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Accountability And Accountability In Africa

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Historically, The concept of account-giving has ancient roots in record keeping activities related to governance and money-lending systems that first developed in Ancient Egypt (Mahmud, 1997), Greece (Jennifer, 1982) and Rome (Joseph, 2001) later.
In the centuries since the reign of William I of England, accountability has slowly wrestled free from its etymological bondage with accounting. In contemporary political discourse, ‘accountability’ and ‘accountable’ no longer convey a stuffy image of bookkeeping and financial administration, but they hold strong promises of fair and equitable governance.
Moreover, the accounting relationship has almost completely reversed. Accountability does not refer to sovereigns holding their subjects to account, …show more content…
The average African leader sees no need to be accountable to the governed and the masses themselves do not know or care that the governments they voted in is supposed to be accountable to them, an institutionalized apathy has had significant impact on the macro economic performance of African states, especially south of the Sahara. The inability or unwillingness of most African governments to formulate or implement programs that will force political office holders to embrace accountability as a way to stem endemic corruption have been seen by experts as glaring example of the governments culpability in the process the encourages corruption. While the economies of their countries flounders, most African governments, instead of doing the sensible thing checking the root cause go up in hand of donor nations, in search of aid (Nwonwu, …show more content…
This theory describes that an emphasis on accountability in government is one aspect of growing emphasis on eliminating corruption and promoting transparency in government (Kaufman, 2005). This theory will be serving as the theoretical background of the study because it offer the basis for the relationship that accountability can eradicate the corruption in the public sector by imposing effective control over the government.
In the conceptual background of the study, the researcher begins with literal definition of the terms. Literally, Accountability can be defined as “the state of being accountable, liable or answerable. Combat is termed as “take action to reduce, destroy or prevent (something undesirable) Oxford dictionary (1999).
Transparency International (2012) defines corruption as “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain”. Cambridge Dictionary (2000) describes public sector as “businesses and industries that are owned or controlled by the government”.
In the working definitions, (Boven, 2005) defines Accountability as “a relationship between an actor and a forum, in which the actor has an obligation to explain and to justify his or her conduct, the forum can pose questions and pass judgment, and the actor can be

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