Public Sector Reform and the Political Settlement in West Africa: A Comparative Reading of Ghana and Nigeria

Abstract

Public-sector reform has been a near-permanent feature of governance in West Africa since the structural-adjustment period of the 1980s, yet efforts across civil-service restructuring, decentralization, and public financial management remain poorly integrated and unevenly sustained. This paper is a structured comparative political-economy analysis, not a causal study: it evaluates whether documented reform trajectories in two comparable West African cases are consistent with the mechanisms proposed by political settlements theory. Drawing on a theory-guided literature review of English-language donor, governmental, and academic sources, the paper traces reform in Ghana from the 1980s Civil Service Reform Programme through successive initiatives to current public-financial-management digitization, and compares this trajectory with Nigeria. Interventions are distinguished as technical/administrative or politically redistributive and coded against an explicit reform–political-threat framework. Ghana achieved modest, durable gains in low-political-threat domains such as revenue administration, financial-control automation, and budget digitization. Reforms that would redistribute politically valuable resources wage-bill restraint, fiscal decentralization, and continuity across administrations have repeatedly stalled or reversed. These patterns align with the incentives of Ghana’s competitive-clientelist settlement. The Nigerian comparison reveals the same broad mechanism operating within a different institutional context shaped by federalism, oil-revenue dependence, and military-rule legacy, indicating a settlement-level pattern expressed through country-specific institutions rather than a uniform regional outcome.