The Centralized African State and its Implications for Technological Behaviour in the Public Sector

Though the foregoing political economy analysis does allude to certain distinctive aspects of the African state, it does not however incorporate the important fact that, by the standards of most other developing countries, this state is typically run along highly centralized lines. Such a comparison invites a number of questions, of which the following are the most essential for our purposes: Through what mechanisms and in which directions has the pronounced centralization of state power in Africa influenced the pattern of technological behaviour in the public sector? How amenable to change are the influences thus exerted? In addressing these questions, the argument of this chapter will be that pronounced concentration of power at the central level constitutes yet another reason for the stylized patterns of technological behaviour described in Chapters 1 and 3. And like the other political factors which were described in the previous chapter, the centralization of state power has a powerful self-perpetuating quality which has tended to undermine policy reforms in the 1970s and 1980s and which continues to pose a fundamental challenge to contemporary political and economic change in Africa.