ABSTRACT
The post-colonial state has furnished the most prominent, but by no means exclusive, focus of social interaction and political exchange in Ghana. To comprehend the capabilities and limitations of the state in the post-Nkrumah era and thereby to uncover the relationship between the state and social forces in the country, it is necessary to expose and explicate the institutional setting of Ghanaian politics between 1969 and 1982 in some detail. The foundations of the Ghanaian state were laid in the colonial period when, under the aegis of the British administration, the economic, bureaucratic, and coercive facets of the state infrastructure were established. The state structures that came to the fore in Ghana after independence reflected an étatism that lacked either depth, breath, or continuity. The relationships between local-communal and state institutions of Ghana after the first reversion to civilian rule in 1969 were highly variable.
