Slow but Steady Progress versus Leap Frogging: An E-government Dilemma in Africa

Abstract

It is now accepted that ICT can play a significant role in making governments in Africa more efficient and effective. However, the success of e-government initiatives is far and wide in Africa. The overall reality is that despite every African country having a sophisticated e-government strategy and in many instances a dedicated ministry for ICT, e-government has not added any real value. Theory and literature on strategy suggest that ownership of strategy is significantly influential to strategy implementation. The people who are tasked with implementing strategy must be able to understand and interpret the strategy in order for them to create suitable and workable plans. This paper therefore investigated in the qualitative-interpretive paradigm the appetite for ownership of e-government strategy among a convenient sample of twelve government Chief Information Officers (CIO) in South Africa. South Africa has a robust e-government strategy whose three main driving values are to lower costs, increase productivity and achieve citizen convenience. The findings reveal a low ownership of the e-government strategy among the CIOs. The results are important for the research and practice of e-government in Africa. For practice, the results reveal the importance of African countries placing a greater emphasis on slowly and steadily growing their CIOs to take ownership of e-government strategies rather than advancing even more sophisticated ones. African countries typically lose sight of the fact that their western counterparts were first successful at creating ownership of their strategies before moving up to more sophisticated strategies. For research, the paper shows the greater importance of adopting qualitative approaches to investigating e-government in African countries in preference of quantitative approaches. Qualitative approaches are ideal for unearthing the subtle cultural and contextual intricacies that face those responsible for implementing and diffusing e-government in Africa