One of the intractable problems which bedevil former colonial countries during their early years of independence is their failure to adapt the public administrative systems inherited from their erstwhile colonial administrators to the dynamic purposes of national development as conceived by the new nation. In almost all instances the milieu of public decision-making is characterised by a new and unprecedented reorientation of public policies in social, economic and political sectors of activity, each of which, in turn, makes qualitatively and quantitatively new priority demands on the administrative apparatus of the new state. For administrative systems, therefore, which have been confined, both in their structure and operations, to law-and-order maintenance, revenue collection and surplus budgeting, their transformation to creative, dynamic instruments of development becomes a very complicated exercise in which deliberate but honest trial and error are the dominant ethic.
