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Analysts of modern-day sub-Saharan Africa have argued that its “neopatrimonial regimes,” descending from pre-colonial polities, translate badly to the scale of the nation-state and hinder democratic accountability. In this paper, I argue by contrast that the problem with today’s failed or failing states is that they are not patrimonial enough, if we understand patrimonialism in classic Weberian terms as a system based on traditions of reciprocal interdependence between rulers and citizens, and characterized by personal but malleable ruling networks. I make this argument by showing how the Asante Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries shifted from a working model, incorporating both patrimonial and bureaucratic forms of authority, to an exploitative one that reneged on its traditional commitments to the wider public. The cause of this shift was the expansion of exchange with European nations as a rival avenue to power and wealth. This problem continues today, where African rulers are incentivized by the demands of global banks, the United Nations, and G20 governments rather than internal authority traditions, thus limiting their ability to establish locally effective and publically accountable hybrids of patrimonial and bureaucratic governance.

This chapter seeks to explore what responsible management entailed in the country of Ghana, with regard to gold trade. Responsible management ‘… addresses the specific strategies, tactics or actions managers ought to pursue to address business’s accountability, obligations and duties to society and stakeholders’ (Carroll et al., 2019, p. 57). The Akan moral saying, ‘To possess virtue is better than gold’, purports that good ethics is of more value compared to wealth; and underpins Afro-communitarianism where common societal good is priced over individual gains. ‘The gold mining sector was largely administered by the Abusa system, which is still a feature in agriculture in modern Ghana’ (Iliffe, 1995, p. 147). This system operated a tripartite profit-sharing scheme, where the chief who is the landholder, received one-third of the production, the lessee or operator of the mine one-third and the workers the last third (Iliffe, 1995, p.147). Some traditional values and ethical concepts that guided doing business in ancient Ghana will be expounded in this chapter.

The purpose of this study is to explore the indigenous business incubators with special emphasis on the Kente weaving industry. The study highlights the formation, incubation, challenges, opportunities and strategies for success based on the Kente indigenous business model. The Kente subsector is in the clothing industry and accommodates small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Ghana. The study adopts a qualitative and descriptive case study design with five SME Kente shop owners as respondents. Findings reveal that some owners inherited their business, whilst others established them themselves. Owners incubate their business via shared services, ad hoc business advice, financial management, family support, employee relationship management and prayers. The challenges often encountered were inadequate financial backing, lack of government support and business competition. The opportunities harnessed were technology, growing market demand and innovation.

Finally, in respect of the knowledge of Kente weaving, it was found that the weavers learnt from their elders that weaving is the skill of a spider, a prestige to Asantes. The chapter concludes that Kente business has the potential to contribute to the socio-economic development of Ghana and Ghanaians. It is recommended that SME owners invest in individual, team and organisational learning and build capacity for technology implementation. The study also provides recommendations for business actors in the textile industry to engage in collaboration with owners of SME Kente businesses to address the challenges.

Women of Power Revisited: African Women in Leadership through the Ages, Space, Time, and Governance chapter provides an overview of what Africa has witnessed as the world's greatest civilizations through the stories of four of her Queens. The chapter examines women in leadership positions in ancient Africa: namely, Makeda, referred to as Queen of Sheba; Queen mother of Ejusu, Yaa Asantewaa of Ashanti; Queen Nzinga of Angola; and Hatshepsut. Africa has an indomitable spirit that consists of different forms of texts representing the rich diversity that constitute the great civilizations and empires the world has ever had. The chapter challenges the perpetuated notion that Africa is mostly jungle and uninhabited except for Egypt. It is this stereotyped image of Africa that prompted us to write about the four African Queens to illuminate salient features of African Indigenous women in leadership and how it can be applied in contemporary institutions.

The discussion is anchored on spirituality and womanism as our discursive frameworks. We also evoke creation stories which provide the essence of beginning of settlements of humans on our planet earth with particular focus on African Indigenous women's contribution to leadership. In addition, the chapter highlights the colonial oppression, and the current colonial legacies that she is struggling to deal with, including political and economic leadership. The emphasis is to disavow the Eurocentric and colonial fallacy that Africa is without history, without structure, and without kings and queens. This cannot be done without understanding the beginning of African-centered leadership. It is with this understanding that chapter embarked on the journey or path of decolonizing leadership models in our institutions.

In terms of the concept of broken home as a juvenile delinquency risk factor, whilst Nigeria and Ghana are culturally different from western nations (Gyekye, 1996; Hofstede, 1980; Smith, 2004), parental death (PDE) and parental divorce (PDI) have been previously taken-for-granted as one factor, that is ‘broken home’. This paper aims to deconstruct the singular model of ‘broken home’ and propose a binary model – the parental death and parental divorce hypotheses, with unique variables inherent in Nigerian/Ghanaian context.

It principally deploys the application of Goffman’s (1967) theory of stigma, anthropological insights on burial rites and other social facts (Gyekye, 1996; Mazzucato et al., 2006; Smith, 2004) to tease out diversity and complexity of lives across cultures, which specifically represent a binary model of broken home in Nigeria/Ghana. It slightly appraises post-colonial insights on decolonization (Agozino, 2003; Said, 1994) to interrogate both marginalized and mainstream literature.

Thus far, analyses have challenged the homogenization of the concept broken home in existing literature. Qualitatively unlike in the ‘West’, analyses have identified the varying meanings/consequences of parental divorce and parental death in Nigeria/Ghana.

Unlike existing data, this paper has contrasted the differential impacts of parental death and parental divorce with more refined variables (e.g. the sociocultural penalties of divorce such as stigma in terms of parental divorce and other social facts such as burial ceremonies, kinship nurturing, in relation to parental death), which helped to fill in the missing gap in comparative criminology literature.