The Politics of Performance Management in Developing Countries

Abstract This article examines the dynamics of performance management in developing countries using Ghana and Nigeria as case studies. Performance management has been proclaimed as a panacea for efficiency, efficacy and accountability in public organizations. As a result, over the past decades, many governments in developing countries have devoted considerable resources to improving performance management practices by building the capacity of performance management agencies. The objective is to use these agencies to both enforce and measure the degree of performance practices in the public sector. Ghana and Nigeria have bought into this idea and the two elite agencies responsible for developing and deepening this performance management culture are the Auditor-General of the Federation of Nigeria (AuGF) and the Ghana Auditor Service ( GAS ). This paper adopts a comparative approach to gauge the extent to which they have delivered their mandate. It argues that just creating these performance management agencies is not a panacea to solving the problems of poor performance in the public sector. It concludes noting that it is a mirage to create a performance management culture in public organizations without addressing critical issues of leadership, patronage, arm’s length relationships and unaccountable regimes.