Books and Publications: The Civil Service Within The Party Framework
The CPP and its leader Kwame Nkrumah had two basic aims in their administration of Ghana from independence in March 1957 to their overthrow in February 1966. On the one hand, they wanted rapid socio economic development for the country.
They wanted, as Nkrumah wrote in his Autobiography, to achieve in a generation what other countries had taken three hundred years or more to achieve. On the other hand, they wanted to maintain the rule of the CPP and its "integral wings" by hook or by crook.
To this end the CPP was proclaimed the supreme political institution in Ghana, and Nkrumah accordingly established a simple identity between Ghana and the CPP:the CPP is Ghana and Ghana is the CPP", he proclaimed in I speak of Freedom.
Dr Amonoo, a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Lagos, sets out in this book to examine how Nkrumah and his party set about trying to use the civil service to achieve the purpose of rapid socio-economic development. Dr Amonoo argues, with a wealth of evidence and detail from the central through regional down to district and local levels of administration, that Nkrumah tried to adapt an ill-fitted administrative machinery to this purpose without success.
He maintains that the civil service machinery as fashioned by the colonialists for their purpose suffered from two fatal defects. First, it was hidebound by bureaucratic rules and regulations which made it a slow and groggy instrument incapable of responding to the dynamism of the Nkrumah regime.
Secondly, the Senior Civil Servants, also brought up by the colonialists for their own purposes, were steeped in the values of colonialism, wedded to rules and regulations, detached from the objectives of the CPP regime, and "relished objective analysis".
Nkrumah had a number of solutions which he tried to implement more or less simultaneously. First, he tried to change the rules; hence the Civil Service Code that was introduced in 1960 with the coming of the Republic. It downgraded the Public Service Commission and concentrated power of appointment, promotion, transfer and discipline in the hands of the President with the PSC only playing an advisory role.
Secondly, he tried to change the orientation of the civil servants, particularly its senior members, to internalize the norms, desires and objectives of the CPP; to make them respond dynamically to the promptings of the Osagyefo. These twin-solutions were not satisfactory.
Therefore, thirdly, Nkrumah set up within the administration itself a parallel service, from the national level down to the local, staffed with people who he hoped would be more responsive, more dynamic and more oriented to the objectives of the CPP:
At the centre the parallel service consisted mainly of civil servants manning secretariats, special departments bureaux etc. set apart from the main Ministries and Departments and located in Flagstaff House, the seat of government, from where the President himself worked, and where indeed he lived.
These civil servants were younger, more flexible, and more oriented to the objectives of the regime; they were recruited into the service mainly during the terminal years of colonialism and had therefore not been imbued with the bureaucratic values of the colonial service..
The President formulated policies from Flagstaff House with the advice and technical assistance of this central machinery. The Ministries, headed by Nkrumah's own CPP Ministers, and the traditional technical Departments merely implemented them.
At the regional level the parallel institution was much more political than at the centre. This consisted of party Regional Commissioners who replaced the civil service Regional Officers whom the CPPhad inherited from the colonial regime.
The R:Cs were people who were totally innocent of bureaucratic values. They were political Ministers who were responsible to the President himself and who saw their function as ensuring the supremacy of the party at the regional level and predominance of party objectives in the regional administration.
The institution of Regional Commissioner was duplicated at the district level where the famous old colonial District Commissioner came back with a vengeance in the garb of a party DC. He was even more innocent of bureaucratic values and had less patience with rules, regulations, detachment and objective analysis. He was more concerned than the RC to ensure that projects were implemented, if necessary, against the financial regulations, so that the credibility of the regime with the masses was not impaired.
At the village level the CPP simply gobbled up the Development Committees, the real agents of local development. The Development Committees, working with the Department of Social Welfare and Community Development, had preceded the CPP.
They were cheap, bureaucratic, flexible non and responsive instruments for developing the rural areas, and as such were the happy hunting ground of the anti-bureaucrat. The new DCs promptly seized these instruments and ensured that they were woven into the CPP; in particular that the leadership was dominated by the Party irrespective of the wishes of the people of the locality, a practice that led to tensions and many an ugly scene. These are straight forward historical facts which Dr Amonoo sets out in his book with clarity and fair mindedness. He argues that the apparent conviction of Nkrumah and his regime that by these methods the civil service would be adapted to the needs and orientations of the regime, that the institutions he set up would somehow be fused with the old machinery was never realized.
To the very end there existed “a dual institutional arrangement within the machinery of government; especially the civil service, at all levels. The one embraced the purposes and orientations of the regime and constituted the new order. The other remained rigidly bureaucratic and represented the old order". Hence the subtitle of his book: The Politics of Institutional Dualism.
Dr Amonoo believes that the theory of institutional dualism better explains the achievements, failures, and tensions of Nkrumah's administration than a whole battery of Western social science concepts, especially the concepts of "routinization of charisma" as employed by David Apter and "personal political machine" as employed by Henry Bretton.
One suspects that he believes his theory is also superior to the concepts of class and class-conflict employed by such Marxists and Neo-Marxists as Anne Seidman and Bjorn Beckman to explain the Nkrumah regime: he doesn't even bother to examine these latter explanations.
Certainly one is on very solid ground in saying that Dr Amonoo, with his detailed local investigations and natural fuel for a society into which he was born and nurtured, provides more convincing a explanation of the Nkrumah regime than the distant visitor armed with theories and concepts born of the experience of his own society.
This is not to say that Dr Amonoo's thesis cannot be flawed in any way. In the first place, it is clear from the experience of the Nkrumah regime as well as the work under review that there were three, not two, parallel sets of institutions: the "orthodox" and "unorthodox" sections of the civil service, which he deals with, and the party which he doesn't deal with except in so far as the activities of the RCs. and DCs. impinged on it.
This is a pity, for by omitting to consider the party, Dr. Amonoo fails to get a rounded picture of what was happening in the country's politics under Nkrumah.
In the second place, Dr. Amonoo only shows glimpses of what the CPP really expected from the civil service. The Party didn't simply want the bureaucrats to implement government policies with sympathy, imagination and speed - a request which was wholly legitimate. It also wanted the civil servants to help the CPP to maintain itself in power.
In short it wanted the civil servants to become party militants, an illegitimate request if ever there was one. Surely it is only in a totalitarian state in which part of the people organised in a particular party substitutes itself for whatever reason for the whole society that civil servants can be asked not only to implement government policies faithfully but also to "explain and defend government policies with interest and conviction.". That, surely, should be the function of the party and not the civil servants.
Because he doesn't confront this issue, he fails to assess the proper effects of introducing into the service people who had no understanding of rules designed to ensure that public funds are properly safeguarded and that policies must have a proper regard for their economic effects. This is a little surprising since he is fully aware of the embezzlements and wastage which were facilitated by the deliberate disregard of the financial rules and regulations of the civil service.
These criticisms apart, one must admit that Dr Amonoo has hit upon one of the abiding problems of administration in Ghana and, for that matter, in most African countries. The history of Ghana since Nkrumah shows that the problem is a real one, for Busia, Acheampong and Rawlings have all complained about the inability of the Civil Service to meet the expectations of their regimes, and the fact that they have all failed to find a lasting solution to it should lead one to treat Nkrumah's solution with sympathy.
Dr Amonoo's examination on the problem should be of assistance to any regime in Ghana that is interested in a lasting solution to it. A society progresses by building upon the past, not by ignoring it.
R.A.
