In postcolonial Ghana, a fresh start but not a blank slate
A new study of the country’s bureaucracy shows the challenges of state-building at the moment of independence.
In postcolonial Ghana, a study reveals that while the nation gained political independence in 1957 from colonial rule, it did not start with a clean slate. The composition of the Ghanaian bureaucracy during and after British control shows a stark ethnic imbalance, with the Ga and Fante ethnic groups, comprising only 14% of the population, holding over 70% of public-sector positions in the 1950s.
MIT scholar Noah Nathan, co-author of the study, asserts that this distribution points to a lack of meritocracy and ethnic bias in job distribution. "Independence in Africa wasn't this hard break from the past," Nathan emphasizes, suggesting that the inherited state institutions inherited from the colonial era, which were built on patronage, shaped Ghana's political landscape.
Analyzing historical employment records from the British National Archives, the study distinguishes between 11,702 Ghanaian civil servants and 4,805 European civil servants, revealing the ethnic imbalance in hiring practices. While Ghana's first president Kwame Nkrumah inherited a system rife with patronage and ethnic favoritism, he did not dismantle it.
The research further disproves the notion that educational attainment influenced hiring, as educational access across ethnic groups did not correlate with civil service job distribution by the 1950s.
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