By Mathew K Jallow
Bureaucracy in Africa
Jonathan Mayo a student of African bureaucracy subscribes to Max Weber's ideal-type definition of bureaucracy as the superior form of organization. In the African context too, bureaucracy is seen as the rational and most efficient social instrument of formally coordinating purposive human action. The impersonality of this coordination necessarily precludes consideration of compassion, affection, traditionalist personality, or other corrupting forms of influence. There is a crisis of the bureaucracy in Africa, which he attributes to the lack of or deficiency in the technical or scientific means of dealing with problems and needs. These deficiencies are the lack of technical competence and management efficiency. Technical competence is the capacity to think and conceptualize a successful management process, while management efficiency refers to the ability to understand, apply, and turn concepts and ideas into reality. Virtually everyone subscribes to the idea that Africa requires efficient and effective bureaucracies to advance its development, and besides, the idea of bureaucracies as instruments of change and development has historical precedence.
The history of all great civilizations begins with the formation of bureaucracies, which shapes men's first existence. The expansive existence of bureaucracy also usually showed a corresponding competence of skilled and learned men of experience who managed these bureaucracies. The indispensability of bureaucracy to the successful functioning of great civilizations has always required an experienced administrative cadre. In the African, this refers to competencies and skill such as a management efficiency and technical competency. The successful functioning of African bureaucracies is impossible without management efficiency and technical competency. These also require an examination of individuals as moral beings capable of not only the instrument of rationality of efficiency and productivity, but also, of substantive rationality about human dignity and the respect and preservation of human life. Management efficiency and technical competence is designed to underscore the significance of man as a morale being capable of:
i. Individual responsibility through the exercise of his substantive rationality based on
his personal identity, conscience and loyalty
ii. Accountability to the community at large based not only on the values of efficiency
and productivity, but also on universally recognized values of human rights.
Without individual responsibility and accountability, bureaucracy can rather easily become a brutal instrument of social repression as has happened in Africa over the past half-century. The issue in Africa is not one of recognizing bureaucracy as a sine qua non of economic development, but that a bureaucracy is impossible without the prerequisites of management efficiency and technical competence. The values of efficiency and productivity are of major concern to African management, and African bureaucrats have a great deal to learn from the classical conceptual foundation of western management thought. To help us further understand and assess the practical grounding of management efficiency beyond the conceptual implications, management efficiency is defined as a practice. The concept of efficiency is as a coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve these standards of excellence. As mentioned earlier, efficiency and competence are indispensable to the effective functioning of any bureaucracy. Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge. Knowledge is a feature, which makes the bureaucracy rational and assures it a position of extraordinary power. The absence of any unifying social basis in Africa can be resolved by a systematic institutionalization of bureaucracies based on efficiency and competence. The rationale is that bureaucracy is based on the neutral values of efficiency and productivity, which are fundamental and necessary to any nation's development. The universals of bureaucracy consider that the values of efficiency and productivity are common to all societies regardless of their value premises. No other form of social organization can instill the strong and lasting sense of common values as bureaucracy. The issues in Africa is not the failure of African bureaucracies per se, but rather that formal organizations there lack some essential elements, the absence of which accounts for the inefficiencies of bureaucracies around the continent. There is an influence of the peasant culture on the bureaucracies throughout Africa. Many staff members in administrations normally comes from the systems of extended family, and their experience in the ideal of impersonal public service is brief, and lacks tradition and the sentiment of nationalism. Thus, nepotism, favoritism, and the sense of the personal rooted in the various ethnic groups within African nations are a salient defining character of human behavior in African bureaucracies. This failure of the bureaucracy in Africa has directly impacted the way public administrations have functioned in the delivery of public services to citizens across the continent.
Bureaucratic Corruption in Africa
In Africa, complex social and historical precedents partly account for the fact that among bureaucrats, the sense of country and public interest is chronically lacking. Rather, the sense of self and one's selfish personal interest super cedes the sense of country and public interest. Consequently, over the past five decades since the attainment of political independence, African bureaucrats entrusted with running the affairs of governments, have entrenched the practice of defrauding the public and private sector of billions of dollars originally meant to help the poor. Corruption, the word used to describe this practice, is one of the most notoriously persistent and progressively worsening social tragedies afflicting sub-Saharan African countries. Corrupt bureaucratic practices have permeated most institutions, both public and private, and government and non-governmental organizations. A noted student of the African bureaucracy asserted that corruption has become a way of life for public service employees throughout the continent, and it had become the primary means of accumulating wealth and private property. Corruption continues to be a serious hindrance to the political, social and economic development of the continent, slowing down administrative development and performance, impairing economic efficiency, dampening local initiative and enterprise, and intensifying other social problems such as poverty, crime, unemployment and ethnic and tribal conflicts. Despite the widespread and debilitating practice of corruption among bureaucrats across sub-Saharan Africa, it is only fairly recently that international agencies, institutions and organizations such as the World Bank, IMF and UNDP, have begun to recognize its seriousness and pervasiveness around the continent. However, the emergence in Africa of overly powerful states with limitless economic and political power, where the supreme reign over civil society is practiced, has created social environments that enabled and fostered endemic corruption. The concentration of power in the state has led to the emergence of autocratic presidents, who are above the law, and whose tenures as presidents is associated with the lack of administrative predictability, the rule of law, and the lack of implementation and review of state regulations and policies.
Most Africans experience the scope, extent and the perniciousness of corruption on a daily basis, as it has become a part of everyday life. So pervasive is the institution of corruption that apart from developing into a public nuisance, it has put the credibility of the instruments of power into the limelight. The distrust by the population of the bureaucracies and in the functioning of public administration are so widespread that in most places, resignation and the acceptance of the state of affairs has set in, making it more difficult to address the problem. The failure of African governments to deliver services to their citizens in a fair, transparent and accountable manner rests on both the political and bureaucratic leadership. The systemic and endemic corruption in Africa has among other things distorted the system of justice, undermined economic development, and corrupted the decision-making process and the fair and honest dispensation of justice.
Corruption has become so entrenched that most Africans think it is now inextricable. It has been described by some African academics as a form of moral breakdown, which
influences people to engage in dishonest practice such as fraud, nepotism, graft, bribery and patronage. At the same time, it has been insinuated that developing countries where
corruption is prevalent, have low standards of morality. This may not be true and some prominent African social scientists refute this claim, affirming instead that corruption is a form of anti-social behavior, which confers unjust or fraudulent benefits on perpetrators, inconsistent with established legal norms and prevailing moral ethos of a society. The spread and perpetuation of corruption is encouraged by endemic poverty, employment, bureaucratic abuse of power and the neglect of the poor and vulnerable groups. The perpetuation of corruption is inextricably linked to unprofessional, over-centralization, and incompetence of the bureaucracy. The existence of unprofessional and incompetent bureaucratic officials is due largely to the fact that in corrupt governments across Africa, the practice is to hire relatives, associates and tribes and clan members, irrespective of their qualification or lack of qualification. Corruption in Africa can therefore be seen as a consequence of failure of leadership, which has contributed to causing the rampant poverty, inequality, socio-political instability, under development, poor governance and many other social maladies. The failure of African political systems and administrative bureaucracies can therefore be described as the result of the failure of governance. Half a century after gaining political independence, the scope, depth and pervasiveness of corruption in Africa is so severe, it is in fact the major cause of the crisis if governance across sub-Saharan Africa.