ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a weak African state is characterized by lack of societal cohesion and consensus on what organizing principles should determine the contest for state power and how that power should be executed. The weakness of African states derives from the collapse of the patrimonial state, the dereliction of political accountability and the political instrumentalisation of disorder. The democratic political framework was an artificial construct, hastily put in place by the retreating colonial powers and readily embraced by the nationalists because it was the price to pay to be entrusted with control over the post-colonial state. The chapter talks about the scenario of the supposedly emerging bureaucratic, patrimonialistic, and corporatist society. To Max Weber, patrimonialism was a type of traditional domination, and this often leads those who try to apply this concept to contemporary non-Western society's right back into the traditional-modern dichotomy. Discretion is a necessary component of patrimonialism.
