight and regulatory institutions--Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice, Serious Fraud Office, Office of the Auditor General, Inland Revenue Service, Customs, Excise and Preventive Service, Bank of Ghana and Securities Exchange Commission-- charges of corruption and mismanagement are rife in Ghana.

Ghana Airways collapsed due to gross mismanagement within the period that Ghana declared the "zero tolerance" for corruption. The latest scandals relating to examination malpractices in the University of Ghana, as well as misuse of public resources in the Energy Commission are just the tip of the iceberg. It is therefore not surprising that the 2004 Report of the Center for Public Integrity provided Ghana with a low-to-moderate rating on the public integrity index. Sadly, Ghana has not even begun to ask itself what the real causes of corruption are.

This analysis shows that Africa has a lot of work to do to recover the ethic of public service. Public agencies must be made legitimately public by grounding them in the lived experiences of the people. For far too long public administration has remained isolated from the people that it is supposed to work for or at least work with.

Nonetheless, there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel. The vast majority of Africans (over 70 percent) living in rural areas are decent, humble and hard working individuals, who tend to find dignity even in poverty and hardship. If some of the values of these rural folks can be systematically clarified and infused in public administration, a fresh start can be made and there could still be hope for recovering the ethic of public service in Africa.

ASPA member Peter Fuseini Haruna is an associate professor of public administration at Texas A&M International University. E-mail: pharuna@tamiu.edu

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