Leadership Concepts and the Role of Government in Africa: The Case of Ghana

By Kwaku A. Danso

The concepts of leadership and the specific role of government leadership in meeting the basic needs of the people seem poorly defined in many areas of African society. Many people in these poor societies seem desperate and anxious for service, contrary to what many external observers may seem to think as a state of contentment. This creates a management dilemma why government fails to deliver despite high expectations of the electorate. The case of Africa was studied using Ghana as an example of such societies where one can observe phenomenon from examples of traditional leadership of chiefs with certain powers but limited responsibilities that may not be clearly defined for modern development of the society. Whiles recognizing traditional leadership, people in these societies find themselves with shifted locus of power and control, owing loyalty and allegiance to some other elected leaders who seem not concerned about the interests of the electorate, even where very high taxes are collected and people have the money to pay for services. The case of Ghana was examined using a qualitative case study. Selected businesspersons were interviewed in the Accra-Tema metropolitan area to examine their experiences, expectations and perceptions of the leadership, using one indicator of business performance: the quality of utility service delivery regarding water, electricity, telephone and garbage. As well known and found by the World Bank and local Private Enterprise Foundation [PEF] and business groups, electricity and telephone services are indispensable elements of any modern business. In the 1990s, the facsimile machine became part of modern business to enhance data delivery in addition to voice transmission, and in 2006 the Internet and electronic mail have become an almost integral part of global business communication for more than ten years. The needs for these business tools become more critical if businesses have to compete at the global level in free-enterprise markets usually imposed by Western donor and lender conditions. Water and garbage service not only affect health in any society, but in Africa poor sewage treatment and open sewage are directly related to mosquito breeding and malaria. Malaria was reported to kill 15,000 children under five years of age and 2,000 pregnant women in 2005, and seem to reduce the average life expectancy of people in some sectors of the nation by more than six years (GhanaHomePage, 2006, May 12). The research study on Ghana by this author showed that inefficient service delivery was found to impact about 90% of businesses in almost all sectors, despite a high [73%] expectation from leadership. Despite the call for overseas investors, first-dial successful completion rate of telephone transmission from California to Ghana was only 4%, most fax machines tried were not functional, and more than 95% of the participant business managers and owners used in the study did not have regular use of the Internet. Fifty-six (56) types of leadership perceptions based on the culture evolved and were grouped into common themes, and compared with a similar study in the United States of America. Cultural factors were explored in order to understand the challenges in Ghanas socio-economic development compared with Euro-American and Asian-Confucian cultures.
This book is based on a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the PhD degree at Capella Universitys School of Business and Technology [Organization and Management - Leadership Option] in June 2006. I wish to acknowledge the help of Capella University as well as the supervision of Dr. Godwin Igein and Dr. Stephen Tvorik of the School of Business and Technology, and Dr. Kwesi Ngissah of Oakland, California who acted as outside dissertation committee member.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 15, 2007
• ISBN: 9781477166710

Kwaku A. Danso

Kwaku A. Danso has been an Engineer, Manager and Consultant for about ten American companies in America, mostly in high technology industries of Silicon Valley, California. His BS degree was in Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and MS and M. Eng. in Materials Science and a PhD in Business and Technology (Leadership specialization). He has also been an entrepreneur and CEO of a real estate and mortgage financial company. Known in his high school as Danso JFK, he was the valedictorian of his graduating class of 1965 at Prempeh College, Kumasi, Ghana, and won a full Engineering scholarship to University of California at Berkeley after teaching at Kumasi Academy [1967/68]. With his best friend and high school classmate Dr. Kwame Ankra [may he rest in Peace] he won first prize in the Bechtel Engineering competition at the University of California in 1971. He has written for West Africa Magazine, The Statesman, The Independent, The Chronicle, African Monthly, and was a Columnist for the Ghana Drum, Toronto Ghanaian News and for Ghanaweb.

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Copyright © 2007 by Kwaku A. Danso.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2006906217

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4257-2500-6

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Contents

Dedication

Summary

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1      Introduction

Chapter 2      The Problems and Theories of Underdevelopment

Chapter 3      Postindependence: Elitism and Culture

Chapter 4      Ghana and the Global Community

Chapter 5      Leadership and Performance Strategies

Chapter 6      Leadership Theory as Applied to Ghana

Chapter 7      Studying Ghanaian Society through Empirical Research

Chapter 8      Data Collection and Analysis

Chapter 9      Delivery and Satisfaction of Service

Chapter 10      The Impact of Service Delivery on Businesses

Chapter 11      Expectations of the Role and Responsibility of Leadership

Chapter 12      Leadership Performance in Ten-Year Period (1995-2005)

Chapter 13      Perception and Expectations of Leadership

Chapter 14      Comparison of Leadership Concepts: Ghana and America

Chapter 15      Endemic Culture, Discipline, and Socioeconomic Development

Chapter 16      Cultural Group Characteristics: Common Heritage and Development

Chapter 17      Summary Results: Discussion and Conclusions

Chapter 18      Recommendations

References

PICTURES

Appendix A      Research interview questions for qualitative case study

Appendix B

Appendix C

Author Biography

Dedication

This work is dedicated to my wife Helen Danso, without whose patience and peaceful dedication and cooperation this would have been almost impossible. This book is based on my dissertation work for my doctorate in philosophy, a work that should have been completed some three decades earlier but had to wait due to different paths and experiences in life: a high tech engineering career, family life, management, and entrepreneurship. There were tasks and challenges of life to achieve on the journey to finally reach this goal. Now, having completed this goal, only God Almighty can direct the path from here on how best the knowledge acquired helps the people in need most.

Summary

The concepts of leadership and the specific role of government leadership in meeting the basic needs of the people seem poorly defined in many areas of African society. Many people in these poor societies seem desperate and anxious for services, contrary to what many external observers may seem to think as a state of contentment. This creates a management dilemma why government fails to deliver despite high expectations of the electorate. The case of Africa was studied using Ghana as an example of such societies where one can observe phenomenon from examples of traditional leadership of chiefs with certain powers but limited responsibilities that may not be clearly defined for modern development of the society. While recognizing traditional leadership, people in these societies find themselves with shifted locus of power and control, owing loyalty and allegiance to some other elected leaders who seem not concerned about the interests of the electorate, even when very high taxes are collected and people have the money to pay for services.

The case of Ghana was examined using a qualitative case study. Selected businesspersons were interviewed in the Accra-Tema metropolitan area to examine their experiences, expectations, and perceptions of the leadership, using one indicator of business performance: the quality of utility-service delivery regarding water, electricity, telephone, and garbage. As well known and found by the World Bank and local Private Enterprise Foundation (PEF) and business groups, electricity and telephone services are indispensable elements of any modern business.

In the 1990s, the facsimile machine became part of modern business to enhance data delivery in addition to voice transmission, and in 2006, the Internet and electronic mail became an almost integral part of global business communication for more than ten years. The need for these business tools becomes more critical if businesses have to compete at the global level in free-enterprise markets where conditions are usually imposed by Western donor and lender. Water and garbage service not only affect health in any society, but affected the environment as well, specifically in Africa, poor sewage treatment, open sewage and environmental squalor are directly related to mosquito breeding and malaria. Malaria was reported to kill fifteen thousand children under five years of age and two thousand pregnant women in 2005, and seems to reduce the average life expectancy of people in some sectors of the nation by more than six years (GhanaHomePage, 12 May 2006).

The research study on Ghana by this author showed that inefficient service delivery was found to impact about 90% of businesses in almost all sectors, despite a high (73%) expectation from leadership. Despite the call for overseas investors, first-dial successful completion rate of telephone transmission from California to Ghana was only 4%. Most fax machines tried were not functional, and more than 95% of the participant business-managers and owners for this study did not have regular use of the Internet. Fifty-six (56) types of leadership perceptions based on the culture evolved and were grouped into common themes and compared with a similar study in the United States of America… Cultural factors were explored in order to understand the challenges in Ghana’s socioeconomic development compared with Euro-American and Asian-Confucian cultures.

This book is based on a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctorate degree in philosophy at Capella University’s School of Business and Technology (Organization and Management-Leadership Option) in June 2006.

Acknowledgments

I want to acknowledge the enthusiastic support and willingness of my PhD committee chairperson, Dr. Godwin Igein, and committee members Dr. Stephen Tvorik of Capella University and Dr. Kwesi Ngissah of Oakland, California, a native of Ghana.

I wish to also acknowledge and thank the Capella University faculty members who advised us at colloquiums with their valuable personal and professional experiences and knowledge, and acted as inspiration for these executive studies. It was difficult putting together a list of academic references whose authors had dared to write about the leadership in Ghana or Africa during the postindependence era, when it was not safe for academicians to do so. However, every sweat was worth it.

To Kwasi Kissi and Dr. Kwame Antwi Boasiako, who made the first attempt at editing my very first draft, I give my appreciation. Most grateful and memorable thanks to Richmond Darko, the promising young man whom I helped by mentoring and tutoring on computers in the late 1990s when he was fifteen and a new immigrant… He spent his 2005 Christmas vacation with our family, edited my work then, and again in between college graduation and medical school. Good luck to this young man.

I also wish to thank the executives and members of the Ghana Leadership Union Inc., an NGO we created to act as a catalyst for change and bring to the fore an awareness of leadership among our Internet community and in Ghana. The discussion forum will continue, but perhaps there is a final stage where African professionals and all persons of goodwill have to participate in the destiny of their nations and help effect desired leadership changes.

I also wish to acknowledge the work and thoughts of Professor Max Assimeng of the University of Ghana and the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. Last but not the least is acknowledgment for my lovely wife Helen, whose support and endurance in almost two decades has matched my will to succeed.

Chapter 1

Introduction

There is a missing link in the formula for Africa’s developmental process which has eluded many writers and well-wishers and deceived many Western philanthropists, lenders, and governments. Many Africans in the diaspora who considered Africa as their mother continent are confused, including those who left their native lands to seek further education, mostly in the West. While the last few centuries from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries witnessed the brutal assault by other nations on the people and nation states of Africa, the last half of the twentieth century saw many African nations attain political independence, and hence an expectation to steer their destinies with their own hands. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana proclaimed on the eve of his nation’s political independence on March 6, 1957, that they prefer self-government with danger to servitude in tranquility… Such bold statements obviously carried with it the heavy responsibility of strategic policy initiation, decision-making, and implementation of visions to compete at the global levels as peers of other nations. The result, after half a century, has left many young Africans from Algeria, through Ghana, Nigeria to Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Somalia to South Africa disillusioned as to what went wrong. The youth have a right to ask, and it is the responsibility of the Africans (like this writer) who have been educated and got a chance to see and experience Western civilization to find answers. This book tries to find such answers.

This writer has pondered over the dilemma of African underdevelopment for over three decades, and studied many Africans as individuals and groups, especially in the United States, starting as a student at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s. A two-year exploratory study was conducted of the nation of Ghana, in addition to courses on leadership as part of a division of the Business and Technology called Organization and Management. How do societies in the modern world, nations, organizations, manage their lives and their destinies to cope with global competition in a world that is gradually being modeled after Western civilization and their free-enterprise market economic models? How do people who have never been used to competition strategize to change, to cope, and to survive well in sometimes cutthroat global competition?

The forces of globalization, technology, and customer preferences have been identified as the greatest forces of change in the world today (Jick & Peiperl, 2002). This has shifted the nature of business to such an extent that products, services, and information can be exchanged faster and across cultural and geographic boundaries. Pictures and business data can be easily exchanged using hand-held devices, cell phones and computers using electronic mail and the Internet. At the same time over two-thirds of the world’s surface area belongs to nations which have been classified as the least developed countries (LDC), also called the third world or simply developing nations (Handelman, 2003, 2). According to the 2003 population statistics, these nations also are home to three-quarters of the planet’s 6.2 billion people (The World Bank, 2005). The relatively cheaper labor rates in the LDC have created a global sourcing business strategy for multinationals in the Developed Countries. At the same time it has created export-led development strategies for the LDC (Austin & Kohn, 1990; Utility Week, 2005). To expand their businesses, corporations and business leaders now have to deal with multicultural environments, involving not only different languages, but differences in interpretation, accounting systems, ethics, laws, and cultural and sociopolitical systems (Harris & Moran, 2000).

In the last two or three decades of the twentieth century and especially after only the first decade of their independence (the 1960s), African nations have been in the Western news media mostly for reasons of military coups, war, famine, and other negative news (Richburg, 1999). However, despite all the negative news in the press, African nations showed some of the highest stock market gains across all continents in the last decade, according to Databank (2005) . . . African stock markets posted almost nine times the gains in North America from December 2001 to June 2005, according to reports by Databank (2005, July). It could be argued that a firm understanding of these societies and cultures would be of important strategic interest to global business leaders.

The progress and optimal development of any organization depends on the effective performance of leadership in the management of human and material resources. Effective leadership has been found to be the major catalyst for change, influencing the top management team (TMT) dynamics, leader-member exchange dynamics and organizational citizenship behavior, as well as the ethical behavior of subordinates (Peterson & Martorana, 2003; Wang et al, 2005; Dvir et al, 2002; Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999; Paine & Organ, 2000). The economies of many African countries have shown relatively poor performance in the postindependence era, especially in the last three decades… Other indices of human development such as the UN human development indices show poor results (The World Bank, 2004; UNDP, 2005). One can compare this performance with some of the other nations that were under British colonial rule, which had obtained their political independence around the same period (1957).

Ghana was used as an example in this study and analysis for these reasons:

(1…) It is the country in which the writer was born and grew up till after high school before he proceeded to the USA for further studies in the late 1960s. It is therefore easier to draw from the many years of direct experience of that culture and use as a basis to study the culture of other African or other nations.

(2…) Ghana was the first African country to obtain political independence from Great Britain in 1957, and its leader, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, actively inspired and instigated other nations such as Congo, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Angola, and South Africa to free themselves from colonialism and apartheid in Southern Africa.

(3…) Ghana was also among the first to fall victim to civilian and then military dictatorship, and hence economic ruin. There have been four military interventions, with the fourth civilian democratic government starting in January 1993, which has survived one election turnover in 2000 (Ghana, Political History, 2005, September 4).

Ghana has had ineffective leadership performance, especially leadership with measurable transformational outcomes or transactional outcomes as defined in leadership literature (Aronson, 2001, Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999). Development at the economic, social, and environmental levels seem to have deteriorated for decades, especially since the overthrow of the first premier and president, Kwame Nkrumah in 1966, as shown by the economic and social indicators in the World Bank report (2004, 252), The World Bank Country Profile (2003), and news reports on GhanaHomePage (2005g, h, i, j). One of the key indicators of effective leadership is the delivery of utilities and basic services to meet the needs of the people in a nation (The World Bank, 2004). As the population grows in the urban centers, effective leadership should plan and hence provide services as needed in the urban centers as well as the rural areas. The World Bank Development Report (2004) depicts a relationship between the distribution of services and utilities, income distribution, and economic development… The impact of these parameters for the overall national development can be seen more from the impact on the business community, which is the engine of economic growth… A research report of the Private Enterprises Foundation (PEF) emphasized the unreliable electricity supply and other utilities in Ghana and further illustrates the negative impact on businesses (Ghanaweb.com Business News, 2005, May 26).

A research proposal was thus made to study the leadership performance, perceptions, and expectations in Ghana’s business community, using the delivery of water, sewage, electricity, and phone services as measurement criteria. It also explored how people cope with the poor delivery of services, using in-depth case study interviews of selected members of the business community…

Background of the Study

The study of leadership in Africa, as exemplified by this study on Ghana, is motivated by the lack of economic progress in national development for the past three or four decades after its political independence (1957) and serves as a comparison to some South East Asian countries, which share similar British colonial history and legacy (The World Bank Reports, 2004; 2005).

An exploratory study of Ghana in the summer of 2004 indicated a very poor delivery of basic utilities and services, i.e., water, electricity, garbage pickup, and telephone, in most residential areas… Open sewers also contribute to much environmental degradation, which is directly linked to the breeding of mosquitoes, which is linked to malaria, the greatest killer of Africans, even ahead of HIV/AIDS. Common centralized sewage systems do not exist in Ghana and in most African countries’ residential and business areas (with the possible exception of a few business and office districts such as the ministries). Individual houses build their own septic tanks at a cost which did not make sense why government did not collect the money and provide common system for the communities. The interesting aspect to note for an organizational study is the lack of public outcry and complaints as one might expect in a similar situation in a more developed country such as the United States of America (USA). The World Bank Development Report (2004) identifies some of the major problems of development as lack of safe drinking water, adequate sanitation, and electricity, and affirms the need for government to fulfill this responsibility by providing financing, regulating or monitoring services or providing information about them (ibid, 180). The Private Enterprise Foundation (PEF) in Ghana has reported that in a study conducted between 2003 and 2004, unreliable utility and other services were found to be a major problem affecting businesses and industries in Ghana (GhanaHomePage, 2005, May 26). So what is being done by leadership to correct this problem, and why do members of the business community fail to persuade government to perform if they are taxpayers?

In Ghana, peoples’ perceptions and expectations of leadership seem different from what one may expect in societies with different cultures or where democratic governance has been practiced for generations. There are global companies who may seek to do business in Ghana, and others who are already well established in Ghana. The latter include The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, Inc., Unilever Plc., AngloGold Plc., and distributorships of the major automotive companies such as General Motors Corporation (GM), Ford, Peugeot, Nissan, Honda, Toyota, and Hyundai. These companies, needless to say, are compelled to deal with the drastically different business environment (created by the leadership) that exists in these nations and situations.