Crises of Ethical Governance & Curbing Plunders in African States: Theory and Praxis

Talks of mal-governance and corruption have been a clarion call for governments in Africa. This paper looks at the theory and practice in public administration ethics to take systemic measures to combat unethical governance. In spite of fast growing economies and notwithstanding the slavery and colonial legacy, that is still taxing the continent, new faces and forces of vulnerability and poverty haunt the Africa region. These series of lectures consider the relations between corruption, security and development. 

The public service suffers from the pressures of economies, no less than those of politics. The realities prevailing in Africa render expectations of Africa’s public service rather unreasonable. For most junior public servants in Africa daily survival is nothing less than a minor miracle because their wages lag behind the requirements of self-reproduction. Also, at a structural-political level, structural-cultural level and epistemological level, is the conflict of the legitimacy of the state. Its ‘public’ is nominal with the informal kinship-based; legitimacy of salient values of indigenous African cultures and those of the value systems of the modern state and the antimonies, distortions and confusions of an epistemological stance, which insistently privileges perceives Africa in the image of the West.

  Chronologically one discerns two overarching themes - the organizational context in which individual administrators must work out ethical decisions and conduct, and democratic values as normative touchstones for public administrative ethics. Chronologically, the first to emerge clearly is that of the organization as an arena fraught with complicating factors for any would-be rational ethical administrator. Democratic norms are found in the earliest of these works, but are developed neither as lucidly, nor as progressively as the organizational setting. Thus, democratic theory and values are deemed here to constitute a minor theme, not in the sense of being less important ultimately, but in terms of the attention paid to it in these works in particular, as well as in the literature in general. Increasingly serious and systematic attention devoted to the influence of organizational factors, both positive and negative, is quite clear. At the outset, democratic values are assumed the most basic values necessary for the study of public administration ethics...  

Key words: ethics, corruption, public administration, good governance
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