Debates on governance reform in Ghana increasingly frame traditional authority as incompatible with modern state capacity.
Chieftaincy is often presented as culturally resonant but administratively obsolete—an institution to be tolerated symbolically while real governance proceeds elsewhere.
This framing, though common, rests on a fundamental misreading of indigenous governance systems and obscures the true source of institutional weakness in the post-colonial state.
This rejoinder offers a clarification.
The misreading of chieftaincy
A persistent assumption in policy discourse is the equation of Ghanaian chieftaincy with European feudalism. This comparison is analytically flawed. It presumes that hereditary authority is, by definition, hierarchical, extractive, and resistant to reform.
Indigenous chieftaincy was never conceived as a system of landed privilege or personal sovereignty. It functioned as a communal trust, rooted in kinship, ancestry, and moral accountability. Authority derived not from land ownership or coercive force, but from social legitimacy and collective consent.
Oman and the Fallacy of Feudal Comparison
Feudalism was organised around domination—control of land, military obligation, and tribute. Authority flowed vertically and was enforced through coercion.
Oman, by contrast, represents a politico-moral community.
Within this system:
- Land is held in trust, not owned by the chief
- Authority is exercised on behalf of the lineage and the community
- Power is conditional and revocable
- Leadership is constrained by councils of elders and queen mothers
Most decisively, a chief may be destooled for moral failure. This feature alone distinguishes indigenous governance from feudal rule and underscores its fundamentally accountable character.
Authority, Accountability, and Destoolment
Destoolment is not ceremonial symbolism; it is a structural safeguard. It affirms that authority is continuously earned rather than permanently inherited.
Traditional governance systems incorporated collective decision-making, moral sanction, social accountability, and gender-balanced authority through queen mothers. These arrangements functioned as effective checks and balances, maintaining legitimacy and order without the administrative weight of modern bureaucratic states.
Colonial Distortion and Indirect Rule
What is often criticised today as the failure of chieftaincy is better understood as the outcome of colonial distortion.
Through indirect rule, colonial administrations subordinated chiefs to the colonial state, stripped them of judicial and economic authority, and redirected governance toward extraction rather than stewardship. Indigenous institutions were hollowed out, then subsequently judged inadequate on the basis of the dysfunction imposed upon them.
The problem was not Oman.
The problem was its deliberate disfigurement.
The False Modernity of the Post-Colonial State
Post-independence governance largely inherited the colonial state structure—Aban—without interrogating its philosophical foundations. The result is a system that presents itself as modern while remaining disconnected from indigenous legitimacy.
This form of modernity privileges bureaucratic procedure over consent, administrative complexity over social coherence, and external validation over internal accountability. It is modern in appearance, but institutionally fragile.
Reframing the Question
The relevant policy question is therefore not whether chieftaincy should survive modernisation, but whether sustainable governance can exist without indigenous legitimacy.
Oman does not reject modern administrative systems. It insists that such systems must be anchored in legitimate authority if they are to function effectively.
Modernise the methods.
Retain the legitimacy.
Abandon the false binaries.
Anticipated Criticism: Legitimacy versus Capacity
A predictable critique is the claim that while indigenous legitimacy may inspire loyalty, it lacks the capacity required for modern governance. This argument collapses legitimacy and capacity into opposing categories—tradition versus modernity.
This is a conceptual error.
Legitimacy answers why authority is accepted.
Capacity answers how authority is exercised.
They are not opposites. In practice, legitimacy reduces enforcement costs, lowers resistance, and enhances implementation. Capacity is not weakened by legitimacy; it is enabled by it.
Modernity Is Instrumental, Not Cultural
Modern administrative systems—budgeting frameworks, land registries, performance management tools, and digital platforms—are instrumental, not cultural. They can be deployed within any legitimate governance framework.
To suggest that modernity belongs to a particular civilisation is to confuse historical origin with universal applicability.
Conclusion
The attempt to oppose legitimacy to capacity fails on logical, historical, and managerial grounds. Governance systems that dismiss legitimacy in the name of efficiency ultimately undermine both.
Sustainable capacity is built on trusted authority.
Modernity is a toolkit, not a cultural inheritance.
Legitimacy is not the obstacle—it is the foundation.
Response to the Rejoinder
~ Dr H. Aku Kwapong
The reader’s rejoinder is eloquent, but it is also a textbook case of mistaking an origin story for an operating system.
Here is the core move the rejoinder makes. It idealizes “Oman” as a morally accountable communal trust, then argues that because this ideal is not European feudalism, Ghana’s chieftaincy as a governing system should be retained.
That syllogism fails for one basic reason. Modernization is not a debate about whether an institution once had internal legitimacy. It is a question of whether that institution, as it exists now and at the scale of a modern economy, can deliver the things a modern state must deliver: standardized rights, predictable administration, bankable property, impartial dispute resolution, professional public finance, and a single chain of accountability.
The rejoinder does not answer that question. It changes the question.
The “not feudalism” argument is a distraction
Even if we grant every line of the rejoinder’s historical description, it does not rescue the conclusion. The problem with a hereditary governance layer is not that it resembles medieval Europe. The problem is that it is hereditary, diffuse, nonstandardized, and structurally outside the meritocratic logic of a modern state.
You do not need feudalism to get modernization failure. You only need overlapping authority with ambiguous boundaries and discretionary power over land and community decisions. That is exactly what Ghana has today.
So “chieftaincy is not feudalism” is not an argument for chieftaincy as governance. It is an argument that the metaphor should be retired. Fine. Retire it. The reform still stands.
“Destoolment” is not a modern accountability system
The rejoinder leans heavily on destoolment as proof of accountability. But destoolment is not the same thing as modern accountability, for three reasons.
First, it is not standardized. Modern accountability works because rules are predictable and apply to everyone in the same way.
Second, it is not procedural in a way that investors, banks, planners, and citizens can rely on. A modern accountability system produces written records, transparent due process, enforceable outcomes, and appeal mechanisms.
Third, it does not solve the central governance problem. Even a morally exemplary chief still operates inside a structure where authority is inherited and often overlaps with elected local government, courts, police, and land administration.
A system can contain moral sanctions and still be institutionally incompatible with modern administration. Those are different categories.
The rejoinder romanticizes “Oman” and ignores today’s political economy
The rejoinder treats “Oman” as a stable moral community where authority is revocable and constrained by elders and queen mothers. That is an attractive picture. It is also not an accurate description of how the chieftaincy ecosystem functions across Ghana today, in the aggregate.
What is the lived reality…….
Multiple claimants to stools and skins. Over 550 disputes being litigated.
Prolonged succession disputes that freeze governance.
Land allocations that are opaque, overlapping, and frequently litigated. Even young entrepreneurs being denied rights to rear goats or have access to water for their commercial farms, etc.
Rents extracted through “customary” transactions that have become commercial.
And conflicts in which identity is mobilized because the state has not created non-debatable rules.
None of this requires denying that indigenous systems once had deep legitimacy. It requires acknowledging that incentives and scale have changed. Once land becomes a high-value asset tied to urbanization, mining, infrastructure corridors, and speculative capital, the old moral economy cannot carry the load.
That is what modernization means: the load increases until informal legitimacy is no longer enough.
Colonial distortion is real, but it is not a get-out-of-reform card
Yes, indirect rule distorted traditional authority. But the rejoinder uses that true point to imply that the solution is to retain chieftaincy as governance, as if restoring an earlier moral form is feasible.
It is not.
You cannot rewind the incentives created by modern land markets, mass politics, cash economies, and metropolitan expansion. You cannot wish away the fact that Ghana is now a country of cities, highways, banks, diaspora capital, telecom networks, and national supply chains.
Colonialism may have bent the institution. Modernity changes the environment.
So the choice is not between “pure Oman” and “false Aban.” The choice is whether Ghana wants one coherent governance system, or whether it will continue to run two systems that collide, overlap, and generate permanent ambiguity.
Legitimacy does not justify duplicated sovereignty
The rejoinder sets up a false binary and then congratulates itself for rejecting it: legitimacy versus capacity. I agree with the critique of the binary. Legitimacy matters.
But here is what the rejoinder will not say. Legitimacy is not a license for parallel sovereignty.
A modern republic can and should incorporate legitimacy, culture, and tradition. But it must do so inside a unified constitutional order. Otherwise legitimacy becomes a veto over law, and identity becomes a substitute for adjudication.
And that is precisely how countries get stuck. The state cannot plan. Investors cannot trust title. Citizens do not know which authority is final. Enforcement becomes political. Disputes become existential. Development becomes episodic.
That is not “indigenous legitimacy.” That is institutional fragmentation.
Why the abolition of the sub-chief governance layer is not cultural erasure
The most controversial proposal in my series is the legal abolition of the sprawling sub-chief system as a governance tier. The rejoinder will call that an assault on legitimacy.
It is not.
It is a recognition that you cannot build professional village councils, town councils, and city councils with clear administrative authority while maintaining thousands of inherited offices exercising ambiguous public power over the same territory.
You can preserve culture without preserving a duplicated chain of command.
If a sub-chief wants to serve the community, the republic provides a path: run for the village council, run for the town council, serve in a formal mediation panel subordinate to the courts, compete in a meritocratic administrative system. That is not anti-tradition. That is pro-citizenship.
The constructive answer: constitutionalize tradition, unify governance
The rejoinder ends by saying, modernize the methods, retain the legitimacy. Fine. But that is exactly what the framework does, and what the rejoinder avoids admitting.
Land is removed from inherited discretion and placed under a unified system.
Paramount chiefs and senior traditional leaders are incorporated into a single constitutional advisory chamber, the Senior House, alongside national experts and regional representation.
Tribal monarchs are recognized as constitutional cultural anchors.
In other words, tradition is not abolished. It is relocated to where it strengthens the republic rather than duplicating it.
That is what “retain legitimacy” actually means in a modern state: embed it, do not parallelize it.
The rejoinder is essentially a plea to preserve ambiguity while praising legitimacy. Ghana cannot afford that. The future is not a debate about whether chieftaincy once worked. It is a decision about whether we want one republic with one system of authority, or a permanently unfinished republic where sovereignty is split between citizenship and inheritance.
Countries do not take off on poetry. They take off on structure.
