Since the late 1980s, many African countries have been reforming
their civil
services as a part of the process of state redesign. Unfortunately, these
reforms
have not been very successful because of faulty diagnosis and prognosis.
They
have failed to tackle the major problems confronting African civil services.
These include serious human resource management issues of leadership,
merit pay and related governance reforms, the appropriate strategy for
mobilising resources for civil service reform (CSR) and for implementing
such reforms. These issues must be adequately addressed before African
countries can make significant progress in CSR and in development.
The Botswana Directorate on Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC) was created in August 1994 against the background of a number of scandals in Botswana's public life. The Directorate is now over five years old. Among its main achievements are its successful orchestration of a campaign among the general public against corruption and a high conviction rate of investigated cases. And, this is against a background of many problems confronting the agency. This article highlights the successes and problems of the Botswana DCEC. In addition, the paper reflects on the relevance of the Botswana experience for other less developed countries (LDCs) and especially those in Africa, which must win the war against corruption if they are to have a good chance of success in improving their countries' development prospects.
Pride in public service is inextricably linked to institutional performanceespecially in countries like Nigeria and Uganda, where the state is as yet not fully institutionalized or even legitimized. Despite their colonial origins and the challenges which confront the modern state in Africa, the Nigerian and Ugandan civil services functioned well in terms of their primary responsibilities. They proffered policy advice, regulated their nascent economies and societies and delivered high-quality services to their citizens in the immediate post-independent years around 1960 up to the late 1970s. However, by the 1980s, these civil service systems had declined sharply in terms of all three functions: the quality of the policy advice they gave to political executives, regulatory capacity, and the services they delivered to the public. The two economies were also in tatters.(Table 1 provides a comparison of key parameters for both countries.)This article analyses the factors that have contributed to the success of the civil service in the immediate post-independence years and those that led to the rapid decline of these institutions shortly thereafter. This analysis aims to help in the search for the most appropriate strategies to revitalize the civil services in these countries. The emerging view is that the state is important and that the civil service, as an instrument for making institutional choices in a volatile environment, is crucial to the development process.Nigeria and Uganda -located in the western and eastern halves of the continent respectively -were praised for their civil services in the 1960s. The Ugandan civil service was regarded as one of the very best in the Commonwealth. Nigeria's civil service received a similar rating by scholars and policy-makers in the 1950s and 1960s. However, by the 1980s, the Nigerian civil service was described by a study group set up by the federal government as an institution in which morale was already lost. The Ugandan civil service was also in a deplorable state in the mid-1980s and had practically stopped functioning before the civil service reform programme was initiated.This article identifies the critical variables that enabled the civil services in
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