State-owned enterprises in Africa and the economics of public service delivery is published by AOSIS Scholarly Books.

This book, State-owned enterprises in Africa and the economics of public service delivery, intends to provide a continuous assessment of the crisis in governance in Africa. As it is, there are huge deficits in the capacity of African states to harness vast human and material resources to promote good governance. This manifests in pervasive corruption, collapsed service delivery, collapsed state-owned enterprises, eroded social trust, capital flight, escalating levels of poverty and wars, human insecurity, and stunted growth. The public sector is the pulse of service delivery because the entire governance system revolves around the sourcing of materials and services, mostly from the private sector, in order to achieve its public policy intents. The procurement process, therefore, ordinarily ought to yield positive economic outcomes and an efficiency-driven system in favour of the government itself and its service recipients. However, this more often than not is not the case. Despite its enormous wealth, the African continent is in an economic quagmire, a dilemma that requires multi-facet research activities. This is the motivation for this book.

Copyright (c) 2022 Fulufhelo G. Netswera , Omololu M. Fagbadebo, Nirmala Dorasamy (Volume editor)

Governments across the world are constantly searching for ways to improve governance, public sector accountability and public service delivery. This impressive book covers many of the questions that get asked in this search. The book provides an impressive assessment of country governance contexts, and offers insights into various contextual factors that engender the failure of governments in the delivery of public services. It offers insightful scholarly assessments of the crisis of governance in Africa and grapples with the vexing questions and wicked problems of pervasive corruption, procurement, collapsed service delivery and collapsed state-owned enterprises. The book assesses and analyses state-owned enterprises in Africa and how the nature of the state impacts on public administration. The effect of bureaucratic inefficiency on export orientation and the dynamics associated with enterprises and job creation in Africa are elaborately tackled. The book further provides a thorough exposition and analysis of the pillars supporting corruption in procurement practices, cost of state-owned enterprise failure, procurement in state-owned enterprises, and citizen participation in service delivery. Thanks to the well-structured chapters by leading scholars, analysts and researchers, we now have a comprehensive framework of reference to assess the practices and challenges associated with the performance of stateowned enterprises from different perspectives and contexts, often in the heat of governance crises often experienced in many African countries. This timely book is indeed a rich source for scholars in Public Administration and Management and related disciplines. This well-written book will inspire and inform governance, ethics and accountability, and reform
thinking across Africa and the developing world for many years to come.

Dr Mpumelelo Ndlovu, Department of Public Administration,
Faculty of Management and Commerce, University of Fort Hare, Alice, South Africa