THE SEARCH FOR A DEVELOPMENTAL PUBLIC SERVICE IN GHANA: CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS
E. Gyimah-Boadi, Executive Director, Ghana Center for Democratic Development
(CDD-Ghana); Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Ghana,
Legon.
Text of presentation at the Public Services Commission 7th Annual Lecture, Wednesday May 19, 2004 at the Teacher’s Hall Accra
Salutation
Hon Member of the Council of State; and our most distinguished Chairperson;
Hon. Senior Minister;
Distinguished Chairman of the Public Services Commission;
Distinguished Members of the Public Services Commission;
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen
I deem it a great honour and privilege for me to speak at this forum. I thank the Public
Service Commission for the honour done to me by inviting me and giving me the opportunity
to deliver this year’s lecture.
It is, however, prudent for me to begin with some important disclosures. I am no expert on
the Ghanaian or African public service; I am only a student of politics, specifically the politics of Ghanaian/African development, and in particular the politics of Ghanaian/African
democratisation and democratic governance.
Moreover, I do not claim to have any deep and intimate knowledge of the Ghanaian public
service. I know the Ghanaian public service largely as a consumer, and often an unhappy
consumer of its services, and of course, from books and articles I have read as well as
anecdotal information from my circle of friends and relatives.
So you must pardon me if I come across to you as superficial.
In fact, I accepted to do this lecture in all humility and because I am firm in my conviction
that an effective public service is a central element in Ghana’s quest for good governance,
national stability and sustained national development - the theme for this year’s Public Service Week.
The topic I have selected to speak on also happens to be one of the issues I am looking into
for my impending inaugural lecture at Legon on the prospects and challenges of building
liberal democratic developmental states in Africa. So, please bear with me if I appear to
inflict on you some of my half-baked reflections on the developmental public service in Ghana.
Introduction
The term, “developmental states”, is usually attributed to Chalmers Johnson’s analysis of
the state in post-war Japan and how it organized itself for rapid take off, highlighting the
Ministry of International Trade and Industries (MITI) as its emblematic “developmental
public service.” (Johnson, 1982). The term has since become widely applied to states in
other successful late developing countries and especially the so-called “Asian tigers.”
(Leftwich, 1995; White and Wade, 1998). It is generally understood to apply only to a tiny
number of African states, notably Botswana and Mauritius. The quest for the developmental
state in most African countries, including Ghana, has proved highly elusive.
The public service (used here to include the civil service, parastatals, and local governments)
is one of the key components of the “developmental state”. Critical inquiries into the factors
inhibiting the emergence of developmental states in Africa have come to identify the public
service as a crucial missing element. For many of you who happen to be career public servants
and students of public administration, it may strike you as ridiculous that others, especially
international development specialists, came so late to realize the importance of the service.
But you will not disagree with me that development assistance programs focusing on macroeconomic reforms in the 1980s and early 1990s mostly ignored the public service or subjected it to emasculation.
The new thinking about the crucial importance of the public service has arisen from two main
sources. The first source is the assimilation of the lessons of the so-called ‘orthodox paradox,’ prescribing that the installation of successful economic liberalization regimes, entails
the contraction of the state and public service at the same time as it requires a relatively
efficient, capable and willing state and public service (Miles Khaler).
The second, and even more powerful source of the new thinking comes out of the experience,
insights and lessons learnt from the relatively successful developmental states of South
East Asia, which underscore the importance of effective central bureaucracies (Gordon
White and Robert Wade, 1988; Adrian Leftwich, 1995; World Bank, 1997).
The focus of my presentation is on the key characteristics of the African/Ghanaian public
service, and especially how it arrived at its present state of low capacity. It also analyses
the key challenges entailed in reforming the Ghanaian state and its public service to render
both of them developmental within the context of democracy and good governance.
It outlines some of the key adjustments the state itself and government must undertake in
order to earn a deserving and pro-development public service.
The key characteristics of a developmental public service
A developmental public service is one that is able to help the developmental state to implement its policies and accomplish its goals. A developmental public service embodies the
following state capacities: regulatory; administrative; technical; and extractive. In what
follows below, I lay out the main elements of state and public service capacity draws extensively from Brautigam, 1996; also Gyimah-Boadi and van de Walle, 1996; World Bank, 1997,
White and Wade, 1998; and Moore, 1998.
Regulatory capacity: refers to the ability to establish and enforce the rules that guide or
regulate societal behaviour. In the broadest sense, this means establishing the rule of law.
But in Africa, where traditional and religious legal frameworks coexist alongside constitutional systems, with civil and commercial laws often scarcely amended from colonial times,
regulatory capacity is more specifically reflected in the enforcement of the rules preferred
by the state, especially where they conflict with those preferred by society.
Indicators for measuring the capacity of the public service to enforce state laws and regulations include its ability to enforce contracts, protect property rights, provide national
defence and ensure public order. This must not be confused with the mere proliferation of
state laws and regulations that are sometimes outdated and often unenforceable or unenforced. Further indicators include public service capacity to enforce laws and regulations
on land allocation and land use as well as those requiring the compulsory education of children
of school going age.
Administrative capacity: involves the routine ability to manage the personnel and resources
of the state and to ensure accountability and efficiency in service delivery. It is based on
objective hiring and promotion practices, adequate accounting staff to audit public expenditures, working systems to gather, store, and disseminate information, stable and rule-based
authority, and internal coherence between goals and the resources, personnel, and tools
available to carry them out. Again it is important not to confuse administrative capacity with
size, a confusion that has led many analysts to reflexively indict World Bank/IMF public
sector job retrenchment programs regardless of content.
Indicators of this capacity include the turnover or stability of top officials over time, ratio
of expatriate personnel involved in government operations, and some measure of the level of
the quantity and quality of the services delivered by government (for example, the percentage of the population provided with safe water or electricity at reasonable cost).
Technical capacity: This relates to the expertise and knowledge required to make and implement technical decisions in, say science, engineering and macroeconomics, as well as the
policy tools and instruments necessary to implement those decisions effectively. These
instruments might include establishing and monitoring standards for pharmaceutical imports,
managing exchange rates, or evaluating the engineering plans for a hydroelectric dam. It
also includes the ability to implement the policies of government with minimum slippage – a
key requisite for sustained development. Since a commitment to economic growth constitutes the foremost and single-minded priority of the developmental state, the public service
must have a correspondingly strong central capacity for macro-economic and strategic policy
formulation, monitoring and implementation, and for effecting corrections in a timely manner. In those states, civil servants constitute the main force for directing economic policy in
general and industrial policy in particular – of course under political direction.
Indicators for this capacity include scope and timely production of statistical and information services, number of trained accountants in the public sector, or the presence of effective policy instruments such as a central bank, economic planning bureau, or development
finance agency.
Extractive capacity: This refers to the ability to raise the revenues needed by the state to
pay for the expenses of implementing state policies and goals – which of course includes the
revenue for hiring, paying, and providing public servants with the resources to work with. To
many social scientists, this is the single most important attribute of a capable state and
public service.
Indicators here include the ratio of revenue to gross national product, ratio of fiscal selfreliance (aid receipts compared to total domestic revenue) and relative weight of different
categories of revenue (taxes on trade which require less effort to collect versus income or
value added taxes that are harder to collect).
To be sure, some analysts (such as the Political Risks Services Group of Syracuse New York
and the Africa Competitiveness Report 1999) using mainly subjective indicators, rate Africa
as having a mixed yet generally improving administrative capacity. That may be superficially
true, especially relative to the early 1980s and thanks to the donor driven investments in
public service reforms in the past decade and half. It is also possible to arrive at such
untenably glib conclusions about actual public service effectiveness in Africa if your comparisons are drawn from the universe of highly indebted and under-performing and unsuccessful states. Thus, a World Bank effort to quantify African state capacity (using 1997-98
data) noted that Sierra Leone had been rated among the six countries with the highest
effectiveness – because of inconsistencies in the underlying data. (Kaufmann et al., 1999)
(Ghana was incidentally rated lower).
However, taking the simple definition outlined above, and using more objective criteria, few
states and public services of sub-Sahara Africa (with the possible exceptions of Botswana,
Namibia and South Africa) can be said to be developmental.
Let’s take for instance extractive capacity, or to put simply, the pursuit of revenue. Thomas
Hobbes, as well as most social scientists, takes this as a key measure of the administrative
capacity of the state, since as Mick Moore (1998) argues, ‘a system of collecting taxes is
simultaneously a mechanism for gathering information on citizens and businesses, and forcing them to comply with the state’s reporting requirements and allied regulations.’ The American comedian, Woody Allen, famously observed that the only certainties about life are taxes
and death. That may be very true of America and other societies endowed with capable
public administrations. The part of the Woody Allen maxim asserting the inevitability of
death would certainly apply to Ghanaians; but not the inevitability of taxation. The average
Ghanaian (unless they are export crop farmers or salaried workers) do not experience the
certainty of state taxation – notwithstanding the tremendous strides made in enhancing the
effectiveness of internal revenue mobilization.
The emergence of the crisis of public service incapacity in Africa
We must concede that the development of a high level of state and bureaucratic capacity
took several centuries in other parts of the world. And compared to other developing
countries, the Ghanaian state like other African states is very new. It was formed during
colonial rule and emerged as a nation state less than 50 years ago. By comparison, European colonialism ended in most of Latin America by the mid-19th century. And many Asian
societies can boast of bureaucratic traditions that predate those of Europe.
It is also true that the European colonial powers did little to build more sophisticated regulatory, extractive, technical or administrative capacity in Ghana or elsewhere in Africa except in settler colonies of South Africa and Zimbabwe. They established only the minimum
state and bureaucratic capacity necessary for maintaining law and order and facilitating
resource extraction.
But it is also true that some of the first blows against public service capacity in Africa came
early after independence when the public service was vastly and rapidly expanded, but without the requisite personnel, resources or systems. The Ghanaian experience is quite typical
of developments in Africa in the period immediately after independence. As is well known,
the activities of government were vastly expanded under the Nkrumah-CPP administration
and those that followed – in an effort to meet the requirements of statehood and the high
expectations of Ghanaians for progress and advancement, and in keeping with the prevailing
idea that government was the engine of Ghanaian economic, social and political transformation. An essentially minimalist colonial state became a maximalist state, with a maximalist
public service alongside it.
While laudable in its intentions, the swift nature of the expansion and Africanisation of the
Ghanaian public services put a severe strain on the country’s meagre administrative resources. Ghana did possess a relatively ample supply of bureaucratic talent at the time of
independence (augmented by the expansion of opportunities for university education and the
output of the newly-established Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration).
But this supply was quickly outstripped by the demands of the Nkrumah regime for structural transformation. Tony Killick, analysing the problems encountered by the parastatals
enterprises and how personnel shortages affected public sector performance, wrote:
“Nowhere did shortages of qualified personnel have a more critical impact than in the agencies responsible for the selection, creation and overall management of state manufacturing
enterprises. In the fifties, responsibility rested with the IDC (Industrial Development
Corporation) but, although it was set up in 1951, it was not until 1953 that its first projects
officer was appointed and he did not remain long in office. Throughout its history, the IDC
was under great pressure to process a large number of potential state projects and was
inadequately staffed to do the job. Precisely the same could be said of the Ministry of
Industries ….. The INDUSTRIAL STATISTICS show that there ought to have been a total
of 53 manufacturing enterprises wholly or partly owned by the state in 1966, most of which
had been created during the early sixties, but during most of these years there were fewer
than twenty senior officers in the Ministry to plan and oversee this expansion as well as
undertaking all the other responsibilities of the Ministry.” (Development Economics in Action, 1978, p 240)
Rapid expansion, combined with overlapping and competing lines of authority, also contributed to the creation of what Elliot Berg (1971) colourfully described as an “administrative
jungle’ in which coordination was virtually non-existent and duplication of activities commonplace.
The public service itself was also to some extent both a perpetrator and victim of the
economic and political malaise that gripped Ghana and many other countries in Africa in the
late 1970s and 1980s. Under the NRC and SMC governments, for example, , the statist
inclinations which had receded somewhat under the NLC returned in full force. The central
government was immersed once again in various aspects of the production and distribution
process. Not surprisingly, the personnel of the public service reportedly expanded at an
annual rate of 19 percent between 1975 and 1979.
But increased public service responsibility was not necessarily accompanied by increases in
skilled personnel and financial resources, thus making sustained performance all but impossible. Neither were public servants spared the effects of the precipitous economic decline,
especially the runaway inflation of the period, which eroded official salaries and negated
salary adjustments.
Moreover, the ‘amateur’ military politicians of the 1970s (NRC/SMC) came to rely substantially on the expertise of the senior cadres of the public service to craft and implement the
new policies of centralized state procurement and distribution of both capital and consumer
goods. Public servants, especially those with privileged access to state-distributed and
highly subsidized goods, came to gain considerable power and prestige. Deep involvement in
the political process also created broad opportunities for misuse of public office and heightened the temptation to engage in corruption on the part of those less committed to the
public good.
With mounting evidence of economic and social decline in Ghana in the late 1970s, the entire
public service, especially its senior officers, became embroiled in the widespread disaffection with and alienation from the government and public institutions, including the ministries
and parastatals. In the eyes of the general public the service became identified with an
inefficient governmental machinery, declining social and economic infrastructure and a corrupt establishment – setting the stage for the populist anti-bureaucratic sentiments brought
to the fore by Ft. Lt. J. J. Rawlings and the regimes he helped to father in 1979 and 1981
(Gyimah-Boadi and Rothchild, 1990).
Madam Chair, the history of the ordeal that the public service as an institution and some of
its key personnel went through in the heady months of 1979 and 1981-83 is too well known to
justify a retelling here. Suffice to note that after the abrupt dismissals, forced retirements, dissolutions, and disruptive junior staff militancy, and by the time the neo-liberal
structural adjustment program began, the public service was severely demoralized and in a
state of disarray. Public servant incomes had collapsed, public sector employees were resorting to moonlighting and abuse of state property in order to survive, and personnel flight
had become commonplace at all levels. Public servants in Ghana, in the words of a correspondent of the West Africa magazine (Nii K Bensti Enchill), had been reduced to the level of the
“respectable poor.”
Assessments of the impact of the service reform programs of the mid 1980s to early 1990s
are mixed at best. Some blame the neo-liberal structural adjustment programs of the World
Bank, IMF and other international donors (especially the economic stabilization measures
such as currency devaluation, subsidy reduction, payment of user fees, public sector job
retrenchment, and privatisation) for most of the current problems of the public service.
The programs of public sector job retrenchment and privatisation are charged with the
offence of doing further damage to the effectiveness of the public service (Balogun, 2002);
the salary reform components of the programs (including Ghana’s) have been judged as largely
unsuccessful (Nunberg, 1994); and the record of achievements under decentralization, especially fiscal decentralization, have been described as mixed (even in Ghana) (Ayee, 2003).
Others laud the same reforms for helping to rid the service of some of its most unsustainable features (Kiggindu, 1998), helping to resuscitate some of its vital sectors such the
Ghana’s Internal Revenue Service (Goldsmith, 2003), and bringing about a degree of decentralisation.
Madam Chair, it is still an open question as to whether the public service reforms have
helped to improve the capability; and by how much. The jury may still be hung on this issue.
The restructuring of the IRS and CEPS into semi autonomous bodies in 1987 and the creation of a VAT Service in 1997 as well as the creation of a Revenue Agency Board in 1998 are
perceived to have led to increases in revenue collection and enhanced compliance, and even
registration of new businesses have been said to take fewer number of days. But do we
really have a developmental public service now?
A considerable amount of hard data would be needed to answer this question with any confidence. I am afraid I don’t have that kind of hard data to conclusively demonstrate Ghanaian
state capacity or incapacity. I am willing to concede that this may be reflection of my own
incapacity and lack of resourcefulness. But Madam Chair, it could also be seen as a reflection of the weakness of the Ghanaian state – weak capacity to collect, process, store and
present data. Data on the capacity of the Ghanaian state remains patchy, usually dated,
poorly organized, tentative, and difficult to access – though improving in parts. Thus, we are
compelled to rely on indirect measures of state capacity such as gross primary school enrolment at 81 percent in 2001 (compared to 93 percent and 97 percent respectively in the East
Asia/Pacific and Latin America/Caribbean regions in 2002); adult literacy rates at 74 percent in 2002 (compared to 87 percent and 90 percent in EA/P and LA/C regions); and less
than four in a hundred Ghanaians subscription to land and cellular telephone lines as compared to 21 and 34 in a hundred respectively in EA/P and LA/C in 2000).
Data from the Afrobarometer survey (involving a national sample of 1200 collected in late
2002 also present a sober picture of state (in)capacity: :two out of every Ghanaian said they
have gone without food during the previous year, including 8 percent for whom hunger is a
regular experience; more than 40 percent report having had no access to clean water at
least occasionally, during the past year and 15% say this is a common occurrence; access to
reliable supply of electricity is a problem for most people, with 38 percent reporting that
they had enjoyed no supply at all during the year. In total, 61 percent of respondents reported having suffered power cuts on least one occasion during the past year; and 39 percent say that they have been regularly unable to secure medical attention when they needed
it.
Anecdotal evidence of weak state capacity in Ghana is amply reflected in our garbage ridden
cities and towns, complete ineffectiveness of zoning and noise control laws huge galleys
created by uncontrolled soil erosion in many villages; and low bureaucratic capacity of the
public land agencies is clearly seen in the huge deficits in the policing, regulation, acquisition
and use of public lands, as well as the collection of ground rents. Indeed, the persistent
anarchy in the land market in Accra is a veritable measure of the weakness of the Ghanaian
state and public service. And it is also instructive that the improvement in the tax collection
capacity of the Ghanaian state is only relative, and, so far mainly confined to indirect taxes
which represent a lower test of tax collection capabilities.
My most recent experience with the Ghanaian public service, specifically renewing my passport and attempting to register the land on which my house sits, suggests to me that the
situation today is not much different from what Killick, Berg and Ben Amonoo described of
the service in the 1960s. And even if it has changed, it is an open question as to whether it
has improved in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. So to a very large degree, the task
of constructing a developmental public service in Ghana remains unfinished.
What must be done; what prospects?
We must begin by getting the basics right! This begins with adherence to rational-legal
bureaucratic principles. As Evans and Rueschemeyer (1985) remind us, nothing in the twentieth century has proved Max Weber wrong on his basic framework. The rational legal
bureaucracy remains the best form of state promoted development. We have no choice but
to bureaucratize the public service more rather than less. This requires that:
• public servants are recruited through meritocratic (rather than partisan political or
nepotistic) principles;
• the public service operates by clear procedures, with
• accountability achieved through review procedures that enforce rules (rather than
chaotic, unsustainable, episodic extra-legal anti-corruption drives, populist task forces
and ad hoc committees). And
• public servants are given incentives that ensure congruence between their personal
goals and their agency’s goals (such as improved salaries, not starvation wages, and
certainly beyond the living wage, as well as more diverse psychological rewards).
Second, we must insulate key or strategic sections or units of the public service from partisan and sectional political pressure or at least reduce their vulnerability to such pressures.
All developmental states have employed highly qualified, competent administrators to direct
with substantial authority their economic development programs without resistance from
other political entities. Many of them have received advanced education abroad: particularly
in East Asia, the top economic posts have been reserved for highly distinguished economists
and bureaucrats. Such top technocrats have succeeded because the state has succeeded in
insulating them from pressures from narrow political and sectarian interests.
Third, reform of administrative procedures and policies and elaboration of administrative
law must feature prominently in any effort to render the public service developmental. We
must deepen administrative and political decentralisation, simplify rules, streamline procedures, and make them fully transparent. We need to reduce official discretion, develop
equitable and meaningful wage policies, and reform public procurement processes and regulations. Public contracts must be awarded strictly on the basis of open tender, and recruitment for public service jobs must be carried out strictly on the basis of open advertisement
and merit. Madam Chair, the final report of the Anin Commission (1974) contended that:
“Underlying much of the persisting corruption in the public services are the cumbersome or
ambiguous administrative procedures and certain government policies which the public consider irksome, unjust or discriminatory.” That wisdom remains true today and must be
taken seriously.
The fourth pre-requisite for a developmental is adequate remuneration for public servants.
Reasoning that “(U)nderpaid ministers and public officials have ruined many governments”
and “adequate remuneration is vital for high standards of probity in ministers and high
officials” (2000, p. 167), master modern state builder Lee Kuan Yew achieved spectacular
outcomes by matching Singaporean public service salaries with those obtained in the private
sector. It is difficult, if not impossible, to assail the argument that we have to pay our public
servants far better than what presently prevails, if we are to have a moral and technical
basis for expecting effective delivery of public services worthy of a developmental state.
We must embark on meaningful salary reform in order to get a developmental public service.
However, we must recognize one basic reality: the public service cannot engineer its own
rescue, no matter how intensely it desires such transformation. The initiative has to
come from the state and government whose ends public servants serve – even though the
leaders of the service can make recommendations for such reforms.
Madam Chair, the billion cedi question is whether the state is ready to foster a
developmental public service in Ghana?
In one sense, every state and every government should be interested in improving the capacity of the bureaucratic arm of the state. But in reality very few African states and governments demonstrate such an interest. Our leaders have historically relied on clientilism,
patronage, and prebendalism as the chief instruments for political control and for weathering economic recession and remaining in power. Far from a commitment to strengthening the
public service, governments in Ghana as elsewhere in Africa are more likely deliberately to
weaken the public service, undermine its autonomy, and render it vulnerable to manipulation
- to guarantee political dominance.
Moreover, governments and political leaders in Africa are likely to lack the necessary political will, even where their vision of state building includes adequately resourcing and remunerating the public service (remember the impasse over the Price Water House salary reform proposal in the Rawlings NDC administration, and the failure of the Kufuor government
to fulfil its promise to initiate a national debate over salaries). It is not too difficult for
Political leaders to accept that they must adequately remunerate their public servants and
resource public services. But very often they also lack the revenue base needed to realise
this vision. Afraid of the likely political and accountability implications, they shy away from
improving tax collection (Guyer, 1992), preferring foreign aid instead, though the latter is
likely to be inadequate or, most likely, unavailable for such uses. Political will is similarly
lacking when it comes to protecting the service from negative political pressure, and respecting its independence.
But what has democracy got to do with this?
Scholars such as Eva Etzioni-Harlevy (1983) have argued persuasively that the role of top
civil servants as rational and objective actors in the policy process is critical to maintaining
the balance between political party leadership and the pursuit of the public interest in a
democracy. The higher civil service acts as a counterbalance to the purely political and
partisan structures involved in the allocation of scarce resources – the essence of all political activity (Olowu, 2003).
But there is no doubt that democracy, especially in its infant stages, generates considerable
negative pressures on the public service. It intensifies the intrusion of partisan politics into
recruitment and other core aspects of the bureaucratic processes. In periods of competitive politics, as has been the case in Ghana, this problem manifests itself in the increase of
patronage-linked recruitment, and a further blurring of the lines between political and public service jobs. Numbers of ‘special aides’ and ‘special assistants’ rise sharply (with some of
them practically supplanting Chief Directors in recent times), and public jobs come to be
used even as a means of staffing political parties and rewarding political allies. Competitive
democracy also intensifies pressure on public servants to apply political rather than technical criteria to make decisions on policies, resource allocation and even hiring. The limited
insulation from public pressure enjoyed by key sectors of the public service (which we con-
sider necessary for a development state) comes under severe stress, as popularly elected
leaders seek to exert their authority and press their political mandate.
None of this should come as a complete surprise – if we remember that the notorious spoils
system emerging in the US in the 19th century under President Andrew Jackson was inspired
by the essentially democratic ideals of countering elitism and popularising public office. The
excesses of the Jacksonian spoils system of hiring for public offices have since been curbed
in the US and elsewhere through various reforms asserting the primacy of technical merit in
recruitment to public office. But the spirit of the spoils system continues to live on in the
tradition of treating many top jobs in the US and other older democracies as purely political
appointments. Political patronage jobs in the older democracies range from a low of about a
hundred positions in the UK to a staggering five thousand with the coming in of a new administration in the US.
Nonetheless, the prospect for public service effectiveness can be enormously enhanced by
democratic politics. First and foremost, democratic politics helps to expand the space for
citizens, taxpayers and consumers to publicly voice their demands for greater governmental
responsiveness, effectiveness, efficiency and accountability. This in turn compels otherwise
lethargic or recalcitrant government to take seriously public service and administrative reform – particularly in conditions of effective democratic competition where non-performance could lead to electoral defeat.
Madam Chair, this is where I see the prospects for building effective state and effective
public service in a democratic Ghana.
Thanks to the provisions of the 1992 Constitution (Chapter 14), Ghana is returning to the
traditions of an independent Public Services Commission, and of public servant political neutrality, that had been lost under a succession of authoritarian regimes. This is beginning to
provide some of the insulation of the public service from partisan political pressure which I
list above as a pre-requisite for a developmental public service.
Second, and more important, Ghana appears to be quickening the pace of building state
capacity in the democratic era. The Fourth Republic has seen its fair share of democracyinduced fiscal indiscipline – such as dramatic overspending in election years. But it is also
noteworthy that the greatest improvement in the revenue mobilization capacity of the Ghanaian state has occurred not under dictatorial non-democratic regimes but under the democratically elected governments of the 4th Republic. The VAT may represent the single most
important development in revenue collection in Ghana since the failed hut tax in the colonial
era. Improving domestic revenue collection in Ghana under the 4th Republic indicates the
growing capacity of the state.
It is useful to remind ourselves that, historically speaking, the emergence of the developmental state long preceded the emergence of the welfare state. In the words of one social
scientist, the “dentist state” came before the “welfare state.” A state with weak extractive
capacity cannot sustain the provision of welfare, unless it can count on the kindness of
strangers on a large scale and for a long time. In practice such luck and munificence is rare.
For reasons we have alluded to above, the Ghanaian state, just like many of its counterparts
in other parts of Africa, has been slow in developing extractive capabilities, even in authoritarian political settings. But democratic states that also desire to be developmental states
are compelled to deepen the extractive capacity.
Madam Chair, Ghana is in a democratic era and trying to build a developmental state and
public service. It is a hopeful sign for the future that the Ghanaian state is becoming increasingly revenue minded, and its capacity for domestic revenue mobilization is improving in
the democratic era. This is the basis of my hope that we may at last be moving into a good
position to resource and remunerate our public services, and thereby empower them to
deliver services effectively and efficiently.
Moreover, democratisation is putting sustained pressure on the state for improvements in
service delivery effectiveness, creating a stronger political incentive for the transformation of our public services. That transformation begins with the increasing respect for the
independence of the public sector through the Public Services Commission – as provided
under the 1992 Constitution. . This is helping to provide a degree of protection for the
security of tenure of public servants, and to protect the service from undue political influence. And with sustained public pressure and two or more electoral turnovers, governments
would be forced to take public service and administrative reforms seriously.
Madam Chair, I am aware that the gains we are talking about are quite marginal at present;
huge gaps in state capacity remain. But I am also convinced that the necessary building
blocks for creating a developmental public service are now being put in place under Ghana’s
Fourth Republic and democratic process. The task of the government, the public service and
indeed all Ghanaians is to work to sustain our democratic gains and prevent reversals.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION.