Watersheds of Ethical Governance Crises Curbing Resource Plunders in Africa – Theory and Praxis - RL Vol. XI No. CCXCIV, MMXVII

Watersheds of Ethical Governance Crises
Curbing Resource Plunders in Africa –

Theory and Praxis

Public Lecture - RL Vol. XI No. CCXCIV, MMXVII

Costantinos Berhutesfa Costantinos, PhD

Professor of Public Policy & Sustainable Institutional Reforms

https://addisababa.academia.edu/CostyCostantinos

Public Administration Ethics: Theory and Praxis

Blocks I - Lecture and Seminar Notes, Series IV, AAU, Addis Ababa, 2013

Reviewed 2015

Abstract

Talks of mal-governance and corruption have been a clarion call for government in recent years. This paper looks at the theory and practice in public administration ethics that will be valuable for leaders to take systemic measures to combat unethical governance. In spite of fast growing economies and notwithstanding the slavery and colonial and neo-liberal 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. At a structural-political level, structural-cultural level and epistemological level, is the conflict of the legitimacy of the received 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 organisational 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 organisation 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 organisational 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 organisational 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

See link here or  http://www.academia.edu/35208062/Watersheds_of_Ethical_Governance_Crises_Curbing_Resource_Plunders_in_Africa_Theory_and_Praxis_Public_Administration_Ethics_Theory_and_Praxis