Abstract
Public sector reform (PSR) has been quite popular in Africa and in recent years, several African countries have implemented far-reaching governance and public service reform measures. The aim of this article is to consider the historical development of Public Sector Reform in Africa and the philosophy behind the ubiquitous wave of reform in the continent. The article discovers that those reform measures have so far gone through three different phases to promote and/or accelerate the revitalization of the public service. It identifies some major challenges that account for the monumental failure of PSR. Finally, the paper offers suggestions on how African countries can free themselves from the doldrums of current PSR. This article will not only broaden the frontier of knowledge in the field of public administration but also address the present and on-going reality of public sector reforms in the West African sub region. This study uses a ‘Literature Survey’ in examining the issue in question.
Highlights
The African continent is geographically vast, culturally heterogeneous, and politically diverse
Most of the public sector reform initiatives that have taken place in the South during the last three decades were introduced as part of the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) of the World Bank in the 1980s
Low productivity and inefficiency originated from the economic crisis of the 1970s; (ii) reforms ignored a basic fact about people and organisations: people make organisations work; motivated workers are a (i) there was One-size-fitsall approach that ignored country-specific aspects of public organisations; (ii) it created a quagmire for employees, e.g. reduction in government requires that salaries and no-wage benefits remain low; due hiring freezes, the underpaid and poorly motivated workers were being admonished to assume additional
Summary
The African continent is geographically vast, culturally heterogeneous, and politically diverse. Omoyefa (2008) observed that while the African leaders innocently and ignorantly accepted the externally induced neo-liberal inspired programmes of reform in their public sector institutions as a way of bettering the lives of their citizens, the developed countries that are driving the force of the donor agencies are interested in re-colonizing African countries through the back door. It is a subtle form of neo-colonialism and Emerging Issues in Public Sector Reforms in Africa: An Assessment of Ghana and Nigeria 97 consequent perpetual slavery.
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