An MIT news report dated November 10, 2026, describes a study of Ghana's colonial-era civil service finding that the Ga and Fante ethnic groups, which made up 14 percent of the population combined, held over 70 percent of public-sector positions in the 1950s. The paper, "The Seeds of State Capture: Merit and Patrimonialism in the Colonial Bureaucracy," appears in advance online form in the American Political Science Review.

The researchers built a dataset from British National Archives employment records covering 11,702 bureaucrats from 1897 to 1955, including 6,879 Ghanaian and 4,805 European civil servants. They inferred ethnicity by comparing names with 13.8 million registered-voter names and 2010 census ethnicity data. They also examined civil service exam results, school locations from the 1890s and government office locations, finding that education and geography did not explain the hiring pattern.

MIT political scientist Noah Nathan, a co-author, said the colonial bureaucracy was not merit-based and that independence did not represent a sharp break from inherited institutions. The researchers suggest Ga and Fante civil servants used social connections in a decentralized hiring process that British officials did not closely monitor.