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African Leadership, Nation State and the Weberian Project
| For many African countries, political independence was accompanied by the institutional arrangements of a modern state, which itself was imposed upon an economic infrastructure of a pre-modern society. It was hoped that these miniature replicas of the transformed colonial state would sustain a transition to modern rational legal bureaucracies. It was this expectancy that led to the much anticipated ‘new man’ that was suppose to emerge out of Africa in the early 1970s. Not only did the latter fail to materialise, but also Africa’s developmental prospects took a nose-dive; with only a few nations escaping what universally came to be known as the African crisis. In this paper, I want to argue that the crisis of the African state is very much the product of the poverty of African leadership and the inability of the latter to move institutional arrangements away from patrimonial and inefficient form of governance, to a more rational legal structure of governance that should provide the superstructure for the transition to modernity. Example will be drawn from several African states to substantiate our arguments.
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